Powering Up Your School

The Learning Power Approach to school leadership (The Learning Power series)

Jann Robinson, Graham Powell, Rachel Macfarlane, Gemma Goldenberg, Robert Cleary, Guy Claxton

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781785834561
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785834899
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Powering Up Your School: The Learning Power Approach to school leadership - co-authored by Guy Claxton, Jann Robinson, Rachel Macfarlane, Graham Powell, Gemma Goldenberg, and Robert Cleary - is a treasury of top tips on how to embed the Learning Power Approach (LPA) in your school culture and empower your teachers to deliver its benefits to students.

The LPA is a way of teaching which aims to develop all students as confident and capable learners ready, willing, and able to choose, design, research, pursue, troubleshoot, and evaluate learning for themselves, alone and with others, in school and out.

This approach also affords a clear view of valued, sought-after outcomes of education - such as the development of character strengths and the pursuit of academic success - and Powering Up Your School sets out a detailed explanation of how these can be accomplished.

It distils into a series of illuminating case studies the lessons learned by a wide range of pioneering school principals who have successfully undertaken the LPA journey, and presents a variety of practical strategies which will enable school leaders to make a positive impact on the lives of both their staff and their students.

These strategies are complemented by a wealth of insights into how school leaders can go about gaining clarity on their vision, achieve buy-in from staff, and foster a collaborative effort towards delivering good outcomes. Together the authors share their tips on how to adapt and refine school structures and teaching practices on a school-wide level, and on how to stimulate and celebrate student progress.

They also provide specific ideas for charting and reflecting on the journey towards building a learning-powered culture, framed in an appendix in the form of a detailed self-assessment grid.

Suitable for school leaders in both primary and high school settings.

Powering Up Your School is the fourth instalment in the Learning Power series.

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Chapter 1

Getting the Bug

The LPA is, like all eduapproaches, a moral business. It derives from a set of value judgements about what we think is “better” – what outcomes of a child’s schooldays are to be judged more desirable than others. If you think it is all about getting as many as possible into “top universities” (and we are not really bothered about the rest), that’s a value judgement. So is the desire for “all our children to be happy”. In particular, the LPA rests on a vision of what we want young people to be like when they leave our schools (whichever phase of schooling we are concerned with). We don’t want them to be greedy, glib, smug, or dishonest (whether they end up as prime minister of their country or not). We don’t want them to be cowed, incurious jobsworths. We would prefer them to be inquisitive, adventurous, honourable, kind, and resilient, for example. Or we would like them to be disposed to think clearly and debate respectfully. So whether the LPA appeals to you depends on where your heart is. And whether you want to lead a successful LPA school depends on your clear and unswerving commitment to those heartfelt values. Without it, you won’t get going. And without it, you are more likely to be despondent or lose faith when things don’t go smoothly first time. From passion comes grit and determination. Remember Machiavelli’s honest appraisal of the leader’s task:

There is nothing more hazardous to undertake, nor more uncertain of success, than to be involved in the bringing about of a new order of things. For the reformer will have as enemies all those who have done well under the old order, and only lukewarm defenders and supporters in those who would profit by the new. This lukewarmness arises partly from timidity, and partly from the incredulity of people who do not readily believe in anything new until they have seen it with their own eyes.1

In this first chapter, we are going to share with you the stories of how some school leaders came to that commitment – why they decided to embark on the slow and demanding process of developing a robust learning-powered culture in their schools. This journey, as you will see, often starts with an itchy dissatisfaction with the status 16quo: perhaps a feeling that there has to be more to a 21st century education than the current obsession with grades, tests, and university or college entrance. Sometimes that itch is scarcely felt until it is activated by a chance conversation, a magazine article or a TED Talk, a professional development seminar, or a poignant event at school. And then you become receptive to other sources of information about how it might be possible to scratch the itch. The LPA journey starts with the personal recognition that “there has to be a better way”, and with a sense of (cautious) optimism that such a way can be found. Without that wholehearted commitment from the school principal, it is unlikely that anything like the LPA will take root and flourish.

Obviously, not all of the stories we tell will ring a bell with everyone. Schools vary enormously in their starting points, and we are all at different stages in our own educational journeys. But we hope that some of them will fire you up and encourage you to take the next step. In truth, 21st century education depends on it!

Jann’s Story

Jann’s Story

Jann Robinson is principal of St Luke’s Grammar School in Dee Why, a suburb of Sydney. St Luke’s is a non-selective, independent school, serving families from the area around the northern beaches of Sydney. As you might expect, many of these families are well off, and, being near the famous Manly Beach, there is something of a laid-back atmosphere in the neighbourhood. Here is Jann’s account of how she got the bug about the LPA:

Making the decision to go with BLP – our preferred version of the LPA – has been the outcome of a long personal journey. It has been the culmination of all the experiences I have had in my years as a teacher and in leadership roles.

My pathway to leadership has been through pastoral care. I have always had a commitment to the well-being of students, and a fundamental belief that if we look after this then the academic results will follow. This commitment reflects a number of experiences. I was particularly affected by the suicides of two of my high school students, one in 1999 and the other the following year, while I was a year coordinator in a previous school.2 Both students were bright and yet this did 17not prevent them from feeling despair. It set me on a path of wanting to work out how to make students more resilient to the pressures they would inevitably face in life. What could we do that might promote resilience and what does it take to make a person flourish, not just at school but in their lives beyond it? These two questions have stayed with me long term, shaping my work. I began, in that school, to design pastoral care programmes for my students, with an explicit emphasis on resilience.

In 2001, I became the dean of students for Years 7–10 in a different school, where I had overall responsibility for the welfare programmes. At this time I came across Art Costa’s Habits of Mind framework, which instantly resonated with my own beliefs. I felt that this really was a way to build resilience in the students. I introduced the habits into the pastoral care programmes – but I couldn’t get any real traction with them. Upon reflection, there just wasn’t enough regular exposure to the habits for the students to really internalise and develop them. Perhaps if I had been able to get them into classrooms more it might have worked. I was also finding it hard in that role to feel that I could have any real impact on the school. And in some ways this dissatisfaction gave me the push I needed to look at becoming a head.

In 2005, I arrived as principal of St Luke’s Grammar School with great plans, but there were so many other issues to be addressed, so I couldn’t just leap straight into building a “Habits of Mind” school. In retrospect, I think I was right to take my time. To lead a culture change programme you must have a foundation of trust with the staff. At St Luke’s, for various reasons, that foundation didn’t exist, and I had to devote the first few years of my headship to building it.

By 2013, when I had been the head of St Luke’s for eight years, I was still looking at how we might do better for our students. I’m not even sure if I knew clearly what “better” would look like at the time, but there were a number of things in play which were making me search for answers. For example, we were seeing a number of high-achieving kids from our junior school who were not coming through to the senior school because there was a feeling in the community that we weren’t good enough academically. In trying to address that concern we focused staff professional development around a range of themes, one of which was Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset. We wanted to get teachers to explore the idea that all students are able to learn, and we spent time on differentiation to try to overcome the underperformance of our more academic kids. While we did see some improvements, it was hard going.

There was a lot of pushback from teachers at being asked to change their practice, partly because there was a culture of blaming the students for any underperformance. They were saying that it was the students’ fault that they were so passive, and there was a general attitude that kids growing up near Sydney’s 18northern beaches were too “laid back” and simply could not be roused to work hard. So when Year 12 students did poorly in their Trial Higher School Certificate exams, staff tended to complain that they were “really hard to motivate” and “just couldn’t pick themselves up from any disappointment with their marks”. In addition, I was aware of evidence that, even when they did do well in the university entrance exams (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR)), students from our type of school often dropped out.

While all this was swirling around in my head, I heard a colleague present on BLP, so I bought both Building Learning Power and The Learning Powered School.3 It sounded good, but I left the books sitting on the shelf for about six months. In mid-2013, when I had some study leave, I finally got around to reading them. I can’t really describe my reaction. It was as though this was what I had been searching for all my teaching career. I think it was seeing resilience featured so prominently in the model that excited me. But it was more than that: it just resonated with all the things I had read previously, and its foundation in neuroscience added to my buy-in. I remember thinking about how it aligned with Howard Gardner’s book Five Minds for the Future.4 The 4Rs of BLP – resilience, resourcefulness, reflection, and reciprocity (or learning relationships) – gave me four out of Gardner’s five minds, and the fifth – his “ethical mind” – could naturally be added through a fifth R, “restoration”, reflecting our school’s Christian foundation.

I remember sitting in the education faculty library in Cambridge, England, reading both books and planning out the strategy for how we would do it. I believed I could get buy-in from the staff by promising them four things: a unified approach to professional development; an answer to the problem of students’ passivity as learners; a solid foundation in neuroscientific research; and a promise that we would, as a whole school, be totally committed to this and only this for five years. I was excited by the idea that the BLP framework would be for every student in every classroom. Critically, not only would it make them powerful learners in school, but it would also develop the dispositions that they needed to be confident and well-rounded people. For me, the LPA has always been bigger than school learning. If we could develop the dispositions that would enable our students to meet academic learning challenges, these same dispositions would allow them to meet life’s challenges too. It is why I am so passionate about it and want to give it as a gift to each and every student. It is about who they are becoming, and giving them the attitudes they need in order to flourish: to be resilient; to know what to 19do when they don’t know what to do; to work with others; and to be reflective about themselves.

Before we go on to our second story, take a moment to reflect on how Jann’s journey towards the LPA is similar to or different from your own.

Wondering

Which bits of Jann’s story resonated with you, and which did not?

Did the fact that St Luke’s is an independent school colour your reading?

Have you had any experiences that shocked you into thinking hard about your educational values and priorities, like the suicides of Jann’s two students did for her?

Robert and Gemma’s Story

Robert and Gemma’s Story

Our second story concerns a very different kind of school. It has two narrators: Robert Cleary and Gemma Goldenberg. Robert is head teacher of Sandringham Primary School, which, as we mentioned, is in the borough of Newham in East London. Gemma was, until 2019, Robert’s deputy in charge of curriculum and professional learning. Sandringham is a large state-funded school. Including its day-care and pre-school provision, the school serves around 1,000 students aged 1–11. The school is located in a densely populated inner-city area with high levels of social deprivation. The majority of the students are from minority ethnic backgrounds, predominantly of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi heritage. Around 98% of the student population speak English as an additional language (EAL). The school has specialised resource provision for children with autism, 20and around 20% of the students are registered as having special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEN or SEND).5

First, let’s hear from Robert:

In April 2010 I was promoted from deputy head of Sandringham to head. On my appointment, the governing body made it clear to the SLT that they wanted the school to “think big” and look outwards for ideas, not just locally but nationally and internationally. The school had been referred to by local authority officials as “Sleepy Sandringham”, and the governors wanted me and my newly appo...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Foreword by Michael Fullan
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Getting the Bug
• Chapter 2: Learning Power: The Facts at Your Fingertips
• Chapter 3: Getting Buy-In: Onboarding All the Stakeholders
• Chapter 4: Creating a Staff Culture of Learning
• Chapter 5: A Language for Learning
• Chapter 6: Targeting Pedagogy: The Design Principles of Learning Power Teaching
• Chapter 7: Beyond the Classroom: Changing Structures and Practices on a Wider Scale
• Chapter 8: Making It Stick: Sustainability
• Chapter 9: Evidencing Progress and Progression
• Chapter 10: Connecting with the Wider World
• Chapter 11: Some Tentative Conclusions
• Appendix: A Self-Assessment Grid for School Leaders
• Further Reading
• About the Authors
• Copyright