Delve into the realities of implementing curriculum across a community of schools, with a focus on how explicit teaching can drive improved practice. Revisiting the Thunderbolt Alliance, this episode explores how schools collaborated on professional learning, using technology to bridge distance and strengthen collective impact. Hear how a full cycle of learning intentions and success criteria (LISC) was implemented across similar school contexts, and what made it work. Take away practical “Ignition Ideas” you can apply in your own school from tomorrow.

Michelle

The following podcast is brought to you by the school and system leadership team in the Curriculum Directorate of the NSW Department of Education.

The podcast focuses on teaching principal and subject experts sharing their experiences to support all. These individual experiences are only one of many ways schools can work towards curriculum implementation.

Welcome back to our podcast, small school, big impact bite-sized strategies for leading curriculum. In a moment, I'm going to introduce you to not just one, but 4 amazing teaching principals who are working around in the Armidale network.

I would like to acknowledge that I am coming from the lands of the Gundungurra people today, and I'd like to pay respect to elders past and present as ongoing teachers of knowledge, songlines and stories.

Today for the Teaching Principals podcast, I've got Jenna from Kelly's Plains, Tim from Kentucky, Sarah from Kingstown, and Dani from Rocky River, who together form this incredibly exceptionally cool sounding thing called the Thunderbolt Alliance. One of the things I've thought about in learning about the Thunderbolt Alliance and the work of you all across your 4 schools is the community of practice that you've set up, and I wondered if I could ask you to talk a little bit more and share with colleagues across New South Wales the way that you structure your community of practice, and more importantly probably why, these things take time they take effort, they take a lot of strategising. What is it that you see in the benefits of that way of working that gives you the motivation to push past barriers that you would otherwise face?

Dani

Moving into this alliance, the schools are already working well in terms of organisation. So things like the athletics carnival, the swimming carnival, coming together for those shared days, and the schools recognise that because it lightens the load when we come together and we work together to do those things, as well as allowing our students to compete and work with the greater body of students, which is wonderful as well.

The 4 of us have come together and recognised we had that shared priority where we wanted to take that to the next level, and we value that collective efficacy. We realised, yes, we commit time into meeting, into talking about our strategies, our ideas, what's our data showing us in our schools, and bringing that all together to create these shared priorities.

But what we realised is that actually pays off tenfold because we're actually lightening each other's loads by working together. And what we're doing is much more powerful in terms of lifting student outcomes across all 4 of our schools, we did recognise that many small schools are geographic isolated. We are all very different contexts, of course, but you often get really siloed. You don't have your stage team meetings where you go and moderate your work writing samples and things like that. So suddenly, with the 4 of us working together, we've built that. We have those groups across stages where we can collaborate and share ideas, and we're just really seeing the value in sharing those priorities. I think what we've seen over the past year is that you've gotta take it slow and it's not straightforward. We had all these, great ideas and yes, we are in the classroom and we are trialing them and testing them as well as we lead our staff through the syllabus implementation. And we've had a specific focus on explicit teaching.

We've honed in on LISC learning attention success criteria, and how we're implementing that in our classrooms, and it's been quite a journey this year. We are doing it slow because we really want to embed this practice across our schools, and it is about creating change that has high impact and sustaining that and building on that. So we've recognised working together, doing it slowly and really responding to the school's needs is actually having a higher impact.

Sarah

And we've done that. Also, when we started to plan that, we thought about what we want. We wanted to come together for a joint curriculum venture, I guess, as Dani mentioned.

We did it for other things, extracurricular activities, and when we started to plan that out, obviously there were barriers around location and we've used things like technology. We've had video recordings of staff to try and overcome some of those barriers. And this year we've really opened the doors for staff to become confident and comfortable with having other people from other schools into their classrooms to show what they're doing and receive feedback on the great things that they're doing and some extra ideas as to how they can move forward and improve. It's exciting to see how we can take that a step further and start to look into the other KLAs. Because it has been more of a numeracy and literacy focus this year, but the inquiry cycle of coming up with a shared purpose, a shared reason for doing this, and what we would like to see is the outcome, providing professional learning to make sure that the staff are upskilled and know what to expect and are capable of being able to put things into practice and having those points where we touch base, we have observations, we have the feedback round, we come together. We actually finalised our last LISC observation on Wednesday for this year. Really exciting to be able to have seen every single school and how they're doing things in their school setting and what we could take and apply into our own school settings.

Michelle

I wonder if you could share some, just a highlights reel of some of the things that you've noticed in terms of the growth of practices or understanding at your own schools, in the students or in your colleagues as a result of the communities of practice and the cycles of inquiry that you've gone through and or anything that you've picked up from your colleagues that you are like, oh, this is an idea that I'm gonna think about how I could implement that into my context.

Jenna

Yeah, so from my context, probably the same across when we first started LISC, some teachers were, I guess just making it as a checklist and maybe only referring to it once, 'cause they see it in the unit and it's just there and it's not something that you keep going backwards and forwards with. And when you ask the students what were they doing?

They're like, oh, well we're just doing this. And you know, couldn't actually articulate their learning in a particular way. And from now on. And I know that it being embedded within all our schools, every child can articulate exactly what they're learning. They're able to give each other feedback. They can give their teachers feedback on what a good one might look like, and the teachers are using it throughout their lesson.

It's not just a beginning or an end. It's actually embedded throughout. The learning intentions are visible in the classrooms. They're being referred to constantly, and the students are seeing success because they know it's not a, a secret, you know, teacher business of what we're actually going to do.

They know exactly what's in front of them. They know why they're doing it and what it's there for.

Tim: And staff feeling more comfortable with the whole process. So it's not a.. We, you know, we do this learning intention and go through the success criteria. It's more evolved, so we, we come out with new ideas for ways of implementing it. We might not start it right at the start of the lesson, so it's more intentional than just doing it. So it's actually has a lot of purpose and we can play with it to match and suit what our kids need and what the lesson needs.

Jenna: And I think the way that, because Dani and Sarah were the drivers of this at the beginning, and I think the way that they presented the professional learning and set it up and we had an agenda, we had lists of questions for staff to give feedback to each other to lead that conversation. So there was tuning protocols around all of that. So everyone was aware and could recognise each other's strengths and what they could take away, what they can put in. And, you know, we've spoken lots about the visuals or the, how we deconstruct.

Dani

There was a really lovely moment. As Sarah was saying, we had our final teaching rounds that we're doing for our year 3-6 staff on Wednesday. That's where we initially presented this professional learning at the start of the year with our as a collective on staff development day. And some teachers were apprehensive and rightly so. It felt like there was a new thing coming in. It was gonna be, this is adding to our load. And so we had a couple of really beautifully experienced teachers who differentiate for their classes so well, and they do such a good job, but previously hadn't had the chance to collaborate in this way. And in that group on Wednesday, their feedback was, this is a full circle moment. We were in that classroom again where we did that PL at the start of the year. And then coming back to now the comment from one of the teachers where we can actually see how this works. Like I wondered, how would you use this? Like the LISC board over there, how is it being referred to? How is this not adding to the load? You know, we can see the kids were using the meta language of the syllabus, to provide feedback to their peers about, I'm really looking forward to using paragraphing in your next part of your piece of writing, because that was a part of the success criteria.

We've had that moment where I think we're realising the impact this is having across, our schools. We're really proud to see that not only, you know, in our data, but from anecdotally from staff feedback and our students as well.

Michelle

And you guys are making me wonder now if, well, quite a few things actually. One is that idea of how sometimes that shift from that emerging sort of attempt to have a go at a new pedagogy or a teaching move in order to support students to then it becoming increasingly like, precise and sophisticated and intentional and targeted. They're often like the smallest of little tweaks. So one of the things that I learned in terms of sharing learning intentions was when I first started working with them, I would often accidentally be talking to kids actually about what they were doing. So we are learning to, count to 10, or we are learning to, you know, combine 2 digit numbers or something, which is more of like what the outcome was, right? And when I like learned this little hack of talking about we are learning that, or we are learning how or we are learning when, and just shifting that little word made me be able to help articulate like what the underlying concepts were or the underlying skills. So that, the doing part landed in its good place in the success criteria and the learning intention could focus really clearly and firmly on the learning.

But I'm gonna ask you guys to finish with what the podcast is calling an ignition idea, which is what's one thing you think that teaching principals could use to light up their school tomorrow. And to help. I'll give you an example, and Tim, you actually made me think about it just before. One idea that I picked up on over time was to move away from this idea of like a learning intention and then its' associated success criteria, almost feeling like a tick and flick, you know, that you do at the beginning of the lesson and you move on. And one little thing that I started to do that started to like, really like light up learning in my classroom was using that learning intention and the success criteria as regular touch points throughout a learning episode so that I could always like anchor it back. So from whenever point it was introduced in the lesson, it then became this really critical anchor for discussion and then always addressed again as we closed out that period of time to support students. So that would be one little ignition idea that you made me think about, Tim, that I would share with colleagues across New South Wales.

Sarah

I think you have to do it as the leader. So the leader, it has to be, you have to practice what you preach, I guess is, is what I would say. We made sure that each of us were as much a part of the observations and the, the rounds that we did as everybody else. Everybody was accountable and we were doing everything at the same time and had those high expectations of ourselves as well. And so you cannot ask staff to start to look at this if you are not also prepared to be in there and doing it with them at the same time, doing that heavy lifting.

Dani

Absolutely. Look, I think just thinking through the lens of LISC and what we've been talking about in terms of that explicit teaching practice and for the CHPS syllabuses specifically as a collective, we did look at how we were using LISC. So with the CHPS syllabuses, something that has come out of this inquiry cycle this year has really been find that, what's the skillset you're trying to develop? Through the geography content or through the science unit for the term. What's the conceptual learning? What do you want them to get by the end of that unit? By the end of the term, we will have, you know, some of our schools will have K-6 students learning in the same room. We've got across 2 stages in one room. So what, what do we want them to get? What's that foundational learning, which that new syllabus is really good for clarifying the skills that they need for each of those areas and embed that in your LISC and have fun.

Michelle

I feel like that's such a great point to end on is have fun, right 'cause it's such a privilege to get to be part of supporting students along their way towards whatever it is that they're gonna do in their lives.

Thanks everybody for sharing your experiences. We look forward to listening to others share their experiences next time. Have a lovely rest of your day.