Unpack strategies such as checks for understanding, explicit teaching, data triangulation and collaborative practice to strengthen student learning outcomes as part of curriculum implementation. Michelle and Bianca's conversation highlights the leadership mindset required to embrace change, model sustainable practice, and build collective efficacy across schools.

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 to our podcast, small school, big impact bite-sized strategies for leading curriculum. Our focus in today's session is enacting a new syllabus.

I'd like to recognise the ongoing custodians of the lands and waterways where we work and live. We pay respect to elders past and present as ongoing teachers of knowledge, songlines and stories. We strive to ensure every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander learner in New South Wales achieves their potential through education. Today we're exploring a few ideas to support enactment of a new syllabus.

I am for those of you who I've not met before, the leader of K to 12 initiatives, which spans a really big portfolio including STEM education, Aboriginal education, professional learning, coordination, effective teaching practices, and school and system leadership. Which is home to the Small and unique schools team, which is where the idea for this Teaching Principals podcast emerged.

Thanks so much, B and I wanted to start with where I could ask you to share a piece of advice that your director Martin Gill shared with you. I really wanted to start there today 'cause I thought it was such a good positioning for the rest of what we'll talk about in terms of enacting syllabus.

Bianca

It was an aha moment from me when Martin, we were speaking in a Grafton principals network meeting, and he just sort of brought it to the front for all of us as principals, teaching principals, high school principals, primary principals, that if your staff aren't looking at you at the moment and thinking, that's the job I want, or that's the job I can do in the future. Then we really need to reflect on that and think about our own practices and our own wellbeing and how we're role modeling this really privileged position that we're in to be principals and specifically teaching principals too, because if our staff are looking at us and seeing us that we're overworked, overstressed working all the weekend, then we really need to sort of reevaluate where we at and provide those fantastic role model for our staff so that, you know, it is aspirational stuff for them. That's where they can aspire to be in a few years time.

Michelle

Thank you. I just wanna emphasise or I think, or amplify what you are talking about there in terms of the role model of like the way that as a teaching principal, you're in this amazing position where you get to learn about syllabus and pedagogy.

You get to talk about syllabus and pedagogy with your teams, and then you get to walk into a classroom and live and breathe it. Cause now Bianca, I'm gonna put you on the spot. We also know that there's pedagogies and practices that are almost syllabus agnostic, and I wonder if there's any stories that you have you could share, where you've picked up on some pedagogy shifts that span all of those different syllabuses, and it ties into this notion of a teaching principal being a role model.

Bianca

Absolutely, Michelle. It's something that I think about a lot as a teaching principal, that we are really in that great position to be in the hotspot of the classroom, but then also leading teaching and learning within our school as well, and how we get to ebb and flow between those. And just thinking about that I had a funny experience when we were starting to introduce some student response system. We've been focusing on the explicit teaching strategy of checking for understanding, and one of the funny ones was choral response, actually. If I've put it to you, because my kids were just not used to it so I delved in in the lesson and asked the whole class a question and just said, okay, everyone answer and they all just looked at me as if to say just say, I'm not gonna call out, i'm not gonna do these things. And it was funny to share that in the staff meeting because then taking the step back and realizing that we actually had to do some explicit teaching around gestures, thinking time, talking time, like here's your response.

Teaching them all of those things before I tried to delve straight into getting a response about, I think it was a question about synonyms. You know, synonyms have the same or different meanings, so that was really interesting I just started teaching them choral response on days of the week and the date ordinal numbers.

So we just went with a week of if yesterday was Tuesday, today must be and mean this is a stage two class, but still they got really used to the protocol and now we're flying with it and it's been implemented really well across lots of different KLAs and we've made it consistent K to 6 as well.

Everybody in, all the teachers in the school are using those gestures and using the same language around it and so that's been a, a good example of, you know, in the trenches back to leading some change across the school too.

Michelle

You are now really making me think back on some conversations I've had with teaching principal colleagues in the past, Bianca, where we would like show up big screens related to NAPLAN data and percentages and start thinking about how is it that we can make sense of and use this data in terms of gathering information and insights about where the students are in their learning now, and then how things are progressing. If there's any sorts of assessment tools or way of collecting assessment data.

Bianca

Absolutely. So I always think of a triangle when I come to and it suits in two ways. It suits in the school excellence framework and the pyramid because student growth and performance sits right at the top of that pyramid, right in our framework.

So I always talk to my staff and I always keep it in mind that we kind of need to climb the sides of that pyramid to get to the top. So by focusing on the top, I don't actually know how we would do that, we're all planned for that. It's the planning for those sides that end up in the resulting of the top being changed.

And that's really contextual for a small school because I can have a cohort of 15 sit NAPLAN one year, and then the next year I might have a cohort of three, and so that's gonna skew my data like nothing else. So then the triangle comes back into play when we are looking at whole school data and data meetings where we really need to triangulate that with our own school-based data, what we are collecting, our formative assessments and our summative assessments, we link that back to NAPLAN and check in. It's there for a reason it provides us with some really useful information, especially when we dig down to those individual levels of that and then we also really like to triangulate that within our Clarence Valley community of small schools too. By having those opportunities for consistency of teacher judgment across our schools so that the cohort of three kindergartens at the school down the road can bring in work samples and look at those sort of things and compare them with the cohort of kindergarten across our community of schools too.

So that provides us, again, with another really nice picture of the assessment of our learners and starting to think about the where to next for them too. So it's a great opportunity to think like a triangle.

Michelle, I'd be really interested in hearing from your perspective as overseeing unique and small schools, what your idea would be to ignite the teaching principals.

Michelle

I like, I like being put on the spot. I probably am gonna draw from two things that I think I've picked up from you, Bianca, and expand them a little bit. One thing I think is just embrace the messiness of it. You know that anytime that I was brave enough to go, I don't really know what this is gonna look like in my classroom, but I'm willing to give it a go and I'll explain to the kids, it's probably gonna be a bit clunky while I figure it out, and I'll seek feedback from them. It always yielded really great outcomes, like better learning outcomes for the kids, stronger relationships with the students, better confidence in my practice. So one would be like, just embrace the mess and, you know, see how it goes and stick the course. You know, like don't give it up too quick, but also don't linger in the mess too long either. And in that vein, I think you've mentioned a lot today, things like checks for understanding, and one of my biggest aha moments about Checks for Understanding was I thought I was doing them, and then I realized that actually while I was waiting too long, so particularly with the younger students, you know, I might do like almost like the equivalent of a three to four minute monologue before I would do a check for understanding, and now I've learned that I almost do it like a sentence or two at a time and just, even if it's little things, I get them to turn and talk to the person next to them and I eavesdrop.

Sometimes I get them to pick up their whiteboard and even try to write a sentence about it. Like you've mentioned, you explicitly teach the kids. Don't worry if you can't write the whole sentence. When you don't know the words or the sounds or how to represent 'em. Just do the line and we move on, you know? But encouraging writing as a way of reflecting on their own thinking or sharing. Sometimes I'd get them to get up and do like four corners or what have you, so that I wasn't just always teaching from the waist up, but when I reflected, sort of had this bigger aha moment of check for understanding much more frequently than I had been. And I think that's probably something that people could, uh, think about and have a go at too. Had a big impact for my students.

Bianca

Thanks, Michelle. I'm, I'm actually gonna take that teaching from the waist up, I just wrote that down. I, the lesson observations that we did around checking for understanding a couple of weeks ago, one of the things that we need to tweak is our eavesdropping.

Michelle

Yeah.

Bianca

And you know, when the kids are turning and talking, they're engaged in that eavesdropping, in on that, deciding who they're gonna cold call to share back afterwards. And I was like, yeah, that's a great saying. Let's not just teach from the waist up. Let's move around. Let's listen in. Let's do that too.

Michelle

Yeah. What I found with choral responses was that I realised that sometimes the kids were fooling me, so it looked like it was right. You know? So if I did things like carefully organised, having the students sit and turn and talk, it gave them a chance to practice the language, you know, to one another.

But I could also be really strategic in where I was eavesdropping and listening in on to get a really accurate read of whether the kids were just literally paying me lip service and making sound, or whether they were, and my check for understanding was more accurate, I think, as a result.

Bianca

Yeah. And that goes back to that anticipating, like you were talking about before.

Michelle

Yeah.

Bianca

Anticipating which of those students you're gonna have to stand close by and listening carefully and then gives you the opportunity for that really quick feedback too. That might just be like a one sentence and correct that thinking.

Michelle

In wrapping up today, I'd really like to thank you so much for finding some time for us to share in a really short, brief format, just some of the things that you are doing in your school and with your community of school to support your teachers. Be they very new and into the space as you have, as well as some of our more experienced colleagues into some pretty substantial syllabus change and thinking about that from the perspective of what is it that we can do to really continue to uplift and deepen our practice and understanding to support the students in our care.

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.