Game Changers | Live | Going the Way towards Growth Minded Change Culture

Going the way towards growth-minded change culture in a school is largely a process of building cultural capital. Building character capital is a key role of civic, performance, and moral character leadership. We believe that character capital relates particularly to the value of the feelings and perceptions held by the school and wider communities about the character purpose and character strengths of a school.

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It is, therefore, inherently moral in nature. It externalises the shared purpose of relationships. It also builds personal value in terms of the level of positive, focused energy about character and character education that leaders invest at work and in their personal life. It also internalises the alignment of hearts and heads. The value of families’ character commitments is held in the hearts of the people within a school. Character capital can be seen particularly in the energy and enthusiasm that people bring to support and act upon the values and character strengths of the school. In other words, we can use the extent of growth-minded change culture in a school as a valid measure of the degree of character capital in the school. Conversely, the greater the character capital, therefore, the more likely it is that the school and the members of its community will be prepared to embark on and complete a learning journey that is propelled by a propensity towards continuous improvement in pursuit of improved outcomes for more students.

Building character capital is enhanced by creating a shared focus on nationally and internationally recognised and supported shifts in approaches to learning and a commitment to building teacher and leader capacity to adopt them. In doing so, the school is expressing its confidence about its capacity to meet the challenge of necessary change by building the character capital to effect change through:

Learning from Other Schools: To what extent does the school engage in measured evaluation of the work of comparable schools in promoting a growth-minded change culture? How successful is the school in resisting the temptation for imitating the practices and facilities of other schools that are not germane to the school’s own strategy, culture, and (most importantly) graduate outcomes?
Finding Your Own Champions: To what extent is the school capable of identifying, encouraging, and supporting those members of faculty who are genuinely innovative in their practice and helping them to pass on this valuable intellectual property to other staff? How successful is the school in protecting its innovators from being conformed to the safe and comfortable middle of present and past habits?
Balancing Innovation and Capacity: To what extent can the school create spaces in which innovation is fostered from inception to proof of concept to embedding in daily life? How successful is the school in staging this process to ensure that fundamentals are secure without being rigid or “rusted on”?

At the same time, we can recognise that schools also need to have in place clear strategies that will enhance the faculty’s:

Adaptive Expertise: All schools are moving away from rigid systems of learning to personalised systems focused on student needs and graduate outcomes that are enhanced by flexible curriculum and innovative pedagogical practice. Schools need to attract high quality teaching candidates, provide them with high quality initial training, and support them to become instructors and researchers with adaptive expertise within the context of the changing nature of our world, and the changes to the educational, human, technological and other systems that support it, and build a flexible career structure for them that rewards both good teaching and the attainment of good student learning outcomes.
Self-Efficacy: Teachers must be encouraged to take responsibility for their professional learning and conduct to meet the expectations and mission of the school, and the external standards.
Instructional Leadership: Schools need to promote effective teachers to take on more responsibility for leading teaching and learning. To this end, they need to identify effective leaders early in their careers and prepare them through specific training and development to lead for change and support teachers through the process.

So what strategies exist to build a community of inquiry and practice with the quantum of character capital required to build adaptive expertise, professional self-efficacy, and instructional leadership?

Do it Properly: Use a strategic cycle to establish collective and collegial intent, collect data, elicit feedback and conduct intelligence-based planning – many schools just don't do this at all.

Capture People’s Hearts: Plans will only work when people want to build them and inhabit them – many teachers just don't like planning and habitually live in a responsive and organic world that overwhelms their sense of personal growth and achievement.

Measure What You Do: Beware substituting a feeling or perception about a successfully run event or program for real data about long-term impact on practice and performance – most schools never measure the impact of professional learning, especially on teacher capability and student learning.

Consider a “Centre for Amazing Things”: Organising professional learning around a “centre for amazing things” (research, innovation, creativity, professional learning, etc) can be a really effective way to concentrate focus and energy on improving the culture of professional learning – the scope and mandate for this centre needs to be very tightly controlled or else its impact may be diluted, and the leadership of the centre should be shared with the school's leadership team.

Take the Time Required: Effective professional learning takes at least two to three years to show tangible improvement and typically can take up to five to six or even ten to twelve years to contribute to lasting positive cultural change – schools that rush these expectations can end up with little significant reform for the investment.

Work from a Knowledge of the Staff: Audit the school’s staff (Including their learning and working preferences) and work from this knowledge carefully to stretch their capability – be aware that even in situations of significant cultural transformation, teachers most often privilege a relational and instinctive paradigm that can work against a strategic and performance driven learning culture.

Coach for Personal and Collegial Success: A coaching model really helps to build an environment in which teachers feel safe and can establish the high levels of trust in their colleagues and leaders before they will engage in constructive risk-taking behaviours that seek to change practice – existence proofs are essential for mitigating fear and anxiety about change, and cynicism about motive and scepticism about what the future really looks like.

A process for coaching teachers for personal and collegial success should take into account these key principles in growing adaptive expertise, professional self-efficacy, and instructional leadership:

Plan to Grow: Set goals for achievable challenge and incremental improvement that focus on something you know and are good at, something you don’t know, and something you are not so good at.
Plan for Autonomy: Resolve to make choices about professional standards and time management that build positive solutions for professional directions and vocational trajectories
Plan to Collaborate: Join together teams of practitioners who collaborate to share planning and implementation of research about activity that improves student learning outcomes
Plan to Align: Choose positive and constructive pathways for you to realise whole-school strategies in your daily practice
Plan to Lead: Seek out opportunities for staff, students and parents to contribute to school decision-making at all levels
Plan to Use Data: Collect data on performance and use it to affirm good practice, correct ineffective activity, set goals and identify specific areas for individual and professional learning
Plan to Be Validated: Identify formal and informal systems and processes for staff to work with each to construct valid and meaningful feedback loops that contextualise and validate standards of performance