Prying off the Lid to Stir the Paint: The Enhanced #PYP and Teacher Agency

How would you like things to be different at our school? This is the fundamental question that school leaders, teachers, students, and parents (really everyone in the building) need to answer. Because that is the starting point for our journey into “enhancing” our PYP schools–getting the Learning Community involved and excited about elevating the learning and teaching.  And this is the time to do it!

But maybe some of you are wondering where do we begin? Agency! This is the “heart” of the changes.

If that word agency doesn’t connect with you, then I reckon you could replace it with another word: EMPOWERMENT.

Empowering students has been a major focus on a variety of blogs and blog posts; aside from the Sharing PYP Blog some of my favorites are IB Educator Voices, What Ed Said, and Sonya Terborg because they authentically grapple with the shifting mindset about our learners that I think all of us can relate to and feel inspired by. Taryn Bond Clegg has also created a compendium of resources. So if that is where you want to begin your journey into agency, then rummage around in those posts, basking in those fabulous ideas. However, I want to talk about the other members of our Learning Community because I believe that if we empower those people, student agency begins to happen organically. Today I want to respond to this tweet by the IB:

Did you know effective leadership will acknowledge the agency of all members of the learning community to take on formal and informal leadership roles to advance the school mission in the #enhancedPYP? pic.twitter.com/CkBS44hfpC

— IB PYP (@ibpyp) August 17, 2018

Voice, Choice, and Ownership

As I see it, enhancing our programs means that we need to disrupt the power structures in our schools, providing more voice, choice and ownership to our teachers. There’s an interesting story shared by David Marquet, commander of the nuclear submarine Santa Fe, of a moment in which he realized during a simple drill, having one point of command was not only limiting to the efficiency of operations of the sub, it was downright dangerous. He says that these traditional leadership structures throw “cold water on” the passion, creativity, and the working knowledge of those who are working under his command. He confessed that these hierarchical military structures in which the top leader does the “thinking” and the others down the food chain act upon those commands are embedded in many organizations-schools being one of them. In fact, schools are masters at it, as it has been the institution that has created factories of workers of the future. So, if we are to take this concept of agency seriously, then our organizational structures must collapse, in which “titles” only define who has the responsibility to push the “launch button”, but everyone else is in full command, not standing around anymore, waiting for orders. Furthermore, he states that “Good leaders don’t need to give good orders. They need to create teams that don’t need to be told what to do.”

Teachers as Leaders

Technically EVERYONE is a pedagogical leader, it’s just the level of responsibility and scale that differs. I know some of us enjoy being “the boss” but powerful leaders are the ones who listen to those they serve–it’s not the other way around. (I think this is why they call this a “power struggle”. ) The reason why this is such a dynamic approach is that it demonstrates that we, as leaders, have trust in our teachers, believing that they are capable of change and willing to engage professionally in transforming our schools

With that in mind, we need to ask the teachers and get their ideas and opinions. Instead of asking teachers and staff to fit them into OUR box, why don’t we meet them where teachers and staff are and find out how they can authentically contribute to our school’s evolution? Why limit our school’s potential with our own finite thinking when we could approach them with a genuine intention to understand and appreciate their perspective and experience. I think this is the 1st step into figuring out how we can access their talents and employ them into new roles. I feel that it’s our curiosity as leaders that help us to see underneath the surface and begin to discern how we might start to transform our leadership structures. Because, if we were to reframe our definition of leadership, not as the one who has CONTROL, but rather as the one who has the ability to INFLUENCE, then a wide swath of possibilities are available and more people can be invited to the party, sort of speaking.

So what can teachers influence?

Professional Development: Professional development shouldn’t something that is done TO them-it is something that is done WITH them. I think often we assume we know what teachers “need”, making stark generalizations and not delving into the recesses of their hearts and minds, learning about what they desire and what fears they have. Plus, when we impose initiatives upon them, it creates passivity. We want teachers who are self-motivated, who can run with the ball, inspiring others, not compliant robots. Perhaps it’s time to personalize their professional development, allowing them to create their own PD plans.

Personalized learning is something that I am very passionate about. I created a series of podcasts to provide some resources out there for teachers to go deeper with their professional learning goals. I think one step of breaking down the power structures is to provide some i-Time or Genius Hour for teachers. Having them design their own learning path linked to self-selected professional goals can be a powerful means to develop a passion and a strong knowledge base.  By the way, I’m not suggesting that teachers only “can” chose the theme of the flavor of their Professional Learning Community –no I think teachers should be able to choose to work alone or in a team on these goals, further enhancing their agency, and then those groups get to choose the goals of their PLCs. If we remember that everyone has different learning styles, then it would further “enhance” to give them the freedom to choose the what, how and who of their professional goals.

Evaluation and Appraisals:  Let’s be honest, when teachers hear those words, evaluation or appraisal, they feel that this is either an exercise of fault finding or a justification process for keeping their jobs. These tools are the ultimate tool for keeping teachers in “their place”, and I think we need to start challenging this process and begin to reframe it. As true professionals, teachers want to be better because they KNOW that their daily efforts are making a difference in the lives of children. We should be giving credit to them, not finding ways to tear them down. Furthermore, I think teachers are more critical of themselves than leaders will ever be but they need authentic feedback. And as a leader who rarely observes the day to day learning classroom, how could you possibly give meaningful feedback? It’s for this reason why evaluations and appraisals are often seen as a joke–an exercise in “ticking a box” for accreditation rather than a true inspiration for professional growth and development.

So instead of putting a rubric or checklist of professional behaviors in front of them (if your school even has one), why don’t they create ones that mean something to them? How about school leadership toss out these autocratic structures and turn the reigns over to them? With that in mind, the only job that school leaders have to do is to provide absolute clarity–clarity of how these enhancements can impact the learning and teaching, and clarity of what your school’s mission and values are. This creates the intention to bring them into the fold of and is the fodder for an amazing amount of transformation to take place. In fact, if I was the ruler of the universe, I would lead teachers through a design-thinking process to recreate the evaluation and appraisal system, and allow the magic to happen.  Giving them the power of What If provides the motivation and creativity to really impact the learning in our schools.

Hierarchical Structures: Titles and Teams

The longer I am education, the more I want to challenge this. I wrote a post a while ago about What If Students Ran the School? (#SOL meets #EmpowerBook), and I’d like to ask to add this question: What if Teachers Ran the School? When I pose this What If-question, it makes me wonder what ideas around leadership structures could surface when we lean in and listen to the very staff we are leading.  These are just a few of my own thoughts and opinions.

In my mind, titles only provide a guide as to who has responsibility for what. It shouldn’t denote authority–give me respect or else! That is low-level leadership thinking anyway. However, I think if we gave teachers a genuine voice, then leadership titles really begin to be meaningful. They can trust us to do the job our title says we are supposed to do and free us from micro-managing. I believe Words Matter and creating titles can throw up walls or barriers to innovation.

So needless to say, I am very wary of creating rungs of leadership teams within the staff. If people are genuine experts in something, they should be called coaches because that denotes someone who is a mentor and teacher-leader, it’s a title that denotes active responsibility. But having “Head of ….” (ex: Head of English) suggests that this is the only person doing the “thinking” on this subject. I mean, the head is where the brain is, right? And we want everyone thinking!! Likewise, having a “Leaders of Learning team” or whatever jazzy name you give an “inner circle” creates cliques and resentment on staff. It creates a culture of “us” and “them”.   I think we need to dismantle any quasi-leadership team that has a guise of distributed leadership but poisons the well of school’s culture.

With that in mind, I am more in favor of having tasks forces that have active, focused energy on developing our school’s initiative. People with passion, coming together to forge a new destiny for our schools–that’s way more powerful and meaningful than any title we can toss at them. Plus, it gives more opportunity to have an eclectic group of individuals to come together, rather than hand-picked individuals.

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So, as we start to question what these “enhancements” might mean for our schools, these are 3 areas that we can start to allow teachers and staff a stake in the game that we call “our school”.  Furthermore,  taking a design-based approach to examining these areas of professional development, evaluation and appraisals, and leadership teams, can begin to unlock the invisible chains that hold teachers back.  I think this will create a cultural quake, with the feeling of freedom and creativity permeating and taking root; because people being driven by a mission, rather than restrained by the tradition of “we’ve always done it this way”, creates a revolution on its own and, an exciting one at that.

Can you think of any other What-Ifs that need to be added to this enhancement when it comes to teacher agency? Please share in the comments below and get a conversation going!