In this series of articles, I have been considering the question of how you win a school community when what you are offering is educationally very different from what the community has been used to and they are very happy with what they currently have? I have been using the metaphor of “wooing” to frame my leadership learnings. So far, I have talked about “capturing the mind”, “engaging the heart” and now I wish to discuss some ways in which we were “faithful over time”. 

Links to the other parts: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Winning our school community – being faithful over time

The first year or so was particularly difficult for our parents. Not only were they being challenged by family, friends and other educationalists about their decision to move their children to that “hippy” school, they were having to defend the school against continual misinformation. And, perhaps, most significantly, the ideas they had so strongly connected with on a cognitive level (Sir Ken Robinson’s ideas, for example) felt very unfamiliar and uncomfortable when parents actually experienced them in reality. These three aspects together were very destabilising for our new parents. Though they could see that their children were happy and thriving academically as well as socially and emotionally, they were continually assailed by doubt. We spent the first year continually reassuring parents that their decision to move to Amesbury School was the right one. Needless to say, this was very tiring for us, and more than a little frustrating, but completely understandable and an absolutely essential aspect of our role as new school staff and an important role for any leader leading a change process.

The following conversation illustrates some significant aspects of our first year’s journey. I was with a group of parents a year after Amesbury School opened and this conversation happened around me.

Parent 1:            I really love Amesbury School. Where are we at with becoming a full primary, Lesley?

All parents:        Yes, when? I would love that to happen.

Principal:            Well, the application has to be in…April, isn’t it? Our next step is to consult with the local schools about it. But it will be up to the Minister to decide.

Parent 1:            Oh please…. please…. Here’s hoping…

Parent 2:            It’s not so bad for you guys, at least your children will be at Amesbury for 5 – 6 years. Our daughters will only have 3 years and that’s just not enough.

Parent 3:            Yes, I really hope… You’ve got to make it happen. You know as a working mum with a demanding job, I just really appreciate that I can feel a part of the school community – like I belong. It’s the first time I have felt like that.

Parent 1:            Yes, it definitely is different. I feel much more a part of it. Before it was like…you can come this far and no more.

Parent 3:            My brother who is a teacher came to Amesbury School for PD. He was very critical of Amesbury School. I got really angry. We had a stand-up argument about it.

Parent 5:            What didn’t he like?

Parent 3:            The open spaces – the fact that teachers didn’t have their own classrooms. He said it was terrible. The furniture and the lack of desks….

Principal:            Does he know anything about what students are doing…what they are achieving? You know….the outcomes of this style of education?

Parent 3:            It wasn’t about that. He has been in teaching at the same school for a long time and he thinks education should be delivered in a particular way. You know the thing he finds most difficult is students calling teachers by their first names.

Parent 5:            But respect has nothing to do with titles and things. People have to earn respect.

Parent 4:            My son used to come home and say Mrs so and so in a funny voice….He’d always say her name in a funny way that was disrespectful. Here he just comes home and says in a normal voice, “Urs and Tara and Matt.”

Parent 2:            You know I think it has helped the students feel that they belong just as much as teachers and that this is a “shared” space not mostly the teachers’ space.

Parent 5:            Yes, I have noticed that they see themselves as working together with the teachers.

Parent 1:            It’s funny, but I think that it is only teachers that I have heard be critical of the school. It’s not anyone else. Just teachers.

Parent 2:            We have heard some unbelievable things like…...

Parent 1:            Like there is no paper and no books. The kids run wild. There is no discipline….

Parent 2:            They don’t do any work.

Parent 3:            My daughter is reading 3 ½ years above her chronological age. And what she is doing in maths…. She was never doing that well before.

Parent 1:            And the questions they ask are different. Their curiosity about the world…

Parent 2:            Our dinnertime conversations just blow me away. It was never like that before.

Parent 5:            And they are happy.

Parent 2:            So happy….. and isn’t happiness everything? Isn’t that what it is all about?

We became aware that over this time we were in a process of continually winning our school community. Cognitive connection with ideas wasn’t enough, though it was a start. The relationships we had worked to develop were not yet enough. Though they were important. We needed to show our community that we would be faithful over time and we did this through responsiveness and, its counterpart, demandingness.

Responsiveness as faithfulness and making the story bigger

Over this year, we became aware that we were engaged in a deliberate process of “being faithful” to our school community. It was important for them to see that what we had said would be important to the school, was important. We had to ensure good academic results, the happiness and wellbeing of ākonga, while developing learning programmes that reflected the learning approaches we had espoused. We had to keep parents happy, while remaining true to what we believed to be important for students, while also creating everything from scratch. We had to develop every system, every structure, every process and every relationship. It was a big ask and we found ourselves constantly bending over backwards to fulfil expectations. We were in a process of being continually responsive to parental concerns.

One of my absolute long-time commitments has been to the bicultural nature of New Zealand. This began as a seven-year-old when I shifted from Christchurch to Kawerau and decided at that early age that it was very important to pronounce Māori words correctly. From then on, I took as many opportunities as I could to learn Te Reo Māori and to develop my knowledge of tikanga Māori. One of the reasons I was excited to take the Amesbury job was because the Establishment Board had identified one of its two central principles as recognising and respecting New Zealand’s bicultural heritage and the multicultural nature of Churton Park. As part of this commitment, the Establishment Board of Trustees had co-opted Bishop Muru Walters to be our school kaumatua. I took this as an invitation to express my commitment to Te Reo Māori me ōna tikanga and to assist the community to value it in the same way I did. I determined that Amesbury School would be a school which truly valued our bicultural heritage and where every student would learn Te Reo Māori me ōna tikanga throughout their time at the school. Therefore, at my initial introduction to the community, as the parent told in her story (Parent Story, Part 2), I began my speech with a mihi and whaikorero. Later, when a bus load of students and staff of Manunui School travelled down from the King Country and handed me over to the Amesbury School Establishment Board of Trustees at the school site, I wore the beautiful kakahu (feathered cloak) that Manunui School had presented to me at my farewell. A photograph of this was published in the local newspaper.

It quickly became clear that this created lots of talk and certainly some consternation as the Parent Story in Part 2 illustrated. People criticised me for not acknowledging all the other ethnicities in Churton Park when I spoke at the community meeting. My experience had been that people often used the argument of being a multicultural country not just a bicultural country to somehow push our bicultural heritage to the side. My personal commitment as a New Zealander is to value our bicultural heritage first and our multicultural heritage second. Not that one is more important than the other, but to acknowledge that our bicultural heritage is more deeply rooted into who we are as New Zealanders and to value Māori as Tangata Whenua (people of the land).

For me, there was no choice in this. No matter how unpalatable this might be to the community, I felt that I needed to signal this focus of the school right from the start. But more than that, how could I not, when it was so central to who I am. To have not worn my kakahu, for example, was unthinkable because it would have dishonoured the students, staff and community of Manunui School and would have been to deny something very important about myself. I couldn’t….I wouldn’t do it, no matter what others thought. My behaviour with regards to this was clearly challenging for some people in Churton Park and, as I said, it did create some negative talk about me and certainly some questions about where this school was headed. However, the parent in the story was right. I responded very quickly to that talk. In the very next newsletter to the community, I included greetings from a range of ethnicities as well as in te Reo Māori. This was to signal that along with the bicultural heritage of NZ, I also valued the multi-cultural nature of the Churton Park community. I increasingly disclosed information about the ways in which we would value our multicultural heritage including a focus on being Asia aware. The important words here are “along with”. This was not a matter of flip flopping and changing my mind, or of regretting my previous actions, but it was, as the parent in the story so insightfully identified, a matter of purposefully making the story bigger in response to my growing understanding of the community (as a result of feedback). Even while I held firm to what was deeply important to me and, in my view, deeply important to education in New Zealand, I was also able to take account of what was important to others. I came to understand this as responsiveness.

  Responsive practice

According to Johnson, Shope and Rouse (2009), responsive practice emphasises being attentive to the specific characteristics and conditions of a particular place or circumstance. At its core, responsive practice “is built upon recognition that schools, students, and communities cannot be homogenised; that effective leaders will know and understand the unique challenges and unique strengths that characterise the communities they serve” (p. 8). As the principal of a new school, having just shifted to a new and very different community (from very low socio-economic to very high socio-economic, for example), I could not know the community and as a result I needed to be highly responsive. This meant considering what I currently understood about the community, seeking the advice of others who were likely to have greater knowledge of the community than I did, being aware of my own need to be authentic and being true to my deeply held moral purposes and beliefs, taking account of the goals and vision for the school, then, having taken all that into account, taking the best action I was able to. That’s just good decision-making. However, responsiveness really kicked in when having taken the action, I remained extremely alert to how the community was reacting and then, if necessary, made further adjustments and grew the story even bigger. As I remained alert and attentive to the voice of the community, I learned more about the community and was therefore able to act in ways that more fully recognised the uniqueness of the community.

Another example of responsiveness – the language we used

Another example of responsiveness related to curriculum. Central to our curriculum is the concept of integrality. See this post for more information. As much as possible, we wanted to deliver an integral curriculum. Put simply, an integral curriculum is one in which learning is, as much as is practicable, experientially based and holistic. We ideally wanted the skill-based learning (specifically in reading, writing and maths) to “fall out of” real experiences with the world rather than skill-based learning driving the learning programmes. That is, (ideally) learning would begin with experience and interactions with the world, then, when students had worked out what they wanted/needed to know, they would step aside from the inquiry to learn the particular skills they would need for the inquiry. Once learned, students would then take those skills back into the inquiry to help them move forward through the inquiry process. This is quite a different approach from learning in more traditional ways where the focus tends to be on the skill-based learning in reading, writing and maths and then those skills may be used within an inquiry – a subtle but significant difference.

Our first ever inquiry topic lent itself to doing maths, reading and writing very authentically as part of the inquiry. It quickly became clear to us that the skill-based learning in the core curriculum areas was so well disguised within the inquiry that when children went home and were asked by their parents whether they did reading today, the children said no. Asked whether they did maths today, they said no. As you can imagine, some members of our school community became quite concerned. Their children were highly engaged and loving school, but the parents needed reassurance that their children were receiving significant tuition in reading, writing and maths. They were used to timetables in which they could see that their children did reading, writing and maths at a certain time each day for a certain period of time. We did several things in response to this concern – we put teacher planning online so that parents could see that students were receiving instruction in reading, writing and maths even if it was within an inquiry focus. We made sure we used the terms reading, writing and maths in our communications with home including putting photos on the school blog of children doing skill-based sessions in reading, writing and maths. With students, we made sure that we used the language of reading, writing and maths. For example, when they were putting together a shopping list for camp food and they had to work out quantities, we made sure teachers named it mathematics.

This relieved some anxiety and concern, and for parents, the story of learning at Amesbury School grew bigger as they became more deeply aware that our school wasn’t just about “new-fangled, progressive ideas”, but it also valued traditional subjects, which were, of course, always going to be central in our curriculum and which we thought we had communicated clearly about. However, we learned that communicating about learning at Amesbury School was a process of continual responsiveness to parental concerns and that we needed to communicate in ways that linked with what parents understood. Hence, using the language of reading, writing and maths.

Genuine responsiveness and openness

In both of the examples given above, there was an element of perception management involved in our responses. We did let parents know that we were actually teaching reading, writing and mathematics, for example. But we also went beyond that to examine their concerns and issues more deeply to see if there was something more we needed to know or understand and, perhaps, change in what we were doing. Even today, we are continually considering where the balance lies between instructional skill-based learning and learning within an inquiry context. How does this look different for a five-year-old who has just arrived at school and a ten-year-old who has had five years of schooling? Some of our best innovations have been a result of genuine responsiveness to our school community.

We discovered that for it to be faithfulness, responsiveness needs to be more than a PR exercise or a perception management thing (though it may also be that) but needs to include genuine openness and willingness to inquire into our educational practices and approaches in response to feedback and concerns – an inquiry that will often continue long after the concerns have been addressed. In a school with a strong focus on personalised learning to meet the individual needs and interests of students, this balance would likely look different from child to child and from inquiry to inquiry.

We talk about the outcome of curriculum being practical wisdom. Practical wisdom was also the outcome of responsiveness as our enlarged story now provided a much better platform from which to make decisions in the future. As our story became increasingly complex and nuanced, we were better able to make decisions that did greater justice to the richness of reality and the uniqueness of the community.

In Part 5, I will talk about “demandingness” which is the counterpart to “responsiveness” and which we came to see is an aspect of being faithful to our school community.

References

Johnson D., Shope S., and Rouse, J. (2009). Towards a Responsive Model for education Rural Appalachia: Merging Theory and Practice, Journal of Educational Leadership Preparation, vol. 4.