Episode 7: Stephanie Le Lievre

(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to Heavy is the English Head. I'm your host, Minimum McLean. I'm our former head of English. I now work with systems, schools, leaders and teachers to develop ambitious and rigorous practices in English and literacy. I recognize the water-ung people as the traditional owners of the lands, waterways and skies have graded along where I'm lucky to live and record this podcast. I pay my respect to their elders past and present. I've met so many incredible English and literacy leaders over the last two decades. These days I get to work with them most days of the week. I think it's one of the toughest, most complex portfolios to hold, and I wanted to provide a platform for great leaders to share their work. This is a podcast about the needy-gritty of leadership in English and literacy. Welcome to episode seven with episode eight and nine being recorded next week. I want to take a moment to thank my listeners. This is the first time I've done that, but I understand long-form episodes aren't for everyone. It's a big commitment to listen to nearly two hours of conversation, and I've checked my stats just last week, and I've got listeners in Australia, the United States, Japan, New Zealand, Canada, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, England, Indonesia, Ireland, Malaysia, Poland, Portugal, Bangladesh, Spain, France, Singapore, Tequila, Vietnam, Germany, Honduras, Hungary, India, Italy, Kenya, Russia, and Venuatu. So thank you all so much for your engagement. I've had the privilege of knowing today's guest over several years now. I had to think back preparing for this interview. I think it's probably around 10 years since we had our first conversation. I admire them for their capacity to take a stand, for their work ethic, their capacity to tune out the noise, their capacity to feel to wheat from chaff, their intelligence, their commitment to their people, their students, and their unwavering belief that education makes way for opportunity. So let me introduce you to Stephanie or Stephanie Lavia. She's principal of Serpentime Primary School in Western Australia. She's a Commonwealth Bank Schools Plus Fellow, and she's the co-director of Science of Teaching and Learning Australia. She's also been a deputy principal and a literacy leader, and she's worked in rural and remote communities. Steph has left her mark wherever she's been. She's done an enormous amount to close the research to practice gap and continues to advocate for curriculum, assessment, and teaching reforms, as well as teacher and leader workload reductions. You may know Steph from reading science in schools, the former online educator community, or as the project lead for the syntax project, working alongside people like Rebecca Glassen, Christina Guy, and Jasmine Hall. The syntax project is now, of course, housed at over-education and widely used across schools in Australia. Steph has also been so generous in sharing the work she's done at her school, including publishing novel studies, knowledge units, and leadership, and reporting documentation. Hello, welcome Steph. So nice to have you on the podcast. Hello, Amina, thank you for that lovely introduction. I hope I got everything correct. I often ask people for their bio, but I thought if I asked if I'm sure she will undersell herself, so I'm going to write this one. Well, thank you, that was very nice. So great to have you on the podcast. Let's get into it. Usually I start just with getting a bit of guest background. So I know I've given you a little introduction there, but I'd love to hear from you about your current role, and I know you've had quite a few roles leading up to this role. Can you tell listeners about your current role past roles and maybe a little bit about your school as well? Yeah, sure, absolutely. So I am currently, and permanently, the principal of seven-time part-risk school. I've been this role just over two years now. I was a deputy prior to being the principal role. We're a school in the Perth Spectral region on the boundary, quite rural in a lot of ways, but still in Perth, at about 250 students. Beautiful school in terms of the community, also the staff, very, very privileged to work with them, the staff I do, and the students, obviously, and the parent whole community. So I don't think I'll be leaving here while before seven time. I've been in terms of teaching career, I've been at three different schools, mostly. I did spend five or so years in Debbie District High School, which is a K-12 large school in the Kimberley, mostly in the teaching role there and some literacy leading as well. And prior to getting into teaching, from very brief amount of time, and I was about a year to 18 months, I was a speech pathologist. So I did my undergraduate and speech pathology, still my dearest friends to this day, are from my undergraduate and speech pathology. And that's the only reason I'm keeping up with the speech pathology kind of lingo, I think, and worked for that 18 months, mostly with actually deaf kids that had literacy difficulties with the telephone speech and language institute. So that actually paved the way, I think, for my interest. I knew I wanted to be a teacher, pretty much as soon as I graduated speech pathology, I knew I wanted to get into teaching, but it definitely paved my interest and passion, if you like, in literacy, and particularly for students struggling to acquire literacy skills. - Yeah, great. So a pretty interesting career, and I think that's how we originally connected was that intersection of speech pathology and teaching, and the two very often different worlds or worlds that clash, but also that that can be a really good foundation for thinking about literacy. So I was gonna ask you about the catalyst, but you've sort of said that, so you started out already before your teaching degree in, you know, with a literacy focus, or probably a language focus. Given you started that way, and it's probably a little bit different to some people coming into teaching with that foundation, but have you had any big shifts in your thinking over the years about English or literacy? - Absolutely, I have had many major shifts in my thinking literacy and instruction in general. I think having a speech pathology background, incredibly beneficial in terms of obviously understanding literacy and language development, evidence-based practice in terms of what is good practice, particularly for students that need additional help, but I still wanted to teaching still not really, I suppose, knowing what that translates to as a whole class level. So, you know, I had all the, you know, okay, understanding of, you know, funny progressions, decoding, the phonological awareness, phonological processing, that kind of background knowledge, but that didn't necessarily translate into, okay, but what does that look like? As a whole class to get bang for buck, but still having to, kind of, for quite, you know, an array of different literacy levels. My first major long term teaching gig was in the Kimberley and different literacy abilities in the one class, and a lot of other things, you know, social economic factors that came into play as well. So, all of a sudden, I felt very undervalued. I don't know the skill, because it doesn't matter what knowledge you have essentially while it's helpful, but what is that actually the black in the classroom? And what does that look like in quite different contexts? And that's how I've come to, you know, realize over the many years I've kind of been in different schools is that what is the best practice in one context while the fundamental principles of what evidence-based practice looks like? Yes, of course, they are remain consistent, but what that translates to into different contexts can be quite different. And so, you know, blanket statements around, there's no room for small work or differentiation. There's not a thing we should be looking at or streaming doesn't work. All these sorts of blanket statements over the years, you know, you realize when you spend a lot of time in different schools, you just can't make statements like that. Or even the statements around, if you've got, you know, over 20% of students with a really difficult, you've got a tier one program, a tier one instruction problem. You know, not necessarily in the context I've been working, and I've worked with incredible educators in the toughest context you could imagine. And I know their instruction was bang on, but we still had well over 20% of kids that were not at grade level for instructions. So I do think over time, though I've gone away from those kind of blanket rules and statements and gone to more, okay, what is the evidence translate to in this context? Yeah, but very context specific. I think probably 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I was probably quite idealistic, like you read a lot of research and you think you're reasonably well-informant. It's not until you actually try and do it that you're like, oh, what's in a paper? I often talk about it as like being research to reality or research to real world. And knowing that I think the more we think about research projects, they were not done in my school. They were not done with these students. They were done very short term often with small groups of students, maybe with pretty homogenous needs. So I think that's a great reflection to start us off with that there are kind of universal truth and principles, but there's so much contextual stuff. And that's evidence-based practice anyway, isn't it? People, I think, forget about that. Sometimes there's the science and the practice and the context and the context drives a lot. Absolutely, yeah, it's considering the context that you went and how that translates. Yeah, in my view, few leaders come as expert as you. I want to ask about how you've built your knowledge and expertise over the years. So obviously you've had that initial training, but there is so much learning. Obviously you've done in terms of reading and studying and practice as well. I think also not every principal comes from an English or literacy background. I think that makes you unique as well. Although I think more and more, we're starting to see people in senior leadership with more of an English and literacy interest. I think a fair bit of knowledge is required to be a principal or a deputy principal, just generally in teaching and learning, and maybe we're only starting to wrestle with that now. How did you build your knowledge and expertise over the years? And what advice would you have for other leaders in terms of doing the same thing? That is a great question. I still, I do not feel like an expert. I feel like the more you learn, the less confident you can in some ways, and that I think the more you learn also, you realize that there is so much to learn and still so much unknown. However, I am very passionate about school leaders, knowing what good instruction looks like. Gone are the days when it was okay to have school leaders that are just kind of the financial managers of the school. I probably need more of that. In fact, I think more I think PL in that area. And you know, I definitely rely on my network, Fritzel, as a quite fairly new principal, for those kind of operational management side, which is a huge part, a human resource management of being a school leader that can't be undersold. But for a long time, we haven't had necessarily the curriculum expertise in school leadership teams. And unfortunately, the people that make the decisions in the school are often the school leaders. So while you absolutely need to be getting your teaching staff and your EA staff on those decisions, you need to have a strong knowledge of what good instruction looks like. I've always had a big interest in literacy and in language. And because of that, I think I'm just a consumer of, you know, if there's information out there, I want to know it. Whether that's just talking to a lot of different people, webinars, doing lots of reading, lots of audio books, lots of conferences, just, and having some quite pivotal influences in my life who have definitely shaped my thinking as well. I guess that's what it comes down to. It's always understanding that there's always a lot to learn also that sometimes the best learning can take place in schools as well. While people that have researchers and have PhDs, of course, they have a lot to offer people and different professions, allied health, have a lot to offer, absolutely. But I also feel quite strongly that teachers, when they have the knowledge of best practice and research and school leaders can be the experts in the room, quite often they are the experts in the room, because they know what that looks like in a classroom. They can take the research, they can look at the research and go, okay, but can this actually work? And a good example of that is understanding that you want to look like a simple, what you would think is a simple, paid reading, so it's in routine, right? And there's lots of research about how kids should be paid. And I love that research because it makes me chuckle sometimes because I'm like, well, in my context, in our school, in this class, that's all well and good to have a bit of a science behind how students should be paid. But ultimately, I know this can and this can't go together, this can and this can is going to be an absolute, you know, and also, we need to also protect the hearts of a lot of our kids who are particularly, maybe not a strong in literacy and are developing that kind of self-conscious, they're getting self-conscious about reading. We need to make sure they're with a safe partner and that they feel comfortable as we don't want to set them up for any humiliation at all. And that's, yeah, very important to me. And also, you know, practically, if you've got different texts going on in paid reading, don't see if you want them to track, they need to be on the same book. Things like that, how long a routine would take, you know, what differentiation actually looks like in theory compared to practice when you're actually catering to different needs without it turning to busy work. All of these real nuances of instruction, you only can be an expert in that when you have had experience doing it in a classroom. So I think it's about valuing, yes, what research is telling us, but also valuing the expertise of teachers and school leaders. And so a lot of my learning now comes from the same things in action. I love talking to the leaders. I love visiting other schools. I love talking to other teachers about how things work in the classroom, particularly those that are interested in evidence-based practice. - Yep, yep. So it sounds like spending a lot of time, the recommendation, I was spending a lot of time to build your knowledge in terms of what the perhaps the research says, but then also spending a lot of time building that experiential knowledge and knowing what's fit for purpose. And I love you sort of centering highly expert leaders and teachers because I don't feel like they have that much of a voice sometimes. This kind of the purpose of this podcast is people who are doing really great work and thinking really deeply about teaching and learning. I think we should be listening to them. Yeah. Let's some move to thinking about who you are as a leader. How do you think that you lead and what are your values as a leader, what drives you when you're a leadership? - Ultimately, how do I lead? I guess I do work hard. And so when you work hard and you have strong work, I think that permeates into the culture that you're leading. And saying, I'm not saying working hard means staying late every day. And my message here is always still family first and still Latin in our staff. And I think it sounds so naff. But I do legitimately care about the wellbeing of my staff at work and outside of work. And we've done quite a lot of initiatives in terms of looking at how can we improve that professional wellbeing, keeping in mind that teachers across Australia, across the world are reporting that with workload crisis, right? We've got burn, mass burn out. We've got teachers leading the profession under within five years of going into it. So we've got a problem with education that teachers are feeling incredibly burnt out with what they have to do every day. So I guess how do I lead? It comes back to valuing my staff, leading an intent and knowing where we want to be and what we want to do. But also understanding that I've got human beings employed here and I've got human beings and students, but also human being employees. And if you are not looking out for your staff, no matter how ambitious your targets are and the strategies to get there, you will end up with burn out in this profession. It is incredibly difficult working in schools just in terms of how much you have to carry and consider every minute of every day. So I adopt the model, we adopt the model, except for time, which is not my model. I've stolen it from someone a long time ago. I don't remember, but it's the higher expectations, higher support. So we do have high expectations of our staff and I do presentations on what this looks like when people come to visit our school and things like having co-design time tables and we know where every minute of our day is used. Of course there's time in there for crunching, sipping and playing the early isn't all of those things, but we still know where our time goes. We have shared resource banks and where people save their resources and then week with banners every week. We have low variance curriculums. We have expectations on instructional routines and what that looks like. All of those sorts of things that make a really cohesive, high achieving context, absolutely. But if we just have those things and we don't have the high support structures in place, that just leads to burn out and it can lead to a bit of a toxic work environment too. On the flip side, if you have all the high supports and everyone is catered for it and there's lots of feel good initiatives in the school but none of the high expectations. You can end up with a feel good school for a while. We know maybe it's strong culture for a little while but ultimately we feel here that we like the team approach and that high expectations actually feed into a high staff culture as well. But the high support, what that looks like for us, is value and teacher time mostly. A lot of our budget is put into project groups, resource groups, and it's been the knowledge unit project for the last few years. If we're expecting teachers to write or revise knowledge units, we're gonna give the time to do that and we value that time. And we've had a lot of workload reduction strategies to get rid of busy stuff that teachers just get bogged down in to try and alleviate that. So then they can focus on what we want them to focus on which is actually teaching. And that I guess is my leadership. It's having that high expectations of ourselves, of myself, of my staff, of the students as well, but balancing that with a lot of high support structures in place to make sure that we're providing the conditions for students and for our staff to really thrive and feel appreciated and feel valued and feel like everyone needs their voice to be heard too. - Great answer. So high expectations, high support, it sounds like that's your culture for your staff and these students will get into teaching learning in a minute, but I was gonna ask you, how do you demonstrate effectiveness or impact for ongoing buy-in? But I think you've kind of answered that as well. It sounds like you've got clarity and you're continuing to come back to that with your staff often. - Yes, yeah, and we do celebrate a lot. We celebrate a lot of student wins, staff wins, great practice happening to really boost that idea where a team, we're not, it's not about one teacher versus another teacher, we're actually sharing. And we do that as a school as well, they share a lot because that's the kind of culture we're all in it for the same reason that we're trying to improve educational outcomes for students. And we're also trying for a teaching quality for teachers to attract them to the profession. So things don't need to be kept secret and we also need to build a culture across the whole profession, really, of sharing more. - Love that. Let's talk about your leadership actions and maybe ways of working, particularly in English and literacy, I know that you're holding lots of other curricular errors in mind, but the way I tend to talk about it with my guests is leadership three ways, instructional, which is, I don't know, that's the best title for it, that's what it's called in the research, but it's really teaching and learning leadership, transformational, which is sort of culture and tone, narrative vision, and then distributed, which is more about how to build leadership structures and expert teams so the work is sustainable. So might start with your instructional leadership. How do you think you lead by directly influencing teaching and learning conditions? So particularly I want to talk about curriculum resourcing assessment choices and instruction choices. What concrete things have you done with respect to your English and literacy, curriculum building or development in your time as principal then? - So I know we've probably been put in a deputy role as well. We definitely have a consistent approach to instruction and what that looks like for different areas of the curriculum, what that looks like in terms of different instruction routines. We established that quite early on, but it's changed adaptive so much, but what we do do is make sure that things are documented in, for example, our instructional playbook, which is a constant working document. It will never be finished, but it's always modified to reflect any changes we've made. So that we're in a really great position now where, although we're on the kind of peripheral border of Perth, we attract really high and we attract really incredible teachers in one quite competitive teaching positions now. So an example is we have had a new teacher this year, she's not a graduate experience teacher, actually from Charlottes Primary School at Pinchett, phenomenal, and her knowledge is incredible. And it's about, okay, this is our approach at certain time, this is in our playbook, this is what we do here, and it's going to have quite a number of differences to the context you've been in. However, we're going to also value your knowledge and when you think things can be improved or you've got ideas or done a bit differently, it's about listening, how can that work here? And then we decide on the steps forward and that that becomes then reflected in our playbook. So I suppose we have this culture now in the school, we have buying, we have in space practice, what we're not, we haven't got any kind of road blockers at this point of time. And we've worked really hard to get there. So now it's more about, you know, you've watched this incredible webinar and it's, you've tried this in your classroom, for example, you know, a fluency routine or something like that, you've adjusted from some feedback. What does that look like? Is that working? How do we then roll that out to the rest of the school? And so that's quite, I guess it's an informal model, but that is our process. So that even though you might have come from a great school doing incredible things, but we can't keep on people that just say, oh, I want to do it like this because that's the school I've come from. It's okay, how does that look like at our school? And how can we make sure that we're still providing consistency and whole school processes? Because ultimately, for something to be successful and to get, you know, higher results, you need to have the consistency. It doesn't matter if you've got pockets of great instruction here and there, everyone's doing something different. The students every year are kind of learning different routines. There's no continuation of curriculum or concepts. And that's where the books start to fall off. So we need to make sure that we follow that particular process. We still have very open to new ideas, opening open to continual improvement, but it's not okay. So oh, yeah, go for it. You can change that. No, we're a school. We need to make sure this goes down the right process. Sounds like you've got a really nice balance there, though. We're through really honoring the knowledge and expertise that people bring to your school or bring to their classroom and that idea of kind of piloting or testing, things out to find a model. Yeah. But I think we're, I don't know if you would agree, but I feel like we're only just getting to the point of understanding that in schools and other organizations and sectors have kind of known this for a long time that we've got to have continuity of systems and approaches and how things work together does matter. Like curriculum does need to speak to each other. Instructions got to have a cumulative effect and even if everyone's doing stuff that is categorically good, if it doesn't fit together, it's almost like a jigsaw puzzle without the pieces actually kind of matching. Absolutely, yeah. How have you gone about making curriculum choices? Because I know resourcing curriculum, particularly if you're looking for low variance and consistency is a big piece of work. I think you've put a lot of time into building out your curriculum in-house and you're a bit unlucky, probably. I think like I was setting up an English curriculum before the age of lots of stuff being available. So yeah, done a lot of, probably as deputy too, done a lot of time building an in-house curriculum. Can you talk us through maybe some of your decisions that you've made, maybe it's funny, spelling or text? Yeah, absolutely. I can just look for it. Ever about that. You're absolutely right. So a lot of the decisions we've made were kind of before the likes of Ocon, for example, before the likes of even, you know, arrow in terms of instructional guidance and things like that. We had to kind of, I think we had a lot of hard task of kind of sorting out what actually good instruction is, what's the difference, what distinguishes a good program from a not so good program. And when we were first looking at, for example, phonics programs, a lot of them are quite expensive, a lot of them, you know, they, I don't think people realize, unless you've been a principal really or deputy, how difficult it is to run an effective school budget. And so there's a lot of comments around, oh, I know, but the money is worth it. But if you're looking at, you know, tens of thousands of dollars at a program, even if it is high quality, that money has to come from somewhere. And yes, there is a lot of probably money away citizen schools, absolutely. But we made some decisions so that we could maximize the money we had so that we could then reinvest that into staff development professional knowledge, release time so they had the time to make these resources. You know, so we actually made our own phonics, scope and seek more phonics and morphology sequence. And you know, even that right down to our item pool, like our word choice, every week, based on statistical frequency. And that itself took a long time to make the resources, then are we creative power points that are quite, oh, they'll say basic instructional routine, you know, decoding, spelling encoding, that's high frequency words, that's dictation, that's connected text reading, there was no, there was nothing else except for just really strong solid instruction routine with a focus on how many repetitions we're getting in. And then all of a sudden, probably like two years after that, youth life came out and I was like, oh, wow. All that, there is a low-class solution. And I was like, wow, okay, yeah. So, and now, if I was to open up a brand new school or something like that, I've got, you know, of course I would go for that option. Why would I make my stuff put all that huge amount of work in if there's already something really high quality out there? So I think it's just making that decision. I'm not against commercial programs, definitely not. I have some, for some reason I have that reputation, a thing against commercial programs. What I am against is quite exorbitant commercial programs which break budgets when there is actually other alternative programs out there that are just as good if not better. And I do think sometimes people attribute cost to like effectiveness and in my experience, that's just not the case. So, you know, there are some things that are absolutely, you know, selling mastery, for example, you would have to pry that out of my dead cold hands, I think. And I know there are more political, etymological inaccuracies that I know that. However, as a school leader, I also see just how intensities, how what an incredible mastery kind of design it has and the results we get from it. So although, yes, I could say that there are flaws in it. I don't, there's nothing at the moment that is going to get me spelling results like that program does. But in saying that, you know, maths is another one. Like, why would I spend years of my time or our time creating a mascot and sequence from scratch when like people out there who are far more knowledgeable and skilled maybe, or even maybe not, but maybe have more time to do it, have done it already. So I guess it's about being smart in terms of what are you going to pay for, what is going to be commercial, what is going to be resource and what is not. Our knowledge units, again, we started creating them quite a few years ago, well before like Oka, we're releasing them, literature units and things like that. Where you were adapting a lot of core knowledge, but we were also making our own kind of ones adapted to trying to think, has curriculum and whatnot. That took a lot of time. And we invested a lot of money in that, particularly in release time, to up-skill staff on the writing revolution. What good vocab instruction looks like, even released time to make the actual resources. Because that's so time-intensive. And to this day, I'm so grateful we've done that. Because although we 100% still use, we adapt some of the Oka novel studies. I love them. We adapt some of the very to-learn units and core knowledge still. The ones we've prayered in house, we still feel like we've got such an incredible product of three years of very hard work with two other schools, Greenfields, and Alondale to reduce that workload. So, yeah, it's a case of, I guess, looking at your context. Again, that sounds, you know, but it is. And looking at, what are you going to spend the money on? And what things do you need to develop as a school? But also, I'm understanding that money, the cost for a program, does not usually equal. It's effectiveness. So, yeah. And that's, I think, that's come up a few times already. You're talking about Bang for Buck. It's one of my favorite things to talk about, whether it's actual buck, or whether it's how we invest our time. But that's the thing. And I think, even with really significant one-off investments in programs in the day and age of people coming and going more from schools too, it's like you get a new staff member, but oh, there goes another few thousand dollars to retrain that person and train this person. And it's not a one-off expense, either. It's an ongoing commitment. So, I think, yeah, I think, I don't know, I've probably become more and more cautious over the years to about what are we actually getting? For this, but like you say, the cost to you then is the time and the commitment to that ongoing work. I tend to find, too, like, if we're going to develop things in-house, often for me it is things like novel studies or text-based units, because I think, I want everybody to know how to do that, because understanding the instructional design and the stuff that sits behind a really well-planned unit informs then how you teach that unit. And it's a lot more complex than picking up something like a spelling mastery, one page, two-page script, where it's reasonably straightforward to see what sits behind that. There's a lot more to the complexity, but it's, yeah, it's a huge amount of work, even to build one unit just takes so long. - And teach us a lot of ones like creating that. - Yeah, teachers love, I think, creating that novel and the knowledge unit when they're given time to do so, because what you start to see is teaching interest coming into play. We've had my year three teacher, Caitlin, who has recently designed a, you know, on the Florida and Florida West Southwest, South West WA, because that's a passion. And the content that has gone into creating this unit is incredible, because that's sort of an interest lens. You can't always make it about start interest obviously. You have to have a continuation of knowledge and building on from one ear to another. But it does allow itself, land itself, easier to having staff perspective and feedback compared to a spelling sequence, for example, where, you know, and that has been really great to say as well. How our staff interests have come into play and how passionate they are about teaching that unit and then how that then transfers to our students becoming really passionate on that topic as well. Yeah. - Yeah, I love that. And yeah, there's so much of the, yeah, there's kind of, there's a stability in quality of text and text that will always be timeless and topics that will always be important. But there's a lot about those choices that are context dependent or state dependent and so on, whereas things like spelling and phonics are, you know, pretty universal, not as much thought needs to go into that. Thanks for sharing that. What about, and you've talked a bit about instruction and setting the bar for instruction. And I imagine like your planning is setting the bar for your instructional techniques and routines. What about literacy assessment? What sort of decisions have you made around assessment and why? - Assessments are definitely, they're purposeful. We're not collecting data for the sake of collecting data. If the data isn't telling us in any way or not using it, we don't collect it. I wouldn't say our assessment schedule is very large, but it's not, if you were comparing schools to schools that wouldn't be on like the heavy end, it would probably sit somewhere in the middle, but all our assessment decisions we use and we look at and we moderate lead. So in a literacy, for example, one of the biggest kind of assessments we would use is reading fluency. Whether it's using, okay, we use canyons because our network uses that, it will, you know. But we really not, we track that. It's something that's very easy to track. It's something that we've actually obscured our parents and understanding what that means, so that they just don't think it's about, oh, we're just tracking how fast you keep getting ready. Oh, it's actually a lot more to it than that. We actually rehearse our parent meetings, like in a staff meeting, once a year, so that we are explaining assessments to teachers, which does do things, sorry, to parents. It does do things that practice and they can teach us, to have a really solid understanding of why we're collecting that information, but it also allows us to practice explaining it in parent friendly terms. Some parents might not be familiar with things like percentile, so we're making sure that we can explain that as a staff. You know, we also, at the end of every knowledge unit or novel study, we do a, what we call the quiz and it's very straightforward format. In fact, it's a very consistent format because we want to track kind of students results, regardless of what unit they've done. And that actually, it consists of some concrete type questions and some more kind of inferential type, you know, quite opinion-based questions as well, some short answer, long answer. And we do that because ultimately, we want to get a snapshot of comprehension based on what content the students know, or sorry, what content the students have been taught and discussed and had a lot of experiences with to see how sticky that knowledge is. Because we know the comprehension assessments, you know, things like that plan and pattern, all that, while they're beneficial to potentially, you know, track cohort changes and things like that, I'll get a bit of an idea of a comprehension kind of ability. It's so influenced by that kind of language and vocab and all those things. So we want to kind of know that they've had five weeks on this unit, on mountains and rivers of the world. We're not testing on very specific recall of facts but have they understood the general ideas? And that then helps us with our English grade as well. And it also helps having discussions with parents around, okay, like they actually did really well in their knowledge unit test because we do allow some students to do it federally or have be scraved. Because we want to know what they know, not necessarily just what they can get down. But, you know, they're already influencing in their phonics and religious, you know, the still cause of concern, and that's why they're intervention. But, you know, that we're really impressed how much they're still engaged with the whole class text and things like that. So it's also a nice picture to show parents through. What else do we collect? We do the experience kind of sweet of like, obviously the earliest of tests in the early years. But I think the most meaningful data we get is probably like our own school-designed phonics reviews. Every term, we also do that middle term checks. Similar for maths, actually, we have quite a process in creating our end-of-term maths tests. A lot of teach import that similar format linked to the WA standards. And we do a midterm and an end term. And that informs a little bit of you, but it's actually incredible how much of an impact that has had on teaching. Because, you know, teachers, we want our kids to do good. We want to identify the gaps. And then we want to get better next term and we celebrate that. It's like, oh, this shows that we have gaps in this area. And those paper-based assessments at the end of term that have been designed by the leadership team and the teachers' input are probably the most useful to us in terms of instruction. But, obviously, we still use the kind of standardised measures to track cohorts, business plan targets, and all those things, too. But apart from, I'm just thinking in our two to six space and literacy. Apart from, like, the AK and the knowledge units for literacy, we do branching assessments, and we've been playing at middle-market competitive judgment. That's, I'm just thinking that, and we do end-of-year patch, just to get some whole school data. That's about it. Thank you, sir. Yep. And then I'm imagining you're using some of those data sets then, particularly your curriculum-based, like, phonics, assessments, and fluency to guide your intervention choices, as well. Oh, 100%. Yeah, so our Katie, it's our first measure. The Zart, obviously, is designed to be a screener, which is great. So, students that are flagged in that, and we, it's so fantastic now, because we're really flagging kids in term one of pro-paramory and even, you know, we have Kendi on-site in WA, so you can even flag them earlier than that, because we do oral language screeners in Kendi. So, we're using the Oxford for that, which I can't write about that enough. I love how user-friendly and teacher-friendly that is. So, we can track Oxford and language screener to then looking at the Canadians in the pro-paramory, as well, and language screener and pro-paramory too. And now, we're, for the first time ever, I think, we are now able to provide pro-intervention, starting from pro-paramory, because we used to identify with the Canadians. In pro-paramory, oh, these kids are going to have difficulty looking at literacy, you know, and we'd know that they're extra support. Maybe they get some more intensive kind of group work in the pro-paramory setting, where you have a bit more flexibility with targeted pull-as-side groups. But really, they won't get into intervention until, like, a whole year later. It's like we identify them so early, but there's no real funding to kind of, because, you know, we have to try and spread our intervention where we can. But now we're in a position where we actually are starting intervention, basically, term one, paper, which is fantastic, 'cause we've now captured these students so early, and we can remediate them, which is fantastic. - Rather than risking some, yeah, further gaps. - Yeah, absolutely. - Yeah. - I do want to move to transformational and distributed, 'cause I think you do a lot in that space too. But the last thing I want to ask about in your instructional leadership is your approach to professional learning and staff development, because I think you've done a lot of work to articulate what your professional learning priorities are, and you manage that time really well, but also how you go about observation, peer-obsculture, coaching, and so on. Can you just talk a little bit about how you lead professional development in your setting? - Yeah, absolutely. So initially, seven times we were heavily reliant on a lot of external professional learning, which still definitely has a place in our professional learning kind of scope. But we've got a lot of thanks to the, like, T12 team, for example. We had a lot of teachers go through T12, and I thought people coming up to the school at LBC, like, sorry, in W.A. we have what's called the language development centers, and they are started mostly speech pathologists, and they come out to the school and do a lot of service PL, with teachers and education assistants, we're in a position now where we've built a lot of in-house PL, which is great. So I suppose we do say a lot of money that way, which is fantastic. But building the expertise collectively as a staff, and we do have a lot of expertise on staff, but we have that just hasn't just happened. We've done that because we've invested in that learning. So one thing we do, staff meetings, only for professional learning or professional discussions or some sort of moderation, we never have operational stuff, like, discussed in staffings. We need to use that time to upskill or develop our skills. We can do that because we, instead of all the operational stuff having to go on our staff meetings, we do a Wednesday comms meeting at morning tea. That's food, which is always great. Retaining duty ruster. So, and we can get all that stuff done in a Wednesday morning tea. So then our staff meetings throughout the term can be solely directed to professional learning. That might be staff running that. We've had staff running professional learning on the writing revolution, for example, because they've done the writing revolution course. And then they're doing an hour session on SVOs, for example. It might be external, if you use something for an educated webinar, so if you use a lot of the Pat Turn, the reading league stuff from there, which has been really great. And sometimes we'll get our professionals in still. So yeah, we've had Jasmine Hall in Fagini Academy for a free matter of speech technology. So I guess, yeah, we always make sure that we are valuing the time we have together. Being a small staff means that we can do that a bit easier as well, because it's not this massive room full of people. We've got a classroom full of our teachers, and we can direct it to professional learning. We do a lot of coaching now, too. We've had a coaching for a long time at the school, but it's, it has been a bit, has it, I suppose? And the first thing that drops when things get hectic, whereas now I've got the deputy Zoe Nixon has a very strong background in the instruction coaching. She is phenomenal. We are implementing Step Lab, which has been really great for us, but one thing it does do, we rehearse as a staff now, a lot of the strategies. So the rule kind of big ticket strategies, things like that, real, what's the difference between an average peer share retain, what makes it like a wicked peer share retain? What's the difference between a, like, how do we extend push for more, as opposed, from students to get the most out of them as opposed to running up for them? Quite specific things like that, that it's easy to rehearse as a staff. And we do that in our staff meetings as well. Every single staff meeting, we have a staff rehearsal of what about strategies. And that's only happened this from the end of last year. So, yeah, we're about a year each of that system now. We release a lot of our teachers for PL, but PL that has been quite considered, not just any old PL. So our teachers go through most of the SOPLA. Me and with Jan Hansbrook came, David Kilpatrick, and we recently had Sharon Bourne over here. We release it to Saturday. But then I give them that day as a planning day to sort of, again, it's budgetful. I'm valuing their time, but they're gonna give up their Saturday. I can't let them have a day off, you know, work, 'cause I don't know how to, I can't do that. (laughing) I'm a manager, I haven't figured out how to do that. Yeah, legally, yeah. But I'm allowed to, I'm allowed to say, well, you can have a planning day at school because of what you've done on that Saturday. So valuing knowledge as opposed to teachers just having to do it in their own time and having that culture of we value knowledge, and then obviously bringing that back and sharing it. So when we had staff go to Sharon Bourne, about five or maybe six of us went to the Sharon Bourne to get up, which is a significant proportion of our teaching, you know, being a small school, then they brought that back. And there was so many ideas and tweaks. It was incredibly validating for what we've done, which is great for our teachers. But it's also, oh, I'm gonna tweak this. I'm gonna bring it this. And one of the little things was, divs, doesn't make sense, which Sharon Bourne does quite a bit of, you know, passages. They keep staff to read the passage and say, "I can pass an article or or grammatical errors." It doesn't make sense, yes or no. And it's just a bit of a self-monitoring tool, I suppose, that you're just teaching, instead of easy to insert in a daddy of you, it's just such a little thing. But it's, it was quite impactful for the teachers. And so they went back, tried it within the first day that we got back to school after the BL. And by the Wednesday our staff meeting was, they were sharing it and sharing what they've made. And so that's the culture we drive. - Yeah, that's great. And I think that whole staff practice-based BL must also free you up to be a lot more strategic and manage your time better with individualised coaching as well. - Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that's exactly what it does. You take your big ticket items off in the kind of whole school's coaching. And to be honest, that's first that wasn't, you've been a trepidation around practicing, but we've felt that safety, I think, in knowing that it's not about us watching you. You can do it in the partner, you can do it outside, you don't, it's not about us, like, you know, there was a checkbox thing, if you're rehearsing, that we're doing it as a team, because we are a team. And then that means that our individual coaching can be so specific and really get into some really, like, fun degree stuff, as opposed to having to worry about, like, entry routines or, like, you know, cold calling routines and all those things. - Yeah. - Yeah, I love that. All right, let's talk about transformational leadership and how you lead through influence or vision or culture or tone. How do you think you continue to, I was gonna say, how do you continue to motivate your staff? It sounds like you've built this kind of self-driving machine where people are enjoying their work and feeling effective and wanting to share and that's almost self-motivation now. But how do you... - I'm sorry, although I'm in a bubble and I don't know what to say. - But how do you think is the leader of the school you set that tone for continuous improvement? You've already talked a bit about acknowledging and celebrating wins, but how do you maintain the culture at your school through your leadership actions? - I think you overcomplete things in education. I genuinely do think it's about value in people, value in their perspective. But also having the ability after school, you have to have hard conversations and also have their things that you can have feedback on. They're saying that you just can't as well, and that's what's happened. But I think the fact that everything for us comes back to like our moral purpose of like, what are we doing? You know, yes, we want to make maybe brave kids have enjoyed school of course it is but how do kids going to enjoy school really? It's if they're going to succeed, if they feel success. I think there's a lot of fluff that can get in the way of education we do over complicate everything. It's a lot of add this on. What's this new mindful program? What's this new well-being initiative? Have you seen this app which tracks kids' moods across the day and like reads their minds? I'm like, surely we are just like, let's actually just focus on what we know has the best impact on long-term outcomes for students. And even if we're looking at mental health or we're looking at academics, it doesn't really matter. We students need to experience success. They need to feel valued in the classroom and they need to feel safe in the classroom. We do do a lot of work around building safe classroom environments and being building very inclusive classroom environments where even if they're reading a novel study in your brain they're still on their literacy intervention five days a week and they're still sounding out their words. They can listen to that, they can discuss that they can take because of the way it's presented. So with all the conversations we have with staff, it's just what we do. We're always talking about it. We are always reflecting on it. We have a field that goes out every week, which where we're celebrating what's happening in classrooms but also highlighting again, reinforcing what we're doing, what we're doing. And I think that kind of energy, we just fade off each other. We've now got a culture where we are collectively so invested that if you're going to come to seven times, you're not invested. Like if you don't care about these things that we care about with it, you're not a good fit. - Yeah. - Yeah, it sounds great. - There are lots of different actions there but it sounds very reciprocal between leadership and the broader team. - Yeah. - Distributed leadership and I know you're a smaller school but how have you extended leadership duties to other people or how have you built sort of leadership teams? I know you've already talked about your DP Zoe and her brilliant work. What attention have you given to building sort of expert leadership teams and processes? - That's really the question. Because it can be quite tricky, particularly for small schools. And we do things a little bit, well, different in some ways here that work for us. So one of the things we don't actually have committees, a lot of what we call committees here, you might call them like professional learning groups. You might have like your math community or your English community. Historically that has not worked for us and in fact I haven't worked for any of some concepts. I've been to May. Often what happens is you may, English community makes very times away. Oh, sorry, I've got three times a term. That would be accepted, that would be accepted. Three times a term. And sometimes, you know, people are told they have to be on a committee not because they want to but because it's expected that you join two committees or whatever it is. Are there deliverables like, have we got any shared aims like while we're meeting? Is it actually effective for any outcomes? So we've now gravitated to project groups. So I mean, as we said that we're like one of them in our school review. We had a school review recently. They were like, oh, you don't have committees. You don't have professional learning groups. This is like a big thing that department expects. I was like, okay, that's fine. But we are one big committee in a small school. So our staff meetings are almost like committee meetings because that's what we do. And we make them all instructional. But in addition to that, we have project groups. And so for example, this year we are, we've spent a lot of time in the peter to writing space and getting our instruction and structural routines and our resources and our progression for narrative and nonfiction writing. And it's just, it's been so effective that the next step is like, okay, how do we now bridge this to the three to six going into that territory? So we've released some of the teachers that are really interested in that feedback progression and working on that. And we work with them. And like Zoe, the deputy works with them. But we release them again, provide the time to work together. But essentially they've given us that another time. They're working on a very particular task with the idea that that's going to be disseminated and shared with the other three to six staff. And again, talking back to your back, your investing time that with a really strong outcome and a really clear purpose. And then if someone, and they might not be the team that's working on something else to English next year, that's okay. It means that you can invite people who are interested in the different projects. You can utilize their skill or expertise or just utilize their interest even for that particular purpose. And they know that we actually have reserved time for this. We also, we do have coaches and we provide the additional dot that's like free periods to be a person for the coaching time. But it's hard to sometimes time table letting in a small school. So what it might be is like one of our coaches will record the amount of time that they're coaching, observing, having coaching conversations. And then when it accumulates a half a day, we can just give them a half day. Or we can give them a whole day or a couple days term, whatever it equates to. And we actually do now have a early years coordinator who is just one day away. And then she's the one teacher from another Thursday. But that's again, something else we've invested in for this distributed shared leadership model. And while she coaches as well, she's also helping coordinate the other coaches too. And working out some of the new initiatives that are going through the early years and refinement of our playbook and all those things that can just be forever refining and continuing again and building upon. - Yep, that's great, thanks, Dave. How have you as the lead or as the leadership team decided on what the maybe bar is in your school? So you've talked a lot about teaching and learning excellence and specifying that. What is excellence or what will excellence be in your setting? - For us, excellence in our setting is seeing students succeed, I suppose. And also seeing kids that are happy, not because they're playing games or all day, it's because they're succeeding and they're valuing their own success. So excellence for us is 100% celebrating our individual student wins, like our intervention wins, even our high flyers, like what they've achieved. The progress, we do a lot of celebrating progress. And also celebrating the wins of our teachers as well. And so while we use data, absolutely data drives us, that fun data is so important. We definitely value that. We probably, what excellence to us is looking okay, this particular childhood year three, she started here, now she's here. We can attribute that to what we've done because if we have done the XYZ to support her, we've been tracking this progress, we've been making modifications. And so we're really celebrating her now. We also have high expectations and excellence in terms of that the model we provide our community, we've done a lot of work in student services, so that students are supported, families are supported, and transparent communication between the school and the parents, but also the school like the student services team, and our teaching bodies. So everyone is on the same page. Everyone knows where every student is at in terms of referral processes, further investigations, school cycling involvement, intervention, whatever it might be. There's no surprises. And so I didn't know that that was happening, or that child was going off for that assessment. And I think again, the community then have a lot of trust in us because we've proven that we're running a tight ship, approving that we are invested and what they're telling us will be reported. It will be acted upon. We'll make sure it's discussed and hand it over. So I suppose yes, excellence comes from data, absolutely, but it also comes back from parent feedback, community feedback. We had our school review just last term, which is a big process of submitting a lot of evidence over, to guess about six months to do, and then they come in for the validation on the day of, there's a director of school review, and then there's another principal from a similar context, or a size school, and they talk to parents, they talk to students, they talk to staff, they talk to us, it's incredible how much data, they go into it really, and it was such a celebration for us. We got a five-year turnaround, which is basically the highest result you can get, and not just a bit of brag from it. I was six percent of schools get that, and no, it was incredible. That's excellent. Yeah, but we were so happy, I may have cried, only because it's, you know, we weren't really hard, and it's just so nice to be recognized for that. But also it meant that the feedback we're getting from the community is the same as what we perceive in the model of excellence that we're providing. So because sometimes, you are providing excellent education, but the community might not know that, they might not perceive that, they might not understand that. So it's really important that you're getting that feedback from your community, too, so. Yeah. So lots of ways, I think, of thinking about it, it's data. It's also progress, as opposed to a set number that you want to get students to. It sounds like it's been about building that community connection. It sounds like excellence is about school systems and processes running well, that transparency, being prompt to act on things. But yeah, congratulations. You should be commended on your success. I think schools are one of these unique workplaces where I don't know any other workplace, and I've worked in other sectors, too. I don't know any other workplace where people work as hard as they do in schools. And there is always just this external pressure from community and commentators to do more, do better, we're not doing well enough. So those moments where there is validation or people notice you're doing good work, I think it's really no one that you felt affected by that. Because it doesn't come along anywhere near often enough, I think that leaders and teachers get thanked for their work. I want to maybe zoom out a little bit now and just think about education more broadly. I've got a couple of questions about science and evidence and then one about how do we kind of achieve sustainability and avoid perpetual novelty in education. So my first kind of curly question is, is it do you think about the science or is it about the movements? I think you and I have been observing this stuff for probably a similar amount of time. And I think we're probably equally committed to evidence-based practice and using evidence as much as possible. But what do you think are the biggest problems with the science of reading and science of learning movements in terms of where we're at now? And perhaps what are the benefits of those movements as well? I definitely think, look at both last 10 years and when it first started to be on the science of reading, that sort of became before everyone was using the science of learning. I think it's definitely shown the spotlight into, oh, teaching is about evidence-based practice and we need to be research-informed, because like you, coming from a science background and a speech pathology background, it was quite absurd to me that you didn't have to necessarily regard research when you had all these lives in your hands where a speech pathology is quite the opposite. You have to remember from you, you might have managed for plans of writing a research rationale and might way you got that research from it. Why is that your approach to therapy, et cetera? So going to teaching where it's a bit more of was when I graduated, what's your teaching philosophy or whatever? Whatever you tell me, it should be so I could get a job. I think it has shifted that, which has been a real positive in actually getting people to go, oh, well, teaching, yes, there's definitely an art to it. It's definitely, like, there's skill involved in its execution, of course. But there is also a science behind how students, how people learn and the conditions where people learn best in. So that's been a real positive of it. I think definitely when the Emily Hanford stuff came out, sort of sorry, while there might be a few downsides of people hanging onto a few of those messages too strongly and going down a little rabbit hole on the hole that had a very, I believe, positive impact on how we teach reading. Going away from the idea of the three-giving model, et cetera, which was so prevalent, even from when the speech path background, me going into a school for the first time and going, oh, I still remember seeing a level text and going, oh, this isn't how I was doing reading instruction and literacy instruction with the students at telephone. This is different, but maybe this is the right way. Maybe I do have to teach these strategies. Like, I wasn't immune to those messages. I just think as I have that background. And so I think that has definitely helped understand, help people understand that where big influence of education comes from, like, you know, you big company, lots of money, companies, the programs, et cetera, be careful of commercial programs, be careful of what you've learned at uni and why not necessarily be true. However, I think what can happen when other downsides of the movement is that, like everything, it will turn into some sort of commercialization. A good idea can go from being a good idea to being implemented incorrectly or translated into classrooms completely incorrectly. And then all of a sudden, you're like, well, I didn't work, I didn't get the results. So that once even the point of science is creating, it hasn't made any progress or hasn't made any change of results. And so it's like, okay, that's because we're not actually looking at the implementation science behind it as well. I think you get a lot of armchair experts. I mean, don't necessarily understand just how hard it is implementing or teaching a number of kids at the same time to read or to write or to do whatever. And it does. It lends itself to schools and systems being taken advantage of. By the next new shiny thing that lacks science of reading or science of learning label on it, sometimes we've, again, I used to hate this expression because it was just used so much on the reading science of school space with Pedro. But, you know, checking the baby out with the bath water. But, you know, there are the biggest lessons I recently, you know, in the last few years is decodable readers, for example. I still am an advocate for decodable readers, absolutely. But what I think I've learned from just my experience and probably accepting what the research is telling us, that they, you know, they're good for training worlds, but you actually need to get kids off to pretty quickly. And I think what we were doing and what the science of reading movement has done, unfortunately, has met kids have been kept on decodable readers, like right up, you know, to the end of year two, beginning in year three, even though they've actually got the ability and their phonic knowledge to start on authentic texts. And so now, again, we're like, okay, what are we doing in the E1 space? Obviously, not kids that are still like you, very, very early phonic concepts, but kids that are able to sound our use some kind of strategies, should say strategies that's got negative connotations, (laughs) word attack skills, we need to actually get them off these as soon as possible, because long term, it's going to have a detrimental impact on their reading ability. It's going to affect the statistical learning of words because we're controlling the frequency of what they're encountering words, much like high frequency words, right? They got absolutely thrown out with the science of reading kind of movement as you start words about, start words about, now, fortunately, we're in the space we're out, they weren't bad. It was just more the mechanisms or the processes of how we're teaching them, as opposed, just memorizing by side, actually, but high frequency words have an incredible impact on our reading ability, again, it keeps on authentic text as soon as we possibly can, and I've been guilty of going, oh, that's not as important as the phonics, sort of stuff we need, you know, well, actually, they're both important. So I think, unfortunately, what the science of learning or science of reading movement has done, it can turn it an idea, but then that translation then becomes so far away from what the research was actually saying because of interpretations of that just where one. - Yeah, I agree with all of those things. I've had kind of similar reflections over time, but I think the way I've been pitching it is something good, done bad, is no better than something bad, done well. And I think the problem, the biggest problem I see with the movements, it's not the evidence, although I think sometimes the scale or the significance of the evidence is distorted, and we're seeing some of that get walked back now, but it was being communicated by people who didn't have strong backgrounds in implementing or teaching. And it was a very narrow articulation of what to teach, but no support on how or how much or for how long or when and why this would work or not work. And it's, yeah, it's the same over in Victoria, it's, you know, authentic texts are bad. Well, no, they're not. Actually, I want kids from the middle of year one transitioning as many as possible as quickly, as possible, like you talk about statistical learning, self-teaching hypothesis, as soon as they've got code, which sits usually about middle of year one's open sequence, they're ready to fly, and we hold them back. You'll see the consequences of that particularly in fluency, and then in turn comprehension. It's the same thing, I think, about reading comprehension strategies were then bad. Well, it's like, well, being able to summarise a text or paraphrase a text is incredibly useful. It's how you integrate that in higher quality, rich, complex text, not practising it as an isolated thing. So it was things became good, bad, banned, or otherwise. And there was that lack of nuance. And I do worry that's set people back. Or like you say, schools will try a particular approach, but without knowing how to do it, and they see their results stay the same. Sometimes go backward and go, there's something wrong with this. Well, no, it's all in the how, isn't it? Absolutely. Yes, yeah. And I've had many school leaders reach out to me about, you know, because knowledge is rich curriculum. It's very tough people at the moment. It's like, oh, now Nathan, rating results are a terrible-- we're looking at knowledge which curriculum can you tell me? And it's like, well, like, honestly, like, yes. Well, students, knowing things is great. And building that kind of knowledge is never going to be a bad thing. It's always going to be a great thing. It is not going to give you overnight success, or even like, you know, a turnaround of the year, in terms of improving your rating naplam. Because ultimately, if you're in the red fee and reading naplam, you've probably got a fluency or a decoding crisis really, or a major problem in a school where that needs addressing. And so I think, again, the people kind of go, oh, that's what that school's doing. I need to do that. That's our priority. And I'm like, your priority probably isn't looking at that, because it's a huge thing to delve into. Your priority is probably, actually, can my students actually read the words off the page? What are you doing about that? At a tier one and a tier two level? Let's start there. That is going to give you more immediate change in terms of results. So I think, again, while there are some really good ideas and some really great things schools are doing in the areas of English, we have to be very mindful about where are they up to in their kind of journey? I don't like that one. In the kind of school implementation process, and is this my priority, or am I just going towards this? 'Cause I heard the school down the road is doing that as well. - Yeah, there's a lot that's been popularized, but I think it's become a bit competitive or it's a race, or we have to be doing all of these things at once, which, like you say, unless we understand the building blocks of reading or what might sit underneath some comprehension data, we're not going to see that success. And it's also, it takes years to see significant and sustained turnarounds in results, particularly comprehension, even when you're nailing everything. You can spend three or five years at it before you start to really see that pay off because it's so cumulative. What do you think schools and teachers need to guard against? And maybe how do you make decisions about where the sources are credible? - I think BKF be very mindful of who is positioning themselves as an expert, generally in my experience, the people that are not calling themselves experts, and such, you know, are the ones that probably, I think so. But inside, there's obviously people that are in influential kind of organisations and positions, you know, like that set Teachwell was so fantastic for us. It's more of a case of just be careful who you're following. And I say that with, you know, full reflection of why I was writing a social media group for me in some of its schools, where we were just a bunch of people giving advice. And some of the advice we're giving was pretty good. And then some of the advice I looked back and go, "Oh, that was probably wrong." So you have to be mindful that people aren't giving advice because they want you to do badly. They come, it's usually coming from a good position, otherwise it's coming from, you know, financial gain. Starts just be very mindful of doing your homework on that particular person, all that particular website. Like, there are organisations out there that for the last 20 years have been really positioning in quarry based learning and balance reading or whole language reading instruction as best practice. And all of a sudden, they're pivoted. And only in the last year or two, not even when this sort of, you know, start to read first with making a headway because they knew that's, you know, in my opinion, maybe that's what the money is, or maybe they have learned. That's absolutely fantastic if they have had some shifts in their thinking, great. But are they actually the experts if they've only just been pivoting their thinking in recent years? Be careful where you're getting your pay off from. Do your homework. You've got consultants coming to your school, great. But what are their actual experiences in working the schools? Doesn't have to be a school leader, but what is their experience working with schools? And also their experience in changing or improving results for a school, too. There's lots of people that get advice for schools, but what is their track record of actually still in change? And that school actually being in a better position compared to prior to the starting in that school. And I just think being mindful of the next new shiny thing. I even get like, you know, when there's a nice, great apps that track are reading, that's all, okay. I mean, looking at it, hang on. Our system's actually working. They've got a really good system here. Our staff know how to interpret this style. They know how to read it, and they're going to enter it. It doesn't need to be pretty and shiny and expensive to be good. But sometimes it is hard, but everyone I've ever been talking about something and you're like, well, maybe I should put it to that. Why do you think we like that? Because I think education is quite unique in that regard. Like other systems and sectors, again, I don't think although I feel like in the age of AI, everybody's going bonkers about innovation, but I think part of doing well in a school is taking multiple years to build and solidify what it is you stand for and how you want to go about things. And then to keep doing that kind of negativity. And yes, within that, you want to innovate and improve. And you've already talked today about how you do that, but you've got to have such a stable base to start with to be able to tweak and improve. But we seem to have this, everybody in school seems to have this tendency to want to switch it up, bring something new and change this, change that. And we're not good with saying, hey, this is really effective. I had this conversation with someone I think was just yesterday where they said, you know, should we be using phonics program A? And I said, well, tell me why you're considering it. You know, well, you know, that's what, you know, is really being supported in the system at this point in time. And I said, well, what are you doing? Well, we're doing phonics program C. Okay, well, okay, talk me through your results. Like, tell me about your year one phonics check results. Tell me about your dibble screening results. I said, well, we're getting really good results. And we've been at this for five or six years. It's going really well. Everybody knows this program really well. And I said, okay. So what is the rationale for changing what we're doing? Yeah, I guess it's, could we get even better? I think that's the right way. Yes, but understanding the process of change means probably for three or four years, we won't be getting better. And we'll have to wait to get to that kind of critical mass again of everybody so fluent and expert in this curriculum, we're getting results. Like, are we willing to kind of delay our progress another five years to get there? So I think, I don't know. It is, I think we still have this thing in education where we look outward a lot rather than look inward. And we compare and compete. And it's, we're our own worst enemy sometimes, I think. Yeah. I think there's a lot of promises as well. To be like for more commercial looking theory. There's a lot, at the moment, there's a lot of data platforms which are like, we can interpret your data and tell you pinpoint exactly where your instructional deficits are. And it sounds incredible. Teacher time saving into my data, it tells me what to teach. Like, how good is this? It doesn't take well to realize that it doesn't do what it says it does, what it does, but it probably, it gives you a, you know, very problematic conclusions. And that's just because, yeah, it looks amazing and it's got a beautiful interface does not mean it. So it's worth any money on. But I think, I think the job is really hard. And, you know, we are always looking, oh, could that make it easier? Could that make teaching easier? And so I understand that whole, well, where they doing, maybe I should do this. And if something's not working, like we have a nice program in our early years, it just, this wasn't working. But it was just, we knew we needed to do something, but we're just looking at, knew we probably couldn't develop something in house better. But, you know, now there has been something that's been brought out with childhood with piloting. And we're probably, one year after the other, it's slowly kind of rolling it out. And I guess that's the difference between just changing for the sake of changing and changing because you've got a good rationale. And you're doing it responsibly and making sure that it is sustainable and that your staff, you have buy it, but also you're, you're, you're tracking the changes reform, maybe doing a whole school implementation or change as well. And it's still you're making that decision as a kind of a whole school decision. 'Cause I often do see something that's the opposite of that, where, for example, you might, I might work in a school where they have, you know, phonics curriculum A in foundation, phonics curriculum B in year one, phonics, and the pieces aren't, you know, communicating. So, yeah, but I think innovation is good, looking for ways that we can improve is great. And I think things like AI, comparative judgment, I'm huge fans of those that are time savers, but at the end of the day, like nothing replaces expert professional judgment in a lot of these things, as much as we probably wouldn't like that to be true. Things can be made more efficient and automatic. There's still that hard work. I'm mindful of our time deadline. This is the first time I've had a time deadline for a time. Which is good, it's probably very helpful. I should arrange that more often. I'm gonna move into my final lot of questions, which is really about maybe lessons, your achievements, and who has influenced you along the way. What do you think you have learned over the last three to five years about change management and strategic thinking? - Well, everything, I suppose when I was in teaching, which we see that later rolls, it was, well, we should be doing this. So, let's all do it. To now, there's a lot more thought and science behind change and that by, for me, it's very much about bringing everyone along together, making sure the message is really clear, consistent, you are saying the why. So, the biggest example I can do is one of the biggest projects and the lead is like the knowledge, you know, coalition that we've got with two other schools that has been going on for three years. We needed to make sure that everyone like you and understood and had ultimate buying about why are we now going towards a new literature and knowledge units in a very consistent format? You know, we're specifically teaching tier two, but can we do a lot of work around what makes a good, how utility work, content, what does that look like in terms of the class discussions? How do we make it inclusive? How do we make sure that students feel safe to aren't safe building classroom safety? And then, you know, the writing task, writing revolution, why have we gone with that? How do we do it, all that sort of stuff? The why is just as important as the how, as opposed to just telling when doing this because I said so, or because this person said it was good. Obviously, you can use data for that. Completions a little bit harder because you don't see those necessarily immediate effects of comprehension. It is a long kind of, you're playing the long game there. We've just, you know, year five net planet data. We had year five reading was over two set of deviations above our life school average, which we had a lot of kids in the exceeding box more than we've had in other years. And obviously, you can't really know exactly where to attribute that to, but if we keep seeing these gains, that's after three years, those kids, the year fives, have had three consistent years of a knowledge, rich kind of comprehension curriculum. In addition to a big focus on fluency, like that can't be understated, a huge focus on decoding fluency, tier two interventions for those that need it, and then we're getting results like this. So it's like, okay. But initially, we didn't have those results to share. So it was about how do we communicate this message? How do we get by when you haven't really got data to show that? And that's about bringing in the research, discussing the research. I'm looking at what we're doing well, but what we haven't really been, maybe targeting as well. And you know, listening to podcasts, which is always a nice one. And I think the age of a lot of podcasts with Natalie Waxlow was a really highlight for my staff, and bringing them along with the buy-in. And now we're in a position where every single one of my staff members here have with the education assistance or teachers would be able to communicate to anyone, how we teach. And I use that, you know, conversation. Teach, just comprehension. Can it really be taught? Or is it just a product? Anyway, that's a whole 'nother discussion. We can do another episode on that. That's one of my favorite topics. How do we target, or how do we provide the optimal conditions for comprehension? Because, you know, it might have been a few years ago, or we just, we have a little just fine. We have, you know, we have some knowledge stuff that's up up. We know the factors that influence comprehension here. We know that it's fluency is the biggest factor. We know that background knowledge is another big factor. We know that access to vocabulary is another factor. We also know that having class discussions where students are talking about texts they're reading and talk and writing about texts they're reading also consolidates what they're reading. So we can articulate that really well as a staff, you know. And we know we can articulate it really well, because we practice, we rehearse it, and then we rehearse it. We talk to parents about it. We talk to a family about it. Like we, like, it's just talked about so much that it becomes, again, it's our identity, I suppose. So I think really communicating, and not just once off, but I guess that's my point. It's sort of once off communication, why we do knowledge, because, you know, it's a continual communication of why we're doing this, or why we're spelling the progression of the school, why we teach human biology, whichever it might be. It's constantly bringing back, talking about it, celebrating it, and looking at data when the data finally kicks in. - Yeah, yeah. I'm really excited, hopefully, with pending napalene changes for us to be able to then track our 357 growth. I think that's going to be really exciting to see, because of those cumulative impacts. But things like napalene are, they're kind of measures of, are we nailing every possible thing that could contribute to comprehension? And when you start to see results, like you're getting, you're like, oh, yeah, we've got pieces in place. That's super rewarding to see. Steph, what have you been your biggest achievements? What are you most proud of in your leadership work? - I am most proud of this school, I think, and the main way I work with it, I, that's what keeps me so driven, because this job, like teaching, can lead to burnout, and you know, school leaders have a similar kind of mental health burnout rights as teachers do as well. It's not reported on for as much. But because I have, you know, I work in a context where I have people that are just as if not more, you know, passionate and driven that's me, I think, yeah, that's why it's sustainable for me. Also, I suppose having to, I've had some intellectual people definitely drive my approach. One of the first people, it would be amputated stuff, who is, she was a speech pathologist at telephone, that I work with, who is now a teacher, we kind of both went to teaching at the same time, but she had like 20 years of speech pathology on me. And just, yeah, she was one of the first people that really drove my interest in literacy. And really, I guess, highlight of literacy being that gateway to academic success and introduced me to the likes of, like, research of that level and so and just that whole world that I had never really considered before. Literacy wasn't, when I did speech pathology, it wasn't covered that well in my degree. The fundamental, obviously, language processing, phonological awareness, amazing, but literacy wasn't necessarily like a, got much airtime. So she was definitely, yeah, really influential. And obviously, on the right hand, I met her 10, maybe not quite 10, maybe nine years ago, and she had a huge influence on my pedagogy, I suppose, and making the most out of, you know, your day, getting it, making the most out of students, day in terms of repetitions, exposures, uping the anti-adonstruction, and think I've totally gone off the track. You were talking about my success as well. But the success as well, I was going to ask about people who have influenced you. And I think it's actually really nice for me to talk about our successors intertwined with people who have influenced you. Sorry, I didn't understand that. Oh, it's all connected. I think it's all connected. But you're very proud of this school. But then let's talk about, let's finish that, though. Then who do you think has influenced you or thinking the most? And also maybe other things like professional readings or podcasts? I've talked about some of this stuff along the way anyway. Yeah, I definitely think those two people are a personal kind of level. In the last hour, a lot of us might have deputied. No, we've been here. I have learnt so much from the idea of deputying with a seven pound as much, which is absolutely phenomenal. I absolutely need the jackpot with her. But there's so many different people. Well, there's so many different people I've spoken to, so many different school leaders and teachers as well. But in terms of big kind of names who's really shifted my thinking or set me on kind of like a pathway or a trajectory, it's probably Natalie Bakesler, funnier and after she really got me interested in the kind of knowledge thing, which then led me down to life and knowledge project. William Van Cleve, I did a lot of his master classes on like morphology and syntax. I've learnt so much from him. He was such a wonderful human. But he was just one of the most knowledgeable people I've ever met in terms of literacy instruction. I don't know anything about how words and sentences work. Yeah, he was incredible. And so a lot of the learnings I got from there then helped with the syntax project and stuff. And also, one of my closest friends, Jasmine Hall, she's done quite a bit of work with my staff and really helped us with our writing, our progression, paid it to and our instruction practices and writing. But I would talk to her daily, I would say, if she can. And what has looked over the many years of friendship I've had with her is probably one of the most important people, so yeah. And she's been with you with sort of all your major projects, too, hasn't she? Like it's project and reading science in schools and a lot of those really influential resources and communities. Yeah, and even right down to our playbook, she's probably had a lot of influence on that, like informally, absolutely. But I'm forever picking her brain. So yeah, very lucky to have that friendship. Yeah, fantastic. The million dollar question, although I feel like I'm getting clearer and clearer on this and my list is getting less and less. But how can we be most impactful in English and literacy leadership? What are the best bets that every leader should know? I think schools need to know that students are really well. And I think that has to, does have to come down to assessment. Like if you have not got good assessments, you don't even know where to start. Like getting a lot of advice to schools informally, like reach out or come to the school for observations and it's like, where do we start? But it is hard to have that conversation without really annoying your data. Something like people are okay, since again, being quiet is transforms how you look at data. And it really transforms how you're tracking literacy and identifying students, how you're running the intervention or how you're identifying kids for the intervention, whatever it might be. Because if you haven't got that, you can't even measure the impact of anything you're doing. I think teachers are a friend of regardless, there's a clear scope of sequence, you know, that the literature and the language strands, particularly earlier teachers are quite usually very good at that side of it. So we tend to say, okay, well, where should we get consistency first? Let's look at the kind of the work that decoding strands first if you're looking at literacy. You're reading and you're spelling always have to be a priority. Let's look at your writing next. I think schools, you know, want to jump into knowledge or jump into comprehension or whatever it might be. But really, let's look at what's happening in your early years. Is that effective? Because if you don't get that right, you're forever going to be playing catch-up. So get nailing your early years instruction, particularly with regards to decoding and coding and writing would always be where I would encourage you to look at data first and start from there because you cannot do everything at once. - Yeah, the start with data. I think that's what I've narrowed down to that too now. It's just really good assessment tools, but as few as possible. - Yes. - Really good high quality curriculum will do a lot and then taking a stand on what your lesson level formative assessment practices are. - Yes, maybe ignore the rest. For the rest is optional. - Yeah, absolutely. Focus on some really high impact structural routines, but that's like your phonics, you know, your lesson, how that's being administered, how many repetitions do you expect them to get in, how many words, how many dictations, et cetera. And then having that as a focus, seeing the results, seeing what it does to your student progress and then building on from there. - Yep, yeah, great. - What's next for you, Steph? What continues to motivate and excite you? - Well, we're always looking at where we're improving and what we're doing. We're definitely in more of the rushing and also mass space at the moment. And the three to six writing is very hard. There are so many components of what make good writing instruction. So we're really delving into that and working out the specifics of what we want that to look like. But a more general sense, nothing. I've got to get through my principal review, which is next to it. And I'm moving out in a few minutes. Sorry, that's enough of things happening. That's enough for me at the moment. Yeah. - Great. Well, Steph, I've really appreciated you spending this time with me. I feel like I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours. It's just such a treat to speak with somebody who's just so knowledgeable and so experienced and who sweats the detail. I'm going to close with some words about you, Steph. And I've gotten these words from somebody who has been across quite a few of the things that you've been doing in WA over many years. So I spoke to Mandinate and about you. So those of you who don't know who are listening, Mandinate News, CEO of the Dislexio Spell Foundation, DSF. She's president of Osbelld as well. She wrote some lovely words. And I think all of us could aspire to having these on our tombstone. I've been aware of Steph's work in the education space since her Kimbley days. I've always been impressed with her passion, singularity, and strong desire to make a difference. Her focus is always, ultimately, on the students and the quality of schooling they have access to. But she never loses sight of the importance of supporting, respecting, and learning from her colleagues, including those she leads. Steph is relentlessly evidence-informed and doesn't suffer fools or charlatans gladly. She's perhaps one of the hardest working, honest, and effective educators. I know, brilliant work, Steph. That's lovely. You're going to make me cry now. When she sent it through, and she said, is that OK? And I was like, Mandy, that is perfect. It captures all of what Steph is. But I'm so appreciate your time. I'm going to let you go to your-- Assembly. Assembly. You must go and look forward to connecting again soon, Steph. Thank you, sir. She was a pleasure. Thank you.