One of the central themes of the Big Day Out this year was to “get smart and open the classrooms doors” so that instruction, which can often seen as private teacher business, can be seen and improved. Each year Darrell Fraser, the deputy secretary of the Department [DEECD] gathers together all the principals across Victoria so the vision for school improvement can be explored. It’s quite a symbolic and cultural move as 1500 of us including various heads of departments gather to hear and discuss the central themes of school improvement.

Over the past 3 years we have been fortunate to have Richard Elmore from Harvard as a critical friend as we continue to build the capacity of teachers and principals. Richard again presented on his theme of “if you cannot see it in the classroom it isn’t there” as did Geoff Masters, the current executive officer of ACER.

Richard Elmore make the case for networks adopting a knowledge framework. As the work advances in complexity we need to adopt a shared language [language is culture and culture is language]. He said that networks are where we should bring our problems of practice to: learning to use agreed protocols, staying in a descriptive rather judgemental voice and seeking the acquisition of new knowledge to solve the problems.   

Geoff made a strong case for using assessment to identify the starting for instruction. He said a challenge for leadership was to ensure teachers used the data on student achievement from the previous year rather than having children start from a clean slate as does often happen [Manshak 2003: states it seems we dump knowledge each year as we move from teacher to teacher].

The final session for the day was to seek feedback from principals upon the 5e model of instruction we are busy developing for all teachers across the state. Readers of my blog will know from previous posts that I am on the principal working party for the development of the instructional model which has been very challenging. Principal feedback was encouraging. I did wonder how teachers might feel moving between novice and expert as they learn to deepen their instructional practice [Hattie].