How can a focus on teacher agency, strategic planning, and professional growth transform a school into a thriving ecosystem where leaders, teachers, parents, and students create dynamic, inclusive, and purpose-driven learning communities? School leader and the author of The Co-Constructed School, Ann Lautrette, shares her experiences, research, and case studies that demonstrate the processes and rewards of building a community of empowered collaborators.

Listen to the previous podcast “Guiding Teachers to Build Co-constructed Classrooms” here.

Connect with Ann and find her books and blogs here.

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.000] – Steve [Intro]

Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.

[00:00:29.620] – Steve

Building Building a co-constructed school. I’m excited to welcome  Ann Lautrette back to our podcast. Ann is currently the Deputy Head at Taipei European School in Taiwan. She is an author and advocate for collaborative learning environments. In our previous podcast around her book, “The Co-Constructed Classroom,” we explored the power of student-teacher partnerships in shaping meaningful learning experiences. Now, Ann has taken that work a step further with her new book, “The Co-Constructed School,” which expands the concept beyond individual classrooms to the entire school culture. We’ll be looking at how leaders, teachers, parents, and students can work together to create a truly collaborative and empowered learning community. Ann, welcome back to the podcast

[00:01:22.350] – Ann

Thank you, Steve. I’m happy to be back to talk about this second book.

[00:01:25.960] – Steve

That’s terrific. I went back and listened to our previous podcast. We predicted this book at the end of our last podcast.

[00:01:33.490] – Ann

We did. We knew it was coming.

[00:01:37.300] – Steve

So in the co-constructed classroom, you focused on teacher-student collaboration at the classroom level. And I want to encourage listeners who haven’t listened to that podcast to do so. It was titled, “Guiding Teachers to Build Co-Constructed Classrooms.” And you’ll be able to find the link for that podcast in the lead-in to this podcast. What inspired you to explore co-construction at the school-wide level?

[00:02:05.890] – Ann

I think when I started writing co-constructed classroom, I was really thinking about it with my own experience as a classroom teacher and also aiming that work, particularly at teachers, in terms of how they can influence the students within their classroom. But I’ve spent many years, 20 years, really, in various leadership roles in schools, both in the UK and mostly internationally. And so I think actually I’ve spent more of my time almost developing my own understanding of co-construction as a concept and then applying that within my leadership roles in terms of really, now, in the really senior leadership roles that I’m in, shaping the school to be exactly that co-constructed place that I feel teachers want to work in, that I want to work in, and also that I think is beneficial for students and the parent community as well.

[00:03:02.740] – Steve

How do you define a co-constructed school? I’m wondering, what would we see and hear and feel being in a co-constructed school?

[00:03:14.200] – Ann

In the book, I specifically define it as a school where all members of the community, so teachers, students, leaders, and parents, all play an active role in shaping the culture. As you mentioned before, they are involved in decision making, and they shape the learning environment for students, but also for, certainly in the case of teachers as a learning environment for themselves. It’s a place committed to professional growth for teachers as well. The idea really is to move the school away from a traditional hierarchical leadership structure that we see in many schools, and we did traditionally see in schools, towards a culture that is really embracing collaboration, is built on trust, and it’s built on shared responsibility.

[00:04:03.090] – Steve

What are the mindshifts that need to take place to move schools further in that direction? I’m thinking probably mindshifts at each spot, the leaders’ mindshifts the parents as well as the teachers?

[00:04:20.300] – Ann

I think, I mean, firstly, it’s a mind shift from that sense of control that sometimes leadership feel they need to have to trust in the members of the community, especially the teachers. I think leaders have to believe that teachers are capable of making the sound pedagogical decisions, firstly, on their own without everything being directed and dictated. I think micromanagement this really what erodes agency and motivation within a school. It makes it difficult for teachers to really enjoy their working life, I think. I think teachers close the door to their classroom and feel autonomous. So if they walk outside and feel that that autonomy is taken away from them, I think that that as a culture is quite damaging to the relationships within the school. And so therefore, it’s a mindset shift from hierarchy to collaboration. And seeing the school environment as an ecosystem where everyone has a role in shaping direction. It’s not really a corporate structure with rigid authority. It’s somewhere where from every student, but also every member of the community to the person right at the top, the director, has an important role to play. Everyone is equally valuable within the community.

[00:05:38.460] – Ann

I think one of the biggest things would be really a mindset shift from fear to experimentation. Maybe it’s a cultural shift rather than a mindset shift. But I think leaders and teachers can be fearful. Teachers can be fearful if leaders create a culture of fear, whereby teachers are fearful to try new things. And If they’re fearful to try new things in the classroom, then there’s a little growth and development for them, and then consequently for students, really. But if leaders create a high trust environment, then teachers feel freer to take risks. Sometimes they fail, but they learn from this and continue to grow their skills. And I think that then translates into students who, similarly, we want them to become creative thinkers and curious inquirers and lead their own learning so that they can leave school and continue to do those things. And I think that can happen when students have the possibility to experiment because teachers model that experimentation and that risk-taking in the classroom. And I think leaders also need to consider a shift from looking at the short-term gains which we could identify perhaps as being exam results or things that we would promote at a relatively short term to systemic change, long term sustainability of a school environment.

[00:06:59.100] – Ann

And coming along with that is the desire to create a place, especially in this culture of education now, to create a space where teachers don’t want to leave because we know we have a crisis of recruitment. And in a crisis of recruitment, then retention becomes just as important as recruiting new teachers. And so therefore, we have an obligation, I think, to create a school where a teacher enjoys coming to work, feels trusted, feels like they have some autonomy, enjoys the relationship relationships that they can build with parents, with students, and with leadership. And that way, our school is more sustainable.

[00:07:38.090] – Steve

I want to pull two words out that you used there that I run into debates on at times with teachers, and that is autonomy and collaboration. In my head, they go together, but I’m frequently questioned questioned that a sense on a teacher’s part that collaboration causes me to lose autonomy. To talk about that a little bit, and maybe it’s the same way with the leaders, a sense that somehow increasing collaboration. I saw the same thing was true when schools first started looking at involving parents, that somehow the autonomy of the school or the autonomy of the classroom was decreased by the collaboration with parents versus I’ve always seen it as increasing.

[00:08:33.260] – Ann

I want to add an additional word to collaboration. I want to talk about maybe shaped collaboration. So I’m not… Despite being a huge proponent for a sense of autonomy and for co-construction, I also, especially at a leadership level and especially with parents, I’m not a huge fan of what is often termed, “blue sky thinking,” where we just start with an absolute blank page and throw out every idea that we might have. I think that potentially reduces autonomy because there’s no shape or structure given to that process. So essentially, the person with the loudest voice is going to win in that collaboration. And some ideas are going to be written roughshard over unless we put some structure around that, whether it’s individual, in a classroom, we might use individual thinking time planning time before we ask students to bring their ideas together so that everyone’s idea can come together. I think in a school for leaders and with parents, if I wanted to involve parents, for example, in some strategic planning, I wouldn’t ask them, what’s everything you want to change in our school? I’d ask them, here’s some ideas. Give us your feedback on these ideas.

[00:09:52.020] – Ann

So I think that allows autonomy in a relatively controlled fashion and collaboration with in a shaped fashion that ensures that everyone’s voice can be heard rather than just opening it up for a free for all, if that makes sense.

[00:10:08.030] – Steve

I’m hearing facilitation.

[00:10:10.240] – Ann

Absolutely.

[00:10:12.500] – Steve

What you describe as the teacher with the student is facilitating that conversation, not cutting it loose. And the same with leadership with teachers and a leadership team with parents.

[00:10:25.260] – Ann

Absolutely. It’s providing scaffold around it, really. Some structure around, whether… I love thinking tools with students, but I also use them. I do a lot of professional development with stuff, so I use them with staff. I use them with parents in sessions as well. Things that allow the thoughts that people have to be out on the page or in the world somewhere rather than in their heads, so that we can actually hear what everyone says rather than what looks like collaboration, but really isn’t, when everyone’s just allowed to say whatever they want at the same mind, and the loudest person is going to have the last word.

[00:11:04.530] – Steve

Yeah. So a large part of that facilitation is seeing that all the voices get heard.

[00:11:10.060] – Ann

Yeah, exactly. I think that’s very important to my concept of co-construction. It’s that we genuinely, authentically hear the voices. In the same way as the collaboration is shaped and structured, it also isn’t pre-determined. So I don’t see any point in going out to teachers or any group of people and asking a question to which you already know the answer that you want.

[00:11:35.700] – Steve

Yeah. And same with students. I’ve seen teachers getting a lot of trouble when students figure that out. You write about the importance of teacher to teacher peer coaching, which is certainly big on my list. You want to expand on that a little bit?

[00:11:55.770] – Ann

Yeah. In my school, as it stands now, we’ve established a model of peer coaching that actually replaced what would have been much more of a top-down kind of bottle. Previously, that would have been maybe two observations per year by leadership, and that would have been fed back to hierarchically I guess you could say. We’ve really replaced that with a peer-to-peer model whereby teachers establish a focus area that they have for a period of time. It could be a year, maybe not, because as you say, it’s not because it’s the end of the school year that what we’re focusing on should end. So a determined period of time that’s always extendable. But each teacher has a particular focus area that they want to develop within their classroom. We ask that it be linked to a Departmental Growth Plan, and the Departmental Growth Plan is linked to the School’s strategic plan. So you have some coordination between what everyone is working on. So for example, this year, our focus has been on authentic learning. And so that’s been one of our strategic goals. It’s been, therefore, a departmental area that they’ve focused on, and each teacher has chosen something or defined their own particular focus area within that broad heading.

[00:13:16.180] – Ann

And then what I like to do is give teachers an option of working in… I found that pairs and threes can work. And so I’ve given them options of working with either one peer or two, and also defining whether they would like to work with someone within their department or outside of their department. And then I go through a process of trying to match people up, which is quite challenging, but I try to do that. And then over the course of the year, the peers will meet to discuss what their focus area is. They will meet to determine how they’re going to gather evidence of progress within that focus area. And that will also include peer observation. But we are very, very keen to say that that peer observation is not evaluative. It’s evidence collection. So if I go into my peer’s classroom, I’m going there because they’ve told me they want me to look at something in particular and give them some feedback on what it is. So it could be talking to students, it could be looking at student work as well at the same time. It could be just observing the parts of the classroom that the teacher doesn’t necessarily see, and then offering that feedback back.

[00:14:27.350] – Ann

So it isn’t feedback on the teaching, is it? And along with this goes the teacher’s ability to ask for particular professional development that might support them with their focus area. They also have a conversation at the start and the end of the process with their head of department in order to just refine perhaps the focus area that they’re setting. But what we’ve seen through this model and the feedback that we’ve had, because we collect feedback each year in order to enhance the model. But certainly what we’ve seen is that teachers much prefer it to a formal observation that is defined on this specific day. They feel that they have some autonomy over their professional development, of course. And they also get to collaborate with people that they perhaps wouldn’t have done, especially if they chose to work with someone outside their department. And that cross-subject work can result in some really great collaborations. We’ve had interdisciplinary units grow out of this because people who wouldn’t normally talk to each other much so they very much have actually discovered some links in what they’re doing. And then I think the advantage of this model for leadership is that this really goes back to what I was saying earlier about trust, because we place a lot of trust on the peer-to-peer pairs that they want to grow in their own professional development.

[00:15:47.720] – Ann

And we don’t need to monitor that in minute detail. We don’t need to micromanage that process, but we place the structure around that process and then allow people to work with it for their own professional growth.

[00:16:02.300] – Steve

Well, Ann, having read the book, I know that you’ve shared your own experiences in there. You’ve shared the research that you’ve looked at in there. You’ve shared case studies from other schools in there. What would you put forth as the payoff that school leaders, actually all educators, what’s the pay off they can be looking for if they move their schools into a more co-constructed ecosystem? I really like that word.

[00:16:40.070] – Ann

Well, I mentioned it before, but I certainly think higher teacher retention rates. Because I don’t think that there are many teachers that you would talk to that would say, I really want to be micromanaged, and I really want to be observed by management every single time, and I want to be pass or fail on my observation. I don’t think most teachers don’t want that environment to work in. So I think if the environment is a place where teachers feel that they have a say in how they’re constructing the school culture that retains them because they feel part of something bigger than themselves, part of something bigger than what happens in their classroom even, but part of the direction that the school is going. It’s a shift from a us versus them mentality sometimes that happens in schools, where the teachers and leadership, where we’re seen at odds with each other, really we’re seen as, in fact, working towards the same goal. So teachers, leaders, parents, students, we’re all trying to achieve whatever our mission is in our school. And so when we feel that we’re part of something big like that, we want to stay and work in the place that we work in.

[00:17:52.900] – Ann

I think we get some professional benefit from that. But I think also that when teachers feel that, then we also see greater student engagement because teachers feel they have a voice, so they give a voice to their students, too. And as I wrote about in the quick-constructed classroom, when we give a voice to students, then the classroom space becomes a more collaborative place. But students also make progress and take charge of their own learning and are more likely to become those lifelong learners that we want them to be. I think we can take our schools to places that are more innovative as well than in terms of teaching practices. I don’t think that innovation most of the time is driven from the top. I think innovation is driven from teachers within a school who innovate. And the job of leaders, I think, is less to be innovative, but more to recognize that innovation and harness it. If we don’t allow it to happen, then we’re not going to be able to move towards a more innovative place. Allowing that, I think we can see our schools become richer, more dynamically learning environments. And a better alignment really between the mission and the classroom practice, because teachers and leadership are working together to achieve it.

[00:19:11.950] – Steve

It really reinforces a discovery that I made years back, and that was I realized when I would talk to teachers who had done really great things, something that they produced with their kids, their kids went way beyond something, when I sat down to talk to the teachers, they never started out with a plan to do the thing they did. They got their kids engaged, and then they trusted letting the kids take a lead, and it took learning somewhere that nobody expected it to go. I’m hearing that in being an innovative school.

[00:19:58.950] – Ann

Yeah, we talk a lot here about space, providing space in the classroom. We can over plan easily. But when we provide space for students to take the ideas, then we have to do the same for teachers. We need to provide space for teachers to be able to innovate.

[00:20:15.560] – Steve

Bingo. I’m wondering if you recommend a starting point. I’m a new head of school, I’m an administrator in a building, and I’d like to see things move in this direction. What would you lay out as places to start?

[00:20:39.060] – Ann

I think the first day, especially as a new leadership member coming into school, which I’ve been in a few times now, I think the most important thing is to start actually just by listening. What actually are the frustrations that people are having? So that could be teachers, that can be students, that can be parents. Everyone really talk to as many people as possible and find the lived experience of being in the school. Then from there, we can go into… If it’s a really big culture shift for a school, then we start relatively small. A small initiative where teachers and/or students have genuine decision-making power. In our school here, we started actually with the strategic plan rather than, as often happens, I think, presenting a strategic plan that has been determined by leadership to the teaching body. We asked them to devise it, basically. We had a huge session with lots of Post-it notes and sheets of paper and headings of the things that we would want to look at in a strategic plan. We had all sorts of ideas come out from teachers. Again, not discussion-based, but well, discussion-based, but written on Post-it notes so that everyone’s voice was able to be heard.

[00:22:02.640] – Ann

Then we took that away as a leadership team and examined all of that, and we turned that into the strategic plan. Starting from there, understanding what Where would our staff want our school to go? We can remind our teachers of our mission, okay, in line with that, where do you want us to go? And then when we start there, we can start to see how that then leads us down the path of, okay, well, what are What are we now going to do to get there? And for us, what are we now going to do to get there was, well, departments are going to set these particular focus areas based on what’s in the strategic plan, and individuals are going to have these focus areas. And so we really feel like we’re all pulling in the same direction because it’s a plan we wrote to achieve a mission we believe in that we’re all contributing to in different ways within our classroom. And you can bring parents into that strategy as well. I think another thing to consider be to think about professional development and how that actually is happening in the school…Is it top-down, decided by someone, and one of a better word, imposed on the Are we targeting staff without any real needs assessment?

[00:23:17.810] – Ann

Or is it peer-led? Are we drawing on some of the expertise that we already have in our school that not only has the expertise, but also has the cultural knowledge of the school and so then we can tailor. I think there’s a place for both external and internal, but for sure, we need to value the knowledge that we have within our staff before we look outside. I think you talked about facilitation earlier. I think if leaders can reframe themselves as facilitators and not just managers or enforcers or whatever it is that comes with hierarchy and see ourselves as facilitating growth in our staff, then similarly, we shift the focus away from teachers feeling like the experience of being in our school is done to them. I talked about students feeling that learning is being done to them in the classroom if they have no agency. Similarly, teachers in the school feel like their job is being done to them unless they have the opportunity to have agency. And I think leadership needs to facilitate that. And then really, really seeking feedback, genuinely seeking feedback with every step of the way. As I said, with our shift towards a peer-to-peer coaching model, we’ve sought feedback along the way from teachers as to what they’ve liked and not liked.

[00:24:49.080] – Ann

And then we’re genuinely taking that on board and reiterated according to that feedback. Because, again, don’t seek feedback if you’re not going to use it. So I think that’s really important and keep refining. And it’s fine to say to teaching body, hey, this is the first time we’re doing this. It might not work. No worries. We’ll reiterate next year, or we’ll get some feedback, or we’ll change what we’re doing, and we’ll try and make it better.

[00:25:14.490] – Steve

I wonder if you’d close that out with one caution.

[00:25:20.860] – Ann

My biggest caution, I think, would be to ensure that you stay…I’ve mentioned it a few times, but ensure that you stay away from what I call fake agency. And so, again, I’ve mentioned it whereby we say, What do you think? But we’re not really interested in what anybody thinks because it’s already decided. That would be my biggest caution, is that if you’re a school leader who thinks that perhaps this would be beneficial for your schools to think about, to shift it away from a more hierarchical model to a co-constructed model. That has to be genuine. It really needs to be, I want to hear what people think, and I don’t have an agenda yet. I don’t know what the answer is yet. I’m going to see what I get, and then we’re going to work with that.

[00:26:05.750] – Steve

As I listen to that, I’m hearing the area you pick needs to be small enough that you can take the risk. If it’s too big, if you can’t take the risk, that’s what’s going to take you into the fake mode.

[00:26:21.790] – Ann

For sure. And I think the first time, especially as a new leader, once you’ve heard what the lived experience of teachers in the school is, one thing I was hearing first coming into my role here was around the performance management model. As you might imagine, teachers weren’t totally satisfied with that model. And so that, for me, was an easy, relatively small, but actually huge impact. But I knew that people wanted change in that area. So therefore, you take something where change is desired.

[00:27:01.230] – Steve

Well, Ann, it’s been great to reconnect with you again. I really appreciate it. You want to tell listeners best way for them to be able to follow up with you with questions and find your books. I think you got a blog that you do that’s available to them as well?

[00:27:19.250] – Ann

Yeah, I do. I have a website that I blog on. It’s called the Co-Constructed Classroom. It’s just thecoconstructedclassroom.com. I’m also active on a LinkedIn, so I can be found there. And the book, both books, in fact, can be found on Amazon.

[00:27:36.500] – Steve

Terrific. We’ll put the link to your website in the lead into the podcast. Thanks again.

[00:27:43.340] – Ann

Thank you so much, Steve. It’s great to talk to you again.

[00:27:48.460] – Steve [Outro]

Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.