review of professional and leadership development in a state education department

In 2016/17 dandolo reviewed Professional and Leadership Development (PLD) in a state education department. Portia Waller (PW) interviewed on of our directors Joe Connell (JC) about his experience on the project.

PW: First of all, can you provide a quick summary of what this project was all about?

JC: A state education department commissioned dandolo to conduct an evaluation of their Professional and Leadership Development, as something that contributes significantly to education system improvement. dandolo set out to solve how this state department could lift their state’s education system through the delivery of a world class PLD approach.

PW: Did you think this work would be important? If so, why?

JC: The evidence is really clear that the biggest in-school factor impacting student outcomes is teacher quality. We also know that teacher quality is really variable. In fact, you typically see more variation between classes in a school than you do between schools, so the problem that you need to solve is at a teacher level, rather than a school level. In terms of the levers that an education department has to influence student outcomes, Professional and Leadership Development is a really significant one. To have the opportunity to do a top to bottom review of PLD in a particular jurisdiction was a really exciting opportunity to create significant change.

PW: The framework that you used for this project broke down Professional Development by function and career stage. What informed this framework?

JC: It’s a classic dandolo conceptual framework story; we break the problem down in a way that makes it easier to understand and helps us to identify priority focus areas.

In this case we broke first broke PLD down by career stage. We used the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers for this. There’s no need to create something new when someone else – in this case AITSL – has done the hard work, and especially when the framework is so widely accepted.

Then we broke PLD down into two different functions. One was the “business as usual training” that a system is always going to need. Like supporting new graduates to transition into teaching roles, or preparing new principals. Then, what became apparent in the jurisdiction in which we were working, is that PLD has another equally important role, which is to create specific system changes. For example, PLD can be used to drive changes in the way that we look at student behaviour or teaching literacy. We reflected these two very different purposes that PLD can serve in the framework.

PW: What were some challenges you faced with this project?

JC: In some ways there was a mismatch between the scope of the project and what was really needed. One thing we know about best practice Professional Development is that most of it should be informal, unstructured and on the job. People say that about 70% of PLD should be created by informal school culture, another 20% should be in-school but formalised, and then 10% should be formalised and external. So one of the acknowledged limitations of the job was that we were focusing on something that should in theory only be 10% of PLD. But at the same time, this is the bit of PLD that’s easiest for essential department to influence, so it makes sense to focus on it.

The other thing that was really tricky for the project methodology was that delivery of Professional Development was done all over the department; there was no single source of responsibility or truth. Every part of the department we talked to was doing bits and pieces of PLD off the side of their desk, so every time we talked to someone new we would get a lot of additional information about what was happening with PLD. This informed what we ended up saying, which was that the gaps in PLD and the variability in quality are really problematic, but that these issues are symptoms of the problem rather than the diagnosis. Our diagnosis was essentially that the organisation didn’t have an effective model that could establish what Professional Development they needed and ensure a high quality of delivery.

This is a challenge we’ve seen before in education departments. Because everyone is in the business of education and learning, everyone thinks that they can run some PLD ‘off the side of their desk’. This commitment to teaching others is really healthy. But the truth is that designing and delivering PLD are distinctive and specialised skill sets.

Making this diagnosis setup for recommendations that were structural, about how PLD should be designed, and organised, as much as they were about what gaps needed filling.

PW: What was different about working for this client?

JC: This was the first piece of work we did in this particular jurisdiction. I think it was the third education department I’d worked for at the time. That total is now up to five.

Working in a new jurisdiction meant that we had to be really sensitive to context and ask a lot of questions to understand the local environment. But it’s also true that you see analogies between different jurisdictions very quickly. You start to see patterns, and there’s a valuable process where you can compare and contrast different jurisdictions. There’s never a scenario where we’ll pick up a model from one jurisdiction and say it should be applied to another. But it’s really valuable to be able to draw a little from over here and a little from there and put them together and apply them. That was something we were able to really usefully do in this project.

PW: What were you proudest of in this project?

JC: Because of way we approached the project, and because our framework cut their Professional Development in a different way, we were able to tell the client a lot of things about their organisation and their practice that they didn’t already know, and quickly. For example, we identified hundreds of PLD offerings that the department didn’t have a core view of. Sometimes giving a client a new evidence base to work from is really helpful. I was also proud that we delivered some hard truths and supported the department to make some genuine trade-offs. Any time you reorganise your organisation it’s a really hard process; choosing to do something like end funding for a scholarship program and reorient that funding somewhere else is really difficult. Often times the hardest thing to do in government is to stop something that you’re already doing, and to acknowledge that there are better things to be doing instead. That can be a hard message to deliver, but if you do it well and do it in a supportive way then it can set your client up to do some really challenging stuff.

PW: How did the client respond to these “hard truths”?

JC: They responded really well. There was almost a bit of a sense of relief; there were some people in the department that had had some hunches, but they hadn’t been able to say them out loud because they didn’t have the evidence base to do it. The other thing was that everyone agreed with the objectives we had, and was on board with the idea that we should make the most of PLD. This meant that the whole organisation embraced our findings. Even though there were some difficult changes, everyone agreed that we were moving towards a really valuable end goal.

PW: What do you think was the major impact of this project?

JC: The single biggest thing was the department set up a new professional learning academy for teachers, which was a really big deal. It’s a standalone academy that works exactly as our advice said it should. We’ve subsequently also had the privilege of working with the department on the business plan for the academy, and it’s now in place and running courses. More generally, I think our work has led to a more disciplined and strategic approach within the department towards Professional Development. There has been a real reorientation of the support that’s provided to emerging leaders and new principles in the system.