The Alberta Teachers’ Association

After spending almost 40 years as an educator in this province, I often say that the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) is the best curriculum reform and redesign that Alberta’s educational system has engaged in. I may be biased after working directly with AISI for more than 15 years, but having seen many educational innovations come and go, I still contend that AISI has been the best.

First, AISI was a collective: the educational partners worked together to build and evolve the initiative. When I travel globally and talk about how well Alberta’s educational partners worked together in this instance, others marvel—it is not their experience. Second, the entire educational system was involved. Every school jurisdiction was included and supported in creating AISI projects that were local in addressing needs and in creating and managing their projects. Third, AISI projects were theoretically grounded and research-based. AISI was serious research, and, as a university-based researcher and educator, it was noteworthy to watch teachers embrace educational research and grow as action researchers. AISI projects collected data, crunched it and generated findings and suggestions for school improvement. Books and articles were written, graduate-level research was completed, and school networks were developed to disseminate what we learned. Fourth, AISI helped us, as a province, learn more about how to create schools as places where children’s learning was centrally prized— and Alberta’s reputation as a centre of efficacious educational thinking expanded globally as AISI’s influence fertilized the entire system. Through this work, as learning-centred schools evolved and emerged, attention was placed on the kind of instructional leadership that fostered school improvement focused on student learning.

This article is about how AISI helped build student-centred, instructional leadership practices. To do this, we focused on the work of principals as school leaders. Previous research, conducted with my great friend Larry Beauchamp, had us spend a year in five highly effective elementary schools. During this year, we asked (1) What makes this school such a good place for teaching and learning? and (2) What does the principal do to support teaching and learning? The conversations that resulted from these two simple questions cemented in my mind the true fact that principals were crucial in leading instruction and managing schools. In one of those five schools, I met school principal Kurtis Hewson, whose innovative and considerate leadership had created a “family” of teachers, working together in the support of learning for both students and staff. I asked Kurtis to consider with me in the remainder of this article a principal’s view of the lessons AISI taught us about school leadership.

—Jim Parsons

These lessons include

1) The power of distributed leadership.

Schools established leadership or research cohorts in their schools to move their AISI research efforts forward, shifting traditional school improvement plans out of the principal’s office and into the hands of staff. In many schools, distributed leadership meant that teachers took control of the forward movement of their schools as they assumed leadership roles in their classrooms, grade-level teams, departments and the greater school community. In some AISI projects, research cohorts were developed where a principal assumed a supportive rather than a guiding role, sharing leadership with those closest to student learning. Teachers moved more centrally, as one teacher told us, from being only classroom teachers to becoming school teachers—where the actions and issues of the school became their shared actions and issues as well.

2) The power of sustainable focus.

In early AISI cycles, it was not unusual for districts and schools to “do” three-year projects, moving onto a new focus for the next three-year AISI cycle. In fact, designing an entirely new project was the “regulation.” However, as AISI evolved and systemic learning deepened, school improvement efforts began to stretch across multiple cycles, expanding and adding to learning from previous cycles. Schools focused on areas such as literacy, numeracy, assessment for learning and student engagement over concurrent cycles, ensuring that meaningful action research learning had time to embed in the instructional culture of school. AISI helped school leaders learn the lesson of sustaining improvement efforts, abandoning “educational fad of the day” mindsets when planning school improvement efforts.

3) The power of data-informed planning.

AISI taught school leaders how to share across school communities and more effectively bring school data to the forefront in ways that supported planning, evaluation, and ongoing improvement efforts. As AISI evolved, the most valuable information came directly from teachers, and, as a province, we came to rely less on external standardized measures to inform local school improvement decisions. Professional observations, teacher-developed rubrics and checklists, and student survey data became increasing valuable for schools, and schools came to use their own data and data collection methods to inform and guide their own effective school improvement planning.

4) The power of partnership and networking.

Schools have much to learn from each other and the outside community. Seldom, if ever, have schools, divisions and teachers worked as closely together over such a broad geography as they did during AISI—especially during AISI’s final but interrupted cycle. AISI helped us recognize the value of partnerships and networking, as schools and districts met to engage and share the findings of their action research projects. In fact, collaboration (both local and provincial) became a core guiding principle of AISI. From such positive collaborations, instructional leaders discovered the power in sharing learning within the greater educational community, and networking with schools (and others more globally) who engaged similar school improvement work. Just as classrooms should not be isolated islands within a school, we learned that schools should not remain insular in their improvement efforts. Learning from others can provide powerful insights to move learning and change forward, and dissemination of learning happening within a school can be powerful for leaders.

5) The power of replacing micro-management with collaborative engagement.

AISI taught us that instead of micromanaging teachers, principals should foster student learning by focusing on teacher professional learning. Because AISI was a school improvement process centred on action research, principals and teachers had to build collaborative research teams. As these teams became efficient, they flew in the face of the current focus on using intense teacher supervision and evaluation to improve school performance. AISI showed the irony and faulty logic of believing that more rigorous supervision improved teacher professional development, compensation, promotion and retention. AISI helped us learn that instead of principals spending more time evaluating teachers into better performance, working together within research teams to solve real school problems enhanced teachers’ professional learning and promoted shared leadership. In an educational context of sweeter carrots or bigger sticks, AISI demonstrated that teachers cared to learn and that collaborative professional learning was more logical than big rewards or strict punishments. AISI showed us that teachers learn best by collaborating with colleagues as a way to share their wisdom and insights.

6) The power of collectively understanding student learning.

AISI taught us the power of collaboration as teachers learned to work together to improve schools. For AISI, the most powerful strategy for improving teaching and learning was building collaborative cultures of collective responsibility. We learned that student learning increased when teachers participated in shared professional learning (through action research). AISI was far more than one activity; it was teacher collaboration through a system of interrelated networking engagements—both local and provincial. It helped teachers examine existing practice, programs and procedures to ensure they aligned with purpose. AISI organized teachers and principals into powerful teams who shared responsibility for student learning and worked interdependently towards achieving mutually accountable goals.

7) The power of collective responsibility.

AISI helped us learn that highly effective principals seek ways to merge collective responsibility with student needs. AISI taught us to ask the right question: “How can we all work together to improve student learning?” We learned that schools need instructional leaders who create a school culture of learning both for students and the teachers who teach them. AISI helped us learn that teacher collaboration—and we include principals with teachers in these collaborations—helps improve student learning, helps advance teacher professional practice and promotes shared leadership. AISI helped principals and teachers engage in collective decisions about what works best to help students learn. AISI helped us embrace the belief that the fundamental purpose of schools is to ensure that all students learn.

Conclusion

AISI’s power for professional learning should not be a surprise. Research supports teacher collaboration as powerful professional development (Barber and Mourshed 2009; Bryk et al  2010). As AISI schools embraced collaborative professional learning, teachers assumed collective responsibility for student learning, engaged their own professional learning and became a force for the professional learning of colleagues as they shared their knowledge, insights and findings about teaching practices—including assessment and student and teacher engagement—by critically conversing about improving learning and sustaining this improvement.

Finally, when considering the radical difference between AISI as a curriculum design with today’s current focus upon aggressive supervision and evaluation of teachers as a way to motivate positive change, Daniel Pink’s (2009) book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is informative. Pink presents compelling evidence that aggressive supervision and teacher evaluation will negatively impact the performance of knowledge workers—and teachers are knowledge workers. Similar to W. Edwards Deming (2000), who argued that leaders should focus on driving fear from their organizations because appeals to fear result in short-term thinking, foster competition and not collaboration, and are barriers to improvement, AISI shows how edifying communities of practice can be towards school improvement goals.

We know that the most significant factor in student learning is the quality of teachers (Marzano 2007). However, AISI reminded us, “leadership is second only to classroom instruction among school-related factors that contribute to what students learn at school” (Leithwood et al 2004, 3). Looking back, AISI taught us to believe that the best way to improve schools is to create spaces where teachers can work with principals to powerfully engage deep questions of teaching and learning. Instructional leaders play a critical role in organizing and promoting spaces in which collective inquiry and informed action thrive. AISI helped instructional leaders discover that fostering and sustaining collective, robust cultures of learning was a powerful way to improve their schools.

References

Barber, M, and Mourshed, M. (2009). Shaping the future: How good education systems can become great in the decade ahead. McKinsey & Company. www.mckinsey.com/locations/southeastasia/knowledge/Education_Roundtable.pdf (accessed May 26, 2014).

Bryk, A, Sebring, P, Allensworth, E, Luppescu, S, and Easton, J (2010). Organizing schools for improvement: Lessons from Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Deming, W E (2000). Out of the crisis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Leithwood, K, Louis, K S, Anderson, S, and Wahlstrom, K (2004). How leadership influences student learning. New York: The Wallace Foundation.

Marzano, R J (2007). The art and science of teaching: A comprehensive framework for effective instruction. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Pink, D (2009). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. New York: Penguin.

Dr. Jim Parsons has been a professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton for 38 years. He was the Faculty of Education’s director for the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement.

Kurtis Hewson is a teacher and a principal. He is currently seconded to the Faculty of Education at the University of Lethbridge.