Central aims for the session: (a) to support participants in understanding what constitutes educational system building and (b) how to categorise and evaluate their own leadership efforts to identify key areas of focus for continuous improvement.
Education system building is an empirically evidenced approach to educational improvement. System building involves teachers and school leaders collaborating to organise, support, and manage teaching and learning across five key domains of practice:
1. Building educational infrastructure: designing formal teaching materials (schemes of work, assessments) and establishing social resources for learning (norms, values, and relationships among students, teachers, and leaders)
2. Teacher professional learning for supporting use of infrastructure in practice: formal CPD, coaching, and opportunities for peer learning (co-planning, peer observation, lesson study, collaborative data analysis)
3. Managing environmental relationships: navigating external environmental influences (exam boards, DfE, inspection bodies, cultural and political shifts), and engaging environmental actors (universities, professional bodies, community actors)
4. Monitoring and managing performance for continuous improvement: monitoring and evaluating teaching and learning (data analysis, staff appraisal, observations of teaching and department routines, and designing mechanisms for teacher feedback), and identifying areas for continuous improvement
5. Developing and distributing academic leadership: structuring teams and roles (HODs, curriculum leads), and encouraging leadership of initiative across all staff
In reflecting on my work as a HOD in three schools, I can organise my activities into each of these domains, and identify domains where my efforts are focused in an average week. I can also compare across my different schools and see how work in each domain looked different depending on the context. This can be a useful framework for reflection to identify 'gaps' in our leadership practice.
However, this lens is most powerful for helping us coordinate improvement efforts across these domains. For example, it can help us to identify when data being collected is not being used to (re)design students’ educational experiences, or staff appraisal routines are not used to shape teacher learning initiatives and/or (re)configure informal leadership roles. A system building frame also helps leaders to conceptualise why some approaches that explicitly work across domains, like lesson study, can be incredibly powerful.
In this session, I will outline the key findings from the education system building research coming out of the US, and draw on my experience as a science leader in England to reframe this for a UK educational context, as well as provide participants with an opportunity to audit their own leadership practice, and learn from other leaders how their work looks similar/different through a system building lens.
