The Classify Education Newsletter #8

Andrew Wilkinson
December 01, 2024

Welcome to the eighth edition of The Classify Education Newsletter. It’s been a busy academic year so far with a lot of competing priorities, so I must apologise for missing last month’s newsletter drop….but we are back!

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Classify updates

Phase 1 of Classify is now live in partner schools. Phase 1 is focused mainly around the teacher use case and providing them with actionable insights. Leaderships dashboard will be following in the next month.
Episode #16 of The Learning Curve School Leadership Podcast is live and I was fortunate enough to speak to Been Cooper GEMS Wellington Al Khalil. We also have another episode going live very soon with the wonderful Bruce Robertson. You can find those episodes here.
I was very privileged to attend and speak at the Abu Dhabi SUM-IT event at Raha International School - Gardens Campus ran by Alta Education.

Leadership reflection

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Key idea: Schools are complex places where links between inputs and outputs are often messy and inconclusive.

Stuart Lock and Tom Bennett

Reflection: In one of the first podcast episodes I ever did, I spoke to the very thoughtful Nick Hart of Horizon British School Dubai where he introduced me to the idea of schools being complex environments. Since then, I have not been able to stop thinking about it and it has truly changed my thinking.

At it’s core complex environments, such as schools, are unpredictable and there is not always predictable cause & effect, input to output relationships. The nature of complex environments means that it is often difficult to even predict influencing factors which presents a great challenge to leadership.

So, how can we navigate the complex school environment? In my recent reading, The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking by Michael Watkins, he proposes the use of systems design thinking: ‘Well-designed systems are adaptive. They recognise emerging threats (and opportunities) and adapt accordingly.' (Watkins: 2024). It is therefore important to capture the main essence/issue that a system concerns itself with but also in trying to make that system adaptive and responsive. Watkins proposes 4 elements that a system needs to make it adaptive:

Threat detection: recognising and prioritising responses to emerging threats.
Crisis management: diagnosing and responding to crisis-generating surprises.
Post-crisis learning: reflecting on crises and disseminating the learnings to avoid unnecessary future problems.
Problem prevention: mobilising resources and taking action to avoid the impacts of threats that you can recognise and prioritise.

These elements help to identify emerging threats and ultimately learn from them and add a domain of knowledge in the web of school complexity that can be useful in the future.

An example may be to look at ‘book moderations’ as part of a quality assurance system. There are many reasons why a book may fall short of a required standard, lots of variables and not all are predictable. An adaptive system could be built around this using the elements mentioned above:

Threat detection: Leader looks at books with teacher and discusses. If a book is not at the required standard. Be curious, an inquire with the teacher.
Crisis management: Identify the most likely cause/cause(s) and create a plan/actions with the teacher to support moving forward.
Post-crisis learning: Meet with the teacher after a defined period of time to revaluate the books in question. Evaluate impact and share practice with wider teaching team.
Problem prevention: Build knowledge base of issues that could impact quality of books to use as reference point in meetings with teachers. Make knowledge base available to all, at all times so they can self-diagnose issues. Carry out PD linked to knowledge base in order to set expectations.

This is just a quick example but over time this approach could be incredibly powerful to building and sharing best practices and avoiding issues and threats before they arise.

The data drop

Data from Teacher Tapp

Performance management is another area that has intrigued me over the past 12 months and this data from Teacher Tapp really shows a positive trend in the number of performance management targets linked to academic outcomes. As mentioned above, schools are complex and the world of academic achievement is naturally incredibly complex so the idea that a teacher performance and particularly pay should be linked it is not productive.

In a blog I earlier this year (see here), I outlined the idea for performance development vs performance management (see diagram below) in which the focus is more on the process of teacher improving their practice than having outcomes linked targets. The idea naturally is that improved practice = improved outcomes.

Teaching & learning tip

Visual Instruction Plans

At the Abu Dhabi SUM-IT event at Raha International School - Gardens Campus I attended a workshop by the excellent Jake Cowling focused on Visual Instruction Plans (VIPs).

Jake outlined an approach which made a lot of sense and one that I feel could be particularly beneficial when modelling to EAL students.

A VIP (see below) is modelled left to right with repeated steps and gestures which through repetition and recall supports in reducing cognitive load for students. A VIP also makes it easy to identify which step of a modelled examples students may be struggling with.

Source: Brad Nguyen from Jake Cowling

Jake also shared a great video by Fred Jones (see below) which is a really clear and effective example which shows just how powerful this type of modelling could be.

If you want to learn more about VIPs, I would recommend contacting Jake on LinkedIn where you can find the presentation slides and more of Jake’s great work.

Five things we enjoyed this month

Learn more about Classify

Thank you as always for taking the time to read this month’s edition of The Classify Education Newsletter. It is genuinely a pleasure putting it together and sharing with passionate educators.

As always, if you have any feedback on anything we do…give me a shout and let me know. I want this newsletter to be a valuable resource and I would love to know if people wanted something specific.

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