Early Career Teachers: Stories of Resilience, University of South Australia

Transcript Induction session 2 Rosie Le Cornu – University of South Australia Judy Peters – University of South Australia Rosie Le Cornu: I’m Rosie, as we said earlier, and Judy and we’re going to divide this session. I’m going to speak first and give some background and then Judy’s going to go on. We’d just like to share the logo with you for this project because it’s highly significant and the question is why are there eight white bits that someone said they look like eyelashes and there’s three, there’s a blue, yellow and red? And the first few slides should provide the answer. So I’ll just leave that with you for the moment. Okay, so what we’re going to do very quickly is provide some background but I know that you’ve had that in the executive summary but we just want to add a few bits in there as well and come to the framework and then I’ll pass over to Judy and Judy is going to look at the resource a bit more and some examples around school culture. Okay, so if I babble too fast just indicate please because, with the time. First of all we’d like to acknowledge our project team because there were seven of us involved, three universities so three universities, there’s a bit of a clue there. And I just want to say that it’s been the most exciting project that Judy and I have been involved in. It’s been lovely to cross the boundaries and borders between Western Australia and South Australia and so just in terms of our, the people involved—and I’ll let you read them rather than go over all of them, but we would like to acknowledge our whole team and Judy and I are here presenting on behalf of the whole team. Okay, and the other one, we’ve got eight stakeholders involved in the project and we would like to acknowledge them and the project, the logo was meant to represent the eight stakeholders and the three universities working together with the belief that it was like a stack of knowledge and that it would get stronger and richer through the participants and I’ll share an aspect of the methodology today which I think will explain that. What we didn’t want this research to be is yet another project of saying how hard it is for early career teachers. We knew from the literature that there was that sink or swim, or battles in the trenches, we knew all of that and we just didn’t want another project saying, Yeah, these are our findings. We also knew, what was well documented in the literature, that it was all the pre-services fault because they hadn’t prepared them adequately. If it wasn’t their fault, it was the department’s fault because they didn’t provide the proper appointments process. Or it was the schools’ fault because they didn’t provide a proper induction. They were isolating, etcetera, etcetera. So there was a lot of problems in the literature and so we just didn’t want to add to that. Also in the literature there were commonly proposed solutions and very much of the, we thought, they were quite fragmented: do this and things will get better. They were also very much on the deficits: oh, the teacher is not coping, there’s a problem here. It was a deficit model. And also early career teachers, we felt, were constructed and they were positioned as lacking agency and as being the newcomer. And also there was a failure to acknowledge the complexity of context and we know how different, in the room here all of our contexts are so different. So that was the previous work and we actually wanted to extend and we’re very grateful to the ARC for funding our project because what we proposed was that we wanted to rethink early career teaching and early career teachers around resilience, the concept of resilience. And we wanted to use that as a lens, not to get hooked on what is resilience and so on, but use it as a lens to look at the early career teacher journey in a bit of a different way. Having said that, we needed to address the notion of resilience and we know in the literature that the conventional one is a bouncing back, you’ll bounce back from adversity and that’s fine but it was very much a psychological individualist approach. And what we wanted, again, was to extend that and to have a much more inclusion of the social, economic and political forces on that. So it wasn’t a matter of you’re resilient or you’re not, again it’s the individual, it’s much more taking into account the interplay between the personal and the contextual. So that became the basis of our research and it was a very important basis that I just want to clarify. We certainly didn’t want to get into the individualistic approach of the strongest and fittest survive; we wanted it to be much more complex than that. So we planned a five year research project and we should add there, 2012 or 2013 / 2014, because we keep disseminating. We really thank AITSL for the opportunity today to come and present to you. Back in 2008 though, I have to say, that very first meeting when the seven of us got together in South Australia—the Western Australians came to us, we went over each year twice and it was just lovely—but we sat around the table not knowing each other very well and our homework had been to write a thousand word paper on resilience. How long does it have to be? We were just like students. You know, What? One thousand words? And it was really interesting because that provided a very rich conversation to embed what we were doing using that lens. So that was an exciting start. Now the other thing there was the establishment of roundtables and that’s a very important and significant part of the methodology because the seven researchers from the unis just were the researchers and provided the work in terms of the actual conducting the research, but the roundtables were a very important part. And I’d like to acknowledge Sam and Kerrie’s department and Lindsay’s department coming together and so each state, we would meet three to four times a year with our people from the departments, Catholic Ed, independent schools, the union, and we’d share what was doing, we’d talk about conflicts and tensions and we’d talk about wording because we all use language in slightly different ways too and we were trying to get some common understanding. So that was really, really important. Then in 2009 we conducted the interviews with the early career teachers. So each of the researchers had about eight or nine early career teachers that we worked with and we got to know them very well and then we’d pull them all together and they were interviewed twice and then we had interviews with the school leaders. Now in about 2010 we developed a profile of conditions—it was a draft of the one pager that you’ve got—and then we worked with schools and participants and again the hours we spent on the words, the wording of each one. Sam’s laughing because we know at one of the roundtable meetings we really got bogged down in, No, not that, use this. What about this? It was fun. It was good fun as well developing it and I think that’s a good thing. Research should be. And then we’ve developed materials and so on, and Judy is going to explain about that a bit more in a minute. The methodology, what we wanted were teachers’ stories. We didn’t want to do a quantitative approach; we really wanted to get out there because I think it was Phil was saying about the humanistic endeavour. These are people, these are our early career teachers—and I can’t just say young because they were a variety of ages but we wanted to hear their stories and so that was really important to us. And our reason for having the participants was really willingness to be involved, that was the only criteria, and we struggled a bit to get some of them because, again, we didn’t want it to be an additional workload and we were lucky again with the funding, ARC funding, because we were able to get relief time for them when they interviewed and I think that’s really important so it didn’t become an extra burden. And then the data collected and then the analysis, we actually had 171 interviews and we had 1,800 papers, copies of rich interview data that we needed to work with. And so we used the research team, we’d get together again for our lovely get-togethers for two or three days at a time. And the five key themes that emerged were the five headings that you’ve got on that one pager and so the notion of policies, teachers’ work, relationships, school culture and teacher identity. They became clear very early on. And then we used NVivo, which is a software program, for more fine grain coding of the data. Now, I just need to keep going here. The participants—just out of interest for you—for South Australia and Western Australia, you can see that we had a predominately female population and certainly in South Australia a lot were in that 20 to 24 year age group; in Western Australia they had much higher proportion of the 35 plus. A lot more primaries than secondary. Metropolitan, rural, remote, about half and half. Mainly government system and mainly contract employment. So that just gives some indication there. And here’s very just general to see where in South Australia and Western Australia. We did try and get some remote as well as rural so that we could try and see that we’re not just talking about one particular cohort. So I’m coming to this now which came about as a result of the interviews with the teachers. I should have said, when we interviewed the teachers, for the first interview we actually asked some things like what’s going well in your teaching? What are you enjoying? What are some struggles? How is it for you? That was in the first interview. In the second interview after they’d been teaching for about a year, we got them to do a line diagram and it was basically the highs and lows. And so they had a piece of paper and they did over the year and it was just fantastic because it was very pictorial evidence of what it was, and then they came back and talked about what the peak was, what the trough was and that sort of thing. So that was fantastic. With these, I think it really does again pick up that it’s a human endeavour that we’re talking about and I won’t get carried away talking about the relationships one because, for me, that’s paramount across all of them, we’re talking about relationships. And what we’re finding too is there were many lived contradictions for the early career teachers. It’s not about just saying develop relationships with kids and parents and teachers and the principal and everybody else. A lot of it was very—like with students, for example, yes, they were enthusiastic and loved their relationships but they also drained them. So there was a whole, there was that juxtaposition of positive and negative emotions. But can we just say that what we’ll argue with all of this, both in the one pager and the book, is that we believe that a substantial level of change needs to occur at many levels: cultural, structural, pedagogical and relational. So it’s not just about one approach; we’re talking about that. And we also really believe that it needs co-operation and support from governments, education systems, schools, teachers unions, universities and communities. So it’s very much that holistic approach. So I’m needing to move over and I’d like now to pass over to Judy. Thanks Judy. Judy Peters: Thanks Rosie. And perhaps just to mention, Rosie was talking about interviews with teachers but, of course, there was also an interview with a school leader in every one of the schools of the end of that first year too which contributed to this. So what I’m going to do is talk a little bit more about this resource that you’ve all got in front of you because we got to the point of having the framework and we worked very closely with our stakeholders and they were happy with this and felt that it would be useful but we’d very much also committed to developing further materials that would elaborate this framework and also provide an entree, I suppose, for work in various levels. And so that was how we came to decide that we would produce a book and mainly it’s an online resource and we have given you the website for it but our stakeholders also felt at the time that it would be useful to have hard copies to disseminate so we found that we could self‑produce them for about, I think it was $15 a copy and they kindly coughed up money and we produced quite a big print run. We’re about to do another print run apparently so if you decide you’d like some, let us know because we can produce them for about that amount but you’ve got yours gratis today. So our stakeholders were also keen that it be very accessible. They couldn’t imagine it being useful if it was a sort of heavily theoretical document, very dense, etcetera. And so we decided to use a structure where we took each of the five themes that you see on the framework and each, there’s a section of the book on each theme, and the one I’m going to particularly refer to, if you want to look at it, is over on page 40 and it’s the school culture one. And if you flick through that while I’m talking, you’ll get to see what I mean about the way we approached it. So we decided that for each of the five themes—and then under the themes we’d identified 18 specific conditions—that we would … sorry, I’ll stand over here I think … that we would elaborate them in ways we thought people would find accessible. And so for each of the conditions under a theme, we produced a story which was based on either a leader or an early career teachers’ interviews. Then there was a short commentary on the story where we tried to link some of the things that have come out of the story with some of the wider ideas in the literature. We then went on and gave a list of possible practical actions that different groups could take in order to help work with early career teachers to promote resilience. And I’m coining from the Hay Group report which I so much enjoyed reading, that whole of profession, which I hadn’t heard that term before but I think we wanted to take a whole of profession approach and so you’ll see that the practical actions actually do cover all of the possible stakeholders who work with early career teachers. We wanted to use some of the rich data and so we also included quotes from the early career teachers and school leaders to add authenticity and some of them are just quite heartrending and others are funny and interesting. We thought that it would be useful to include some quotes from the literature that supported each particular condition. A counter-list of practices that constrain resilience so we had a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of very negative stories where we could include quotes of what not to do. And finally a series of critical questions for reflection and further conversation. So having a look at that particular section on school culture—and it’s interesting that I think that’s been a central theme in all of the reading we’ve had and I’m quoting again from Hay that said, I think, It’s About Culture, was one of the headings in your report. We certainly found that. And you’ll see at the bottom of page 41 that under the school culture theme, we had actually four different conditions: promote a sense of belongingness and social connectedness; develop educative, democratic and empowering processes; provide formal and informal transition induction processes; and develop a professional learning community. And for the purposes of today, we thought that we would just focus on those last two—provide formal and informal transition induction processes; and develop a professional learning community—and just share very quickly, and it will have to be very quickly, a little bit out of that section so you just get a flavour of the kinds of things that were there. So provide informal and informal transition induction processes, this is only a little, tiny bit of the story but Aaron was a young phys ed teacher who got appointed to a school. He got given, in addition to this, a five minute tour of the school when he arrived. At the end of the tour, he’d missed where the toilets were and he didn’t know where his classroom was but that was it, and he was about to teach. He gathered the information he needed to survive by approaching anyone he could find to help and found often they were too busy or dismissed him, etcetera. He was given a mentor but because he was the only phys ed teacher in the school, they gave him a mentor from another school and unfortunately it seemed like it just never eventuated. So he really just made it on his own. So I guess that was one of the negative stories. In terms of the kinds of things we were suggesting that different groups might do—and I won’t go through them all because you can look at them and they are fairly general so we’re hoping that if people are interested they will take one of these and then say, Well, how could we do that? What would be the practical things? But obviously we do want those partnerships that help to develop and support effective mentoring. We’ve had people—Marie was talking about the fact people don’t just know how to mentor, leaders don’t and teachers don’t. They need to have training. The second one is about the fact that so many of our early career teachers were on contract or relief and they didn’t get what was offered to people who were appointed permanently. It’s a huge dilemma. What do you do with a person who turns up in the middle of the year when they’ve missed all of that that happened with the other early career teachers at the beginning of the year? And very much a focus on trying to build early career teachers’ skills in inquiry. I think we see in a lot of our Asian neighbours, who are performing so well on those league tables, a huge commitment to teacher research to the point of having a researcher in every school, etcetera, and I think that’s certainly something we’re valuing with our pre-service teachers, is those skills. As others have said, school leaders are absolutely central and they have a big job to do in terms of identifying mentors, letting early career teachers know what’s available for them, working with them to help define goals. And we found big variation: we found some leaders who were expert at doing that; and others who early career teachers actually came out of their office feeling less positive and less sure because they’d just been given negative feedback and they’d been told what to do. And one young person said, You know, I go in and she gives me all this advice but she’s never once even come into my classroom and observed me and it was really difficult. So a lot of unfortunately not good leadership practice. And of course if you’re going to have inquiry, you need the space to do it and the time. So they are the four groups we’re looking at, is firstly we’ve looked at stakeholders at the system level and uni level, then the leaders. Now colleagues, I think, was one of the big downfalls. We had so many sad stories about the way early career teachers were treated badly by their colleagues: disrespectfully, not helpful, hiding resources. One young teacher said the only way she found out about things was she stayed late at night and she used to creep around classrooms and look in drawers and look in kids’ books. That was how she actually got a bit of help with teaching her Year 3 class for the first time. So I think we’ve got a huge amount of work to do. We’re not negating that early career teachers have a role. Of course they have to be proactive too in a range of ways. Rosie Le Cornu: Judy, can I just add there too with the colleagues, they weren’t all horror stories. We did get some others as well … Judy Peters: No, [we’re about] to get good ones. Rosie Le Cornu: But also we say colleagues in the broader sense because what emerged, it wasn’t just other teaching colleagues, it was, say, SSOs but the support officers in schools. They were incredibly supportive and provided a lot of advice and help to the early career teachers and there didn’t seem to be a power or status thing there too and in lots of ways it was easier. So we’re saying colleagues in the broadest, colleagues in the school. Judy Peters: Thanks Rosie. Going on to the more positive stories, we certainly found what others have found, that in those schools where there had been a lot of work in developing a professional learning community, they were where early career teachers thrived and it was because it was a whole of staff approach to their development and everyone was learning. And this is a principal and, once again, just a little bit of her story, talking about the fact that the teachers should be showing the early career teachers that they are on a learning journey themselves, that it’s okay to make mistakes. In fact, their mantra was we love mistakes, etcetera, and that they develop this learning culture where there was a lot of time for professional conversations, teamwork, early career teachers were not alone, and collaborative approaches to most aspects of their work. So in terms of that, developing a professional learning community, once again just some of the things that the different groups can do. I think the first one for employers, unions, most of you are probably too young to remember the Innovative Links project from about 20 odd years ago but Rosie and I were involved with 18 unions working with networks of school and that was a very positive project about developing that culture in schools. More recently in SA, we’ve had the Learning to Learn project and now the Teaching for Effective Learning that did the same thing for South Australian schools, and some of those schools then appeared in our project and young teachers were really benefiting from the fact there were learning communities. I wonder how many times school leaders do highlight the importance of mistakes when they talk to early career teachers, hopefully a lot. And once again with the colleagues, there seems to at the moment not be that huge understanding from our, especially teaching colleagues, that every early career teacher is everybody’s responsibility in the school, that even if they’re given a mentor—and I think that is important because there are particular things they need, but that everyone should be stopping to say, How are you going? What can I do to help? But someone also made the point about how much pressure teachers are under and, of course, that then makes them less likely to do that. Early career teachers, the trialling and evaluating one new thing at a time was really powerful. We found that some of them would go in and they forgot every—like they’d say to me, Look, all that constructive stuff just went out the window. All we did was, the first two terms were worksheets and just whatever was easiest. But then I had one young one say to me, But what I did was I try to improve one subject each term. So I worked on English in the second term and by the end of that I was feeling that I was doing a lot more hands‑on and investigative things. And the next term, then I focused on my maths. So it didn’t all happen at once but I can’t speak strongly enough about the importance of collaborative work and I think in terms of the standards, it’s interesting to think about if a teacher doesn’t get to the proficient standard, who’s to blame, who’s responsible because it would seem that in the schools where there was a collaborative approach to planning and assessment and reporting and management, those young teachers learnt a lot more and became a lot more competent, I think, than those that were left alone. aitsl Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership Limited