How have you demonstrated leadership for learning in your own role and practice?

What impact has it had on your own learning, your colleagues, families, and students, engagement, learning and achievement?

Over the past two years, Adult Education in BC has been undergoing significant and tumultuous change. For the first time in my twenty years in AE, the Ministry of Education seems to have become aware of our existence. This has challenged the autonomy of educators in the classroom, burdened the students and the records clerks with paperwork, and taxed administration as they attempt to provide coherent leadership in a game that has unclear, unrealistic, and unhelpful rules of play. That sounds very harsh, but I will give you an example to help clarify my reasoning.

In 2010, The MOE determined that adult students would be required to provide their various boards of education with a substantive assignment worth 10% of their final mark. The assignment would be marked with clear explanation of how this assignment did or did not meet the learning outcomes of the course.

Established funding structures meant that this assignment would have to be completed and evaluated in the first two classes. Then the marked assignment was to be signed and dated by the student, copied, and kept on file for seven years by the school. This procedure would happen 5 times every school year.

As you can imagine, people were not receptive. This new policy questioned the teachers’ professionalism and threatened their autonomy. It burdened the support staff with bookkeeping. The assignment alienated students by removing their sense of ownership of their work and intimidated them by subjecting them to a heavily weighted evaluation based on course outcomes in the first days of class.

As tempers flared (mine included), I set to work on creating a meaningful, educationally sound interpretation of this policy. My first concern is always the student. Adult students are an exceptionally diverse lot, but they are all disadvantaged (Consider that all of our students are studying subjects at grade 12 or lower). How can we avoid scaring them away in the first days of the course? How can I avoid a workplace with energy spent on anger instead of education?

First, I worked on creating rubrics so students could see clearly what the course expectations were. This proved overly complicated because many of our students do not have the vocabulary to understand the language of learning outcomes. Furthermore, the teachers could not agree on whether the rubrics were correct or even necessary. I was discouraged by my attempts to resolve the issue, but I persevered.

As I continued looking for a workable solution, I took care to include my colleagues in my efforts by talking them up in the staffroom, the hallways, and the principal’s office. As I did this, I found people became a little less reactive and a little more receptive to my concerns. Eventually, when I came up with a workable solution, it was not complicated. It addressed the issue of teacher autonomy and restored student trust. By good fortune (and campaigning on the part of administration) the assignment no longer has to be kept on file, so the paperwork became less onerous. I believe my choice to share my journey and consult with my colleagues led them to be open to consider my solution. Today, almost every teacher at our school conducts substantive assignments in the same way.

I am in no way an apologist for questionable choices made by the MoE, and I was by no means officially charged with resolving the issue. Nevertheless, I feel I took a leadership role. As troublesome as this new policy was, I didn’t want to spend the next few months railing about injustice (no matter how much I love a good rant!) I took steps to return what was lost and focused on directing attention away from “how terrible” and toward “how workable”. Even though I would have preferred to spend my energy improving my practice instead of repairing it, I am proud of my work and more connected with my colleagues as a result. Most of all, I am happy that student learning needs have been addressed. My students are also my neighbours, and if they are given room to learn and achieve, it is not just my school community that is improved.