JOANNE

Welcome back to our podcast with Professor Helen Timperley on how school leaders respond to complex challenges. In Part two, we explored how school leaders can respond to complexity with adaptive expertise. In this segment, Professor Helen Timperley and I discuss some examples of adaptive expertise in practice. Helen, let's move to talking about examples of adaptive expertise in practice. We've talked about what adaptive expertise is and why it's important.

Let's explore some examples of what it looks like in practice. When I think about complex challenges, the first thing that comes to my mind is the way in which school leaders have led their communities through a period of intense uncertainty, such as living through a global pandemic. What can we learn from that quite unique and universal challenge about how to respond with adaptive expertise?

HELEN

Well, in these unprecedented times as they keep being called, every school leader needed to adapt through COVID; it was a shock to us all. I mean, I remember thinking ‘They aren’t serious about everyone staying home. They don’t really means that schools will be closed.’ It was actually my son working in the health sector that brought me down to reality by saying, ‘No, we can't come to visit you. Yes, you really do have to stay home.’ I ended up teaching his children online for months on end.

JOANNE

How lucky were they?

HELEN

But to bring it back to your question about what we can learn from the pandemic? I think I'd like to answer in two ways. What I see is a routine and be expertise response to the specifics of the pandemic and then have a look at a wider issue. So the first one - School leaders responded to Covid restrictions in a variety of ways – I’m just going to identify two as illustrative – not to say these two covered everyone. And to keep it manageable, I’m going to focus on teacher professional learning. Originally, expertise response was to move teaching online. We had to do that, make sure the technical aspects routine to state were a major problem and to stop existing teacher professional learning because teachers were stretched to the max.

The assumption was that teachers have overwhelming new challenges in the on-line environment and needed the time to sort out the new ways of doing things. From an educational leaders’ perspective, few had the experience or expertise to teach online themselves and felt unable to lead the new form of learning, so the response was adaptive in the sense that they reduced demands on teachers in a time of crisis. But this response didn't develop a depth of expertise for themselves or the teachers. As far as possible, they use existing routines to do new things, but many others saw the problem and more complex ways and responded with high levels of attempted routines.

JOANNE

So what was an adaptive response in your view?

HELEN

This kind of response was to embrace teacher professional learning in this new environment with renewed urgency. Some schools I was in touch with reorganised their professional learning communities according to professional need in the new environment – not according to already established groups. Some teachers needed technical basics to get connected and stay connected – they needed to learn the basics of various platforms.

Others needed to understand how on-line teaching was different from face-to-face teaching and the best ways to do this. These leaders engaged experts in the field to work with their teachers and they participated themselves, to increase their own knowledge and challenge their existing assumptions about how to do the on-line work. Others utilised their most expert teachers in the field to take a leadership role in enhancing the professional learning of their colleagues, regardless of their formal position.

These leaders were really demonstrating a depth of expertise in this new environment.

JOANNE

Yes, you consider Hiefetz model about adaptive expertise, he would argue that the challenge for leaders in this situation is to keep people in that space of disequilibrium long enough to enable new thinking and capabilities to be developed and sustained.

HELEN

Yes – these leaders understood the complexity of the challenges involved from moving from face-to-face learning to on-line learning. They worked to learn themselves and to support teacher learning about new ways of doing things. They challenged their existing assumptions about teaching and learning and developed a whole new area of expertise they didn’t know they would ever need. They used this knowledge to respond flexibly to this new challenge when there was no road map. No-one had needed to do this before.

I indicated earlier I would also talk about the wider issues in relation to the pandemic. I started this podcast with some of the student-related challenges that have been amplified by the pandemic; equity, well-being, attendance etc. I want to talk briefly about one schools’ response to the pandemic to improve teaching and learning on return to school. I’m going to ask our listeners to take the time to reflect on whether there is anything you have learned about leading, teaching and learning during the pandemic that has fundamentally changed something in your school now.

If nothing comes to mind, are you one of the schools who’ve been thinking – now we are back at school, things can return to normal, thank goodness? Or are you one of the schools that has deliberately engaged in an inquiry process and seen the pandemic as an opportunity for change in your next improvement cycle and asked, “What have we learned during the pandemic that we can use to improve teaching and learning now?”

JOANNE

You make a really powerful point there, Helen, because we often heard about this sense of, you know, let's go back to the way things were. And then we also heard comments such as, you know, what is the new normal? And I think your question here, what have we learned during the pandemic that we can use to improve teaching and learning now is a great starting point for school leaders in the environment of strong relational trust to genuinely inquire as to what's been going on in their school and what they might do as they move forward through that lens of adaptive expertise. Does that resonate with you?

HELEN

Yes, it does. And maybe if I ground it a bit in an example is one school I worked with online because again, it's a bit of a woolly idea, It was a k-12 school and the middle school teachers came to realise that the students were actually more engaged in maths when they were on-line than during face-to-face teaching.

So after a series of investigations with these students throughout the remote learning period, they had refined their online teaching to engage all students in self-paced tasks. I'm skipping over multiple enquiries about how they collected evidence and adjusted the teaching to reach all students because in the early stages, only the students in the middle were highly engaged.

JOANNE

That's really interesting.

HELEN

By the time they returned to school, they’d worked out the level of appropriate challenge for each group of students, the kind of feedback students found useful, and developed a self-management continuum where students rated themselves on their level of engagement and how many tasks they’d completed. They continued their inquiry on return to school and changed the physical layout of their classrooms to reduce distractions and allow the students to focus better because this was one of their complaints. The number of maths tasks completed was much higher than prior to the pandemic, as was maths engagement and achievement.

JOANNE

What a fantastic example that is.

HELEN

So I hope it illustrates how some schools learned from the pandemic by developing adaptive expertise across leaders and teachers and thinking about how their assumptions had been challenged, and adjusting teaching and learning in light of what they had learned. It connects with the key drivers of leading learning and leading inquiry.

JOANNE

As I've listened to you describe what that school did to create a different environment for learning for students in this example in mathematics, I'm mindful also that what school leaders are doing when they're supporting teachers to make sure significant complexity, they need to create conditions that enable this adaptive expertise to flourish. So, things like moral purpose, commitment to action, relational trust, and of course their educational leadership are essential and they are the core principles of the framework that we've developed.

As you've said, school leaders and their teams face complex challenges in their everyday work. I know that, you know, school leaders are going to be implementing curriculum changes. I'm wondering what adaptive expertise is required as they respond to the complexity of that as a challenge.

HELEN

Yes and it is a challenge and the process of implementation really has to start with students and teachers. Everyone has to ask themselves how student learning be different and how will we know? And this, of course, comes back to the moral purpose principle in the leadership learning resource. For most teacher groups I have worked with n this way, it takes some time to unpack this really important question.

How is it the same? How is it different from what students learned before? How does it fit with my current beliefs about how students learn? What can I use from my previous units of work? Do I have to start all over again?

It is essential to engage teachers’ existing beliefs and not to bypass them or teachers understandably will feel unheard with many becoming uncommitted to the deep change needed.

In the same way, students and their parents need to be involved. How do they feel about the changes? Do they understand why the changes are important? Are the previously high achieving students going to resent new ways of doing things that may mean they are no longer the stars? This has been the downfall of many attempts to introduce formative assessment practices in schools.

By starting with student learning, implementation is focused on the moral purpose, which is a key principle in the Principal Leadership Learning Resource. In engages the key drivers of leading inquiry and being highly metacognitive among others.

JOANNE

So implicit in your response is the reality that leaders need to learn alongside teachers as they grapple with this question of what students will understand differently in the new curriculum and how they will assess new forms of student learning. The How will we know question.

HELEN

Yes - because no-one has implemented the new curriculum before so no one is an expert. Hopefully, leaders will engage with teachers to unpack the curriculum documents and build their own curriculum content knowledge for a particular syllabus. The meaning of the new ways of doing things can be grounded by asking everyone to contrast student work samples from the new and old curriculum. Then they work together to figure out how their teaching will need to be different.

It is only through engaging with teachers and students and finding out the challenges involved that leaders can really lead with adaptive expertise. It is the unexpected issues that really matter and build the relational trust so essential to change processes.

Relational trust was never built on compliance.

So, leaders have a crucial role in helping teachers to unpack the deeper meaning of the new curriculum as they build new knowledge together, challenging assumptions when the temptation is to tweak what was always taught, and work through new ways of doing things. This builds a collaborative rather than compliance culture and is the essence of adaptive expertise.

The system becomes a learner too as DELs work with leaders and teachers to build their on-the-ground knowledge. Talking to students can provide insights into how they are experiencing the new curriculum. This information can then be fed up through the system to find out what’s working, what’s not and how to respond, and support.

JOANNE

So having a strong system focus will enable students to be the beneficiaries of great educational expertise. What advice would you give to leaders looking to build the capacity to identify the need for adaptive as opposed to routine expertise?

HELEN

That's a hard one. And of course, there's no one answer because leaders listening to the podcast will hear very different starting points. I guess the first question I would pose is for those listening to think about the last time they organised some kind of professional development, or introduced a new initiative, in their schools. Most of you will have started with profiles of student achievement. Let’s say it’s limited improvement in maths achievement over the last few years that concerns you. You have tried to address it before by introducing a new maths program but nothing much has changed.

A routine expertise response might involve providing teachers with more professional development in maths through a series of workshops over the next term. The underpinning assumption is the new program + new professional development will lead to improved maths achievement. Only a term can be devoted to this initiative because there are other pressing needs to attend to, such as the new initiative to address student well-being. This approach might bring an initial lift, but unfortunately, the research indicates it’s rarely sustained.

JOANNE

So, what would an adaptive expertise response look like?

HELEN

Well, an adaptive expertise response will involve unpacking with the teachers and students what they think is leading to the limited improvement and why previous efforts were unsuccessful. An important part of the process is to gather evidence with the teachers and students to test their ideas. Is it student motivation, their maths understanding, or how they feel about maths? Is it some combination of all of these things? How do teachers feel about maths and their knowledge and skills to teach it? How motivated do they feel to improve their knowledge or are they overwhelmed with other things? Was it something about the organisation of the previous efforts to improve that didn’t gel with the teachers?

I worked with one primary school in Victoria in this way. They started with the assumption that students’ poor problem-solving skills in maths was a result of their dislike of maths and so they were unmotivated. The teachers undertook a survey to test this idea and found that students loved maths. The students had no idea they were so far behind. The teachers demanded little of them and problem-solving was fun. As a result of unpacking the students’ responses, teachers came to agree that it was their own lack of confidence and knowledge of maths, particularly in problem solving, that was at the centre of the issue. Then it made sense to the teachers to engage in professional development to increase their maths content knowledge that then transferred to improve their confidence.

JOANNE

And that is a really powerful example of how important it is for school leaders to recognise the point in time of need for professional learning, because the teachers clearly responded well to the inquiry approach that they took to understanding what was going on for students.

HELEN

Yes, and the leaders gained huge respect from the teachers when they admitted it wasn’t their forte either, and joined in the professional development with the teachers. Relational trust was greatly enhanced. This school realised they couldn’t just focus on maths for a term through workshops, but rather needed much longer with in-class support for teachers to develop sufficient knowledge for them to reach a level of mastery to sustain their new ways of doing things because often we do things so fast that teachers don't get that chance to really feel confident and have mastered what they need to do.

JOANNE

Yes, I think it's always the ongoing challenge for leaders is that how do you go narrow and deep and and stop all the other noise in order to focus on what really matters for that school at that time? Helen, can you outline an example of adaptive expertise as it relates to the way school leaders think strategically?

HELEN

Yes, another aspect to developing adaptive expertise for leaders is to think systemically. These ideas come from Heifetz and colleagues at Harvard. Thinking systemically means taking the balcony view. Getting above the detail and developing a big picture view of the direction of the school. Many leaders are great at this, but Heifetz adds another element that he calls the detail of the dance floor. Do all the moves and interactions on the dance floor contribute to, or undermine, the direction of travel envisaged from the balcony. The leaders I worked with on the maths problem-solving realised that introducing a new well-being initiative would undermine the teachers’ new found knowledge and confidence in maths problem-solving. Their knowledge of the detail helped them to rethink what they needed to do from the balcony.

Knowing about the detail on the dance floor doesn’t mean micromanaging. It does mean having sufficient information to know that teachers’ involvement in maths professional development, for example, is actually improving students’ engagement in maths and their achievement. It means collecting indicators of progress at regular intervals, and making adjustments if progress isn’t being made. I mean, something as important as this can’t wait until the end of the year or the next set of external results to know if there has been impact on student learning.

The same ideas apply to implementation of the new curriculum. It means collecting evidence on a regular basis, with teachers, that provides an indication of whether implementation is leading to students developing the understandings and skills envisaged in the new curriculum. I want to reiterate that the evidence must be agreed to by the teachers and collected and interpreted together with them. They need to understand the reasons for any changes in approach.

JOANNE

You've really highlighted in these last few examples of just how complex it is for leaders to make decisions about what way they put their energies in their focus, in their school context. So, let's just return to the question of where leaders start.

HELEN

Properly keeping student learning and well-being as the touchstone for assessing the impact and worth of all school activities is probably a good place to start. It doesn’t mean neglecting teachers’ engagement and well-being. Clearly, teachers are vitally important to students. Teachers who are motivated by being included as essential players in problem solving and strategy by school leaders, are going to teach with increased enthusiasm and engagement when they see improvement in student work. However, the touchstone is always the students.

If things aren’t travelling in the right direction, then an adaptive expertise response means taking a holistic view of what’s happening, including a hard look at your own leadership and relationships. It may mean developing new ways of working that enhance students’ learning and well-being that is embedded in a collaborative professional learning culture.

JOANNE

Helen It's been a real privilege spending this time with you, talking about this fascinating topic, adaptive expertise and sharing with you your wisdom and insights into how we can support school leaders to engage with this, as they do with the complexity of leading their schools. And I think this is a good moment to also remind our leaders that on the School Leadership Institute website in the Principal Leadership Learning Resource, we do have a paper that you wrote for us where you have drawn the threads together around the key drivers for leadership effectiveness, the 4 core principles and links them to adaptive expertise.

So it's been a real privilege for us. For our listeners, you can always visit the school leadership Institute website, you can Google the School Leadership Institute, follow us on Twitter @NSWSLI, I will put together a discussion guide to help you to to use this fantastic podcast in your school setting. Thank you for listening.

JOANNE

Welcome back to our podcast with Professor Helen Timperley on how school leaders respond to complex challenges. In Part 1, we explored context and the uncertainty and unpredictability that principals face in school leadership. In this segment, we will discuss how school leaders can respond to complexity with adaptive expertise. Helen, I know the fabulous work of Byron Hafetz as he explored the notion of adaptive leadership, and he talks about the needs for leaders to understand the difference between technical complicated problems and adaptive challenges and what it means for those they lead.

You refer to the need for leaders to build adaptive expertise as well. Can you talk to us about what you mean by adaptive expertise?

HELEN

Well, if you think about the two types of challenges argued to before, complicated and complex, they require different kinds of expertise. For example, if as a leader, you challenges as complicated or technical and hot bits of language, then your job as a leader is to work out a way to deal with them. Typically, the solutions come from experience and may also be informed by research.

If you think about the two types of challenges I referred to before, complicated and complex, they require different kinds of expertise. If, as a leader, you view challenges as complicated, or technical in Heifetz’s language, then your job, as a leader, is to work out a way to deal with them. Typically, these solutions come from experience and may also be informed by research.

This kind of expertise is usually referred to as routine expertise. I don’t want to disparage the importance of routine expertise, or the knowledge that underpins it, because schools need it to run well. Without clear expectations of who should be where when, with clear job descriptions, timetables that work, together with conditions to get the hundreds of jobs done on a daily basis, schools would soon collapse into chaos. Everyone knows that well-run schools are fundamental to students receiving a good education. The different moving parts add up to a well-functioning whole. However, in our increasingly unpredictable world, routine expertise, while necessary, isn’t sufficient on its own. Much more is needed.

JOANNE

So what is needed?

HELEN

Well, as I indicated earlier, complex challenges are characterised by interactions and interdependencies. There are no simple quick ‘fixes’. Few leaders can solve them on their own, but rather require collaboration with others to analyse the causes, see things from multiple perspectives, and work out solutions that lead to outcomes that are more likely to be sustained. The Cynevin framework I referred to earlier identifies ‘probing’ as the first response to such problems. This is the same as inquiring what is going on for those involved, rather than assuming you know.

Addressing these complex challenges requires a different kind of expertise in educational leaders. This has been referred to as adaptive expertise and now has a reasonably long history in educational leadership. It’s much more than simply being adaptable – all educational leaders must be that to survive. It has a much deeper meaning with implications for leadership.

JOANNE

Absolutely. The Principal Leadership Learning Resource that the School Leadership Institute developed, it is underpinned by these deeper characteristics that are fundamental to adaptive expertise. And you've explored this resource too. What are your thoughts about how this resource has achieved this?

HELEN

Yes it is, and I’ll highlight a few of the key features of this resource to make the idea of adaptive expertise a bit more grounded. The core principles underpinning the resource of moral purpose, commitment to action, educational expertise, and relational trust are fundamental to adaptive expertise.

JOANNE

Absolutely.

HELEN

Strong moral purpose means taking a student perspective in how to meet all challenges. The question becomes, ‘In this situation, what will work best for them? Without a strong moral purpose, challenges in schools often become focused on the adults rather than the students.

Commitment to action is, of course, fundamental to strong moral purpose. This commitment means taking action in the interests of all students.

All through the history of adaptive expertise, the emphasis on deep educational knowledge has been at the forefront. Leaders need to be able to draw on knowledge from a range of sources to develop creative solutions to enduring challenges.

JOANNE

Yeah, absolutely. And what adaptive expertise is required from leaders then?

HELEN

Well, it requires leaders to apply this knowledge flexibly and responsively, rather than in routine ways, because what worked well yesterday may not work today. It also asks leaders to question the adequacy of their knowledge if problems persist and to seek new knowledge if needed. This shifts leadership development from passively engaging with new ideas, to actively seeking what they need to know to meet the needs of a particular group of students at this time.

JOANNE

And of course, all of this requires strong relational trust.

HELEN

Yes - another key principle in the framework is relational trust. This includes professional colleagues, parents, the community and students and it’s fundamental to understanding the complex causes of many educational challenges and the range of possible solutions. It’s possible to solve technical or complicated problems without relational trust. It is not possible to solve complex problems without it, because you need different perspectives to get to the real issues about what is happening.

JOANNE

Indeed. And so I'm wondering, you've also engaged with the 10 drivers for leadership effectiveness in the results that we've released. How do they connect to adaptive expertise, in your view?

HELEN

Well, I'll just touch on a few of the 10 drivers in the Principal Leadership Learning Resource by contrasting how they might look from a routine perspective, or one of adaptive expertise. I mentioned inquiry earlier as being fundamental to solving complex challenges. When I have asked school leaders about inquiry processes in their schools, the response is often about how many inquiry teams the school has, and how well the leader thinks teachers are working together. This is a routine expertise response. Rather, the questions I have in mind are, “To what extent is genuine inquiry, driven by curiosity, evident in the teams? Is it focused on what is happening for learners? Is it focused on making the connections between leadership and teaching practices, and student outcomes? When I ask, many leaders can’t really answer these questions.

JOANNE

They great questions, Helen. And I think they’re questions that could be used across multiple topics from school leaders too.

HELEN

Yes, they certainly could. And another driver in the Principal Leadership Learning Resource is community engagement. When I ask about this, I sometimes get a response about how the school has engaged their community to understand their role in advancing the school’s priorities, such as a ‘reading books at home’ initiative. This is important and can be useful but it’s a routine expertise response to getting families involved in helping students to read more. An adaptive expertise response is to ask, “How can we engage our community so they can contribute to our understanding of the issues around helping students to read more, and how can we develop a joint response together?’

JOANNE

Metacognition is another one of the drivers in the framework. How do you see that connected to the adaptive expertise work?

HELEN

Metacognition is a really slippery sort of concept that is fundamental to the depth of expertise. Since John Bransford and his colleagues have been writing about these ideas for over 20 years. Metacognition refers to understanding your own thinking and assumptions and how they impact on learning. The nearest I hear to a metacognitive response when talking to some school leaders is for them to ask questions about the effectiveness of strategies they have in place for improvement. From an adaptive expertise perspective, metacognition means leaders asking themselves, and each other, “What assumptions are we making about our leadership and how it impacts on our teachers, students and the community? What do we need to question?” These are much harder questions to answer and usually require some soul searching.

JOANNE

They sure are. They are a fabulous example of understanding metacognition in a way that isn't often talked about as well. Thank you for sharing those little gems with us as well. For our listeners, you can always visit the School Leadership Institute website. You can Google the School Leadership Institute. Follow us on Twitter @NSWSLI and we'll put together a discussion guide to help you to to use this fantastic podcast in your school setting.

Thank you for listening.

INTRO

School leaders play a vital role in providing every student in New South Wales public schools with a great education and the best start in life. They have a positive impact in classrooms and on their staff. They guide teacher development and engage their communities. Here at the School Leadership Institute, our mission is to support all NSW public school leaders by providing world class, evidence informed leadership development programs and resources.

Our School Leadership Institute Conversation series will explore the key issues and challenges of school leadership. We'll talk to experts and share their tips and experiences on leading with purpose and impact. I'm Joanne Jarvis, the director of the NSW Department of Education's School Leadership Institute. Welcome to the Leadership in Focus series.

JOANNE

Hello and welcome to episode seven of the Leadership Conversations Podcast series. I'm Joanne Jarvis and on the director of the NSW Department of Education's School Leadership Institute. Today we will be discussing how school leaders respond to the complex challenges they face in leading students, teachers and school communities to achieve the best outcomes for students. With me today is Professor Helen Timperley.

Helen is a professor emeritus at the University of Auckland and world-renowned researcher and also her extensive research experience is focused on how to promote professional and leadership learning in schools in ways that make a difference to outcomes for those students who may be underserved by the system. She's a published author with eight books and numerous research articles, and her recent leadership development is focussed on the leadership expertise.

Leaders need to embrace the complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty of a rapidly changing world in the interest of their students. Helen, it's a real privilege to have you join me today as we discuss this important topic.

HELEN

Thanks, Joanne. I really enjoyed the work I've done with you and the Institute over the last year. You've been addressing some really important issues facing school leaders and now increasingly complex education landscape, which is just full of challenges.

JOANNE

So, in the paper that you've written for the School Leadership Institute, Leading Schools with Adaptive Expertise, you say that school leadership has become a hugely complex, high stakes enterprise characterised by uncertainty and unpredictability, and that principals are finding that what worked in the past is no longer as effective as it was just a few years ago. I'm sure this resonates with our NSW principals.

So, my question is, how has this evolving context changed the way we look at complexity? And in your work with school leaders, how do you support them to understand the nature of complexity?

HELEN

Well, when education was more predictable in a more predictable world, leadership theories tended to offer certainty. If leaders learn to do certain things, such as having a strong vision for their school, or maybe a strategic plan, then their schools would be successful. Lists of Leadership Characteristics and essential tasks got longer and longer. Part of the frustration of researchers and those responsible for leadership development was that despite their best efforts, these formulae often didn't work because effective implementation, of course, is much more complex than many of these lists portray. School leaders who are actually in the job, we've always known that education leadership is highly complex and has become increasingly so. I'd like to provide some context for the rest of the podcast and spend a bit of time reflecting on how complexity has become so central to educational leadership.

JOANNE

Okay, so let's start with the complexity of meeting the needs of every student.

HELEN

Real cool Students have always had diverse needs, but these have grown exponentially in recent times, as have the expectations that schools will meet all of them, and that failing to do so seemed like failure in itself. I'll begin with equity. Recently, equity issues have come to the fore, as they should. But it used to be acceptable to focus on the top students, educate the middle, and largely put the blame on those who didn't succeed, either on their families or on limitations within the students themselves.

Now we realise that many of the students who were not well catered for by our education systems in the past are capable of high achievement as schools change how they go about educating them. However, meeting these equity expectations is not just about a few tweaks here and there, but a highly complex task that challenges many of the assumptions about how we go about things and sometimes challenge the very architecture of schooling itself.

This complexity is often not well understood by those who challenge school leaders just to meet equity expectations. This is easy. Issues around equity interplay with community cultures, home languages and identity. There is no quick fix.

JOANNE

Yes, that's absolutely right. And we could also add to this complexity the need to address the wellbeing and mental health issues experienced by many children and adolescents, couldn't we?

HELEN

Yeah. These issues have become particularly important since COVID struck. They were there prior to the pandemic that had become a major issue since previously mental health was seen to be something outside of teaching and learning in the classroom or the school environment, and usually was dealt with by employing school counsellors. It worked with students separately from the teachers in the learning environments.

For example, if a student was experiencing high levels of stress, then solutions rested with working with individual students. We now have a much more sophisticated understanding of how schools, culture, the way classrooms are organised, the interactions between leaders, teachers and students all impact on students' wellbeing. This means setting up healthy learning environments must become an integral part of leading schools.

JOANNE

So it's an incredibly complex task to be a leader of a school. And Helen, I'm wondering how would you characterise the impact of social media in terms of adding to that layer of complexity of educational leadership?

HELEN

Every leader knows that social media and I include gaming here, have had a huge impact on student engagement and ways of thinking and doing things. There's the high distraction factor that everyone acknowledges that engaging with social media and the adrenaline hits of gaming are much more fun than the hard work of deep learning. But increasingly, it appears that social media is having an impact on the legitimacy of schooling in the eyes of many students and an increasing number of parents, attendance is becoming more erratic in many communities.

Closing schools during the pandemic certainly didn't help with this issue. I mean, recently many of you know we had floods in Auckland and the schools were closed in response, and my immediate reaction was one of despair. We are once again reinforcing the message that going to schools an optional extra rather than becoming an integral part of becoming an engaged member of the community and society.

Simplistic rules that schools need to adjust to these changes and increasing uncertainties are just that - highly simplistic. All the trends I’ve referred to even before the COVID pandemic, they've been amplified and exacerbated during it and have continued post pandemic. This seems to be the new reality.

JOANNE

Well, let me turn to a question about how school leaders understand complexity and draw a few of these threads together. What's your best advice to school leaders who went directly with these complex matters?

HELEN

Well, I think one of the most important ways to do this is to recognise how things come together and interact in a particular situation and to understand how any particular aspect is impacting on others. For example, the equity issues I referred to, to give the students mental health and wellbeing, attendance and the lower social media, all interact and the interdependence needs to be recognised when developing effective responses.

JOANNE

Helen, You've talked previously about the different kinds of challenges facing school leaders requiring different kinds of responses. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more for us?

HELEN

You know, all the challenges leaders face are highly complex. I'd like to spend a bit of time differentiating between them because it's important. The responses are tailored to the kinds of challenges leaders are faced with at a particular time. This work comes from Harvard, and it's summarised in the Cynefin framework by Snowdon.

Snowdon’s work identifies simple, complicated, complex and chaotic challenges. I’ll start with the last one first because it is important to recognise it. I’ve renamed the chaotic challenge to call it a crisis. Because in the last three years school leaders have faced many crises. When it comes to the response to a crisis, you need to act. The inquiry and analysis process I’m going to elaborate later in relation to complex challenges, can come once the crisis is over.

The second kind of challenges Snowdon identifies are simple ones, and I won’t spend time on these because educational leaders face very few of them. Simple problems can be solved reasonably predictably with a known formula. Even teachers don’t deal with many simple challenges.

JOANNE

So we don't want any of the chaotic crises as you describe them. And in some ways, I think we'd like to have lots some simple ones. But the reality is that's not the case for principals. So, let's turn to complicated and complex challenges. I feel that as a former principal, that was where I spent most of my time.

HELEN

Yes, they are the bread and butter of school leaders’ lives. Complicated challenges or problems are sometimes referred to as technical challenges. They require higher order expertise than simple ones, but the causes are reasonably easy to identify and adequate solutions are known. The different parts add up to the whole, so each part can be analysed and dealt with separately. The Harvard researchers suggest that fixing a Ferrari is a complicated challenge. If it doesn’t go, an adequate diagnostic process can find the malfunctioning part, it can be taken out, replaced, and if the diagnosis is accurate the Ferrari will go. This requires high levels of expertise, but it is of a technical nature.

Most challenges faced by school leaders, however, are complex – mainly because they are dealing with people rather than things, such as cars. These challenges are characterised by interactions and interdependencies and often come together in unpredictable ways. When I talked about the challenges schools are facing with many students – their well-being, their achievement and their home lives all interact. In complex problems, people argue about causes. For example, some will say - if only the students would get off social media, they wouldn’t be so tired and would get to school on time. Others claim, if learning in school was more like gaming, the students would want to come to school. Yet others talk about the institutional biases that alienate many students, particularly from minority cultures. Complex problems are often hard to define with multiple claims about causes that inevitably lead to contested solutions.

JOANNE

So can you give us an example to illustrate what you mean about complicated and complex problems and how they are framed to shape the responses to them?

HELEN

Yes. Internationally, student attendance has become a major issue for many secondary schools, particularly since the pandemic. If this issue is thought of as a complicated problem, then it is sometimes framed as a one of getting students to school on-time, every day. It’s obvious that if they’re not at school, they’re not being educated in the subject matter valued by schools. In this scenario, employing attendance officers is a logical solution. Not surprisingly, when the Education Endowment Centre in the United Kingdom undertook a search of the research literature on the best way to address attendance, they couldn’t find any evidence that attendance officers made any difference. This solution is like treating a very complex problem as if it’s complicated.

Imagine the student who’s been attending erratically. They’re behind in their work so they feel a failure in class. Their friendships have been developed outside of school, and they may have been engaging in some high-risk antisocial behaviours which have proved much more exciting than going to school. Evading the attendance officers may well be one of these behaviours.

Rather, what appeared to work for erratic attendance was teachers, or community workers with close family and school connections, engaging directly with the family, together with mentoring and coaching developed individually for each student to catch them up academically, and re-engage them socially. This is much more complex that employing someone whose responsibility stops at getting these students to school, and then leaves the teachers to cater for these very challenging students as best as they can.

JOANNE

You've really highlighted the notion of having a really differentiated approach as being the core issues of complexity. In that particular example, I think it also shows how most of the challenges educational leaders face today are highly complex.

HELEN

Yes, most of them are dominated by these interactions and interdependencies, students, their peers, the teachers, the families, the school as an organisation, and of course the messaging on social media. We're going to challenge horizons, focusing on just one aspect fails to take into account the ripple effects across many others that need to be understood much more holistically.

If an appropriate response is to be developed. Dealing with each aspect separately from others, often leads to short term fixes that exacerbate another related challenge that then pops up, with a vicious cycle of another fix, creating another problem, and so on.

While we’re all tempted with the faster and simpler solutions when we frame problems as complicated, if we want to develop sustainable solutions, we have to embrace their complexity.

JOANNE

So what does this mean?

HELEN

Well, it means living with much greater uncertainty, which, at times, feels really uncomfortable. Uncertainty often makes us feel vulnerable – that we don’t have all the answers. Usually we need to involve others to help us inquire into what’s really going on, and sometimes come up with solutions we haven’t even thought of before.

JOANNE

It reminds me of, say, the one of our mindsets in the School Leadership Institute being curious. For our listeners, you can always visit the School Leadership Institute website. You can Google the School Leadership Institute. Follow us on Twitter @NSWSLI and we'll put together a discussion guide to help you to use this fantastic podcast in your school setting.

Thank you for listening.