Jan 30, 2024
We’ve had two weeks to digest the 2023 NSC results and to look beyond the self-congratulatory political electioneering and the media hype. I fully realise that the cohort in question was most seriously affected by the pandemic, but having a lifetime of Grade 12 experience, I know that the learners would not have been disadvantaged by Umalusi. In truth, many subjects’ marks had to be adjusted downwards with the school-based assessment advantage lost in umpteen cases because it fell outside the final exam performance parameters.
Firstly, let me share a personal response. As a coach, in the last five years, I have worked closely with nine principals in underserved high schools. If I were a politician, I would be very happy with four of them because they have remained stable around a 90% pass rate. As a coach, though, I would have liked to have seen better progress in key areas. But, the other five, although stable, remain fragile and deeply disappointing, despite dedicated leadership and committed teachers.
The purpose of a school is to prepare learners to become good citizens with the knowledge, skills and attitude necessary to live independent, free and fulfilling lives. In the communities I serve we are way off the mark.
My previous province, the Free State, was placed No1 with an 89,3% pass rate but it has the lowest throughput rate. Only 54,9 of Grade 10s in 2021 passed matric in 2023. In comparison, the Western Cape had a pass rate of 81,54% but a throughput rate of 69,3%. In Limpopo the Grade 10 repetition rate in 2022 was 35%. These are stats provided by highly rated, Prof Servaas van der Berg of the University of Stellenbosch’s Research on Socioeconomic Policy Unit and quoted by Tamara Khan in Business Day, 29/01/24. He describes our education system as ‘abysmally inefficient’.
Prof Jonathan Jansen, whom I know well and rate, is a thorn in the side of the system because he talks truth to power. Although written off by many as super-critical and unconventional, he has worked tirelessly to research schools that work and to provide hundreds of pages of regular, practical and inspirational professional advice to principals, teachers and learners. To my mind, he asks the right questions (Daily Dispatch, 25/1/24).
Which 80% do you choose as the better indicator of the health of the SA school system? The 82,9% NSC pass rate or the internationally benchmarked study that showed that 81% of Grade 4s cannot read for meaning in any language? Surely that is the right question.
In the same time I have coached 17 primary school principals in the Cape Town metro. I have absolutely no doubt that that is where the solution lies. We need serious teacher upgrading in ECD and in Foundation Phase and a strong focus on resources at those levels. We need principals and school leadership teams who are skilled in the teaching technologies of FP literacy and numeracy. But, more than anything, we need the political and the professional will and the emphasis on competence and accountability to get our teachers to guide 100% of learners to reading and writing fluency before they start Grade 4.
As principals we can’t wait for the right context or for the system to upgrade teachers and teaching. We are the key deliverers of the system. A school’s professional development programme should focus unequivocally on helping every FP teacher to meet the teaching milestones of every term. This involves high quality leadership, genuine collaboration and sincere commitment.
Principals, you’ve had that one-page NSC Summary Report on your desk. It’s a clear window into your school’s academic standard and its major educational strengths and weaknesses.
Use your systemic thinking training to understand the contextual factors underpinning the extensive detail that accompanies the learners’ individual result advice information. Have your teams studied this page? Have you compared your school with your statistical neighbours?
Even your current Grade 12 learners have much to learn from the detail being shared with them in a positive and proactive way.
If you are a primary school principal, you are awaiting your systemic results. They, too, provide a credible and relevant benchmark for evaluating your functionality as a school. You, too, have all the detail and the chance to compare your systemics with your Grade 3 and Grade 6 November internal assessment.
We all trust our medical professionals to study our blood tests, sonars and scans with pinpoint accuracy and expertise so that a pathway to recovery and health can be determined. We owe our teachers and our learners the same professionalism.
Til next time.
Paul
Coach/Mentor
The Principals Academy Trust
No: 02/24
30 January 2024
Jan 10, 2024
This is my fourth day-one letter to principals who are tasked with bringing a school, its staff and learners back to life. My purpose is to list a few issues which help to shine a bright light on the leadership of instruction. Links to last year’s first letter – very similar – is provided below for one simple reason. The Principal should take the lead by being as prepared as possible, and publicly so, to indicate to your team that re-starting the school should be similar in detail, hype, urgency and teamwork to the opening of a big new supermarket or to the build-up at the start of the first Grand Prix of the season.
When any sports team has a tough day, the losing captain, in the post-match interview, says that there are a few positives to take out of the team’s performance. The winning captain is full of praise for both teams, but, you can be sure that coaches will spend hours on those positives. Take the positives out of 2023 – even ask your teachers to carefully write down one positive – and make a set of positives for 2024. What about a few positives for each classroom?
The word positive means good. It’s the opposite of negative. Making a positive start is all about attitude – that one word that sets a school, a classroom, a teacher or a student apart.
By the time your first staff meeting starts, the principal is in ‘back to my best’ mode. You’ve got rid of the cobwebs in your head, the fear in your gut and the holiday slowness in your step. The teachers are back. You have a key role. No, it’s not to lead them into battle like Napoleon, but to provide that calming presence that is the hallmark of a good principal. The teachers are in recharge mode and your calm, confident and positive attitude serves to bring out the best in your team and to ensure a high-performance level from day one.
Have you given sufficient emphasis to what you expect from those tasked to mentor brand-new and relatively new teachers? Not show them how to get a worksheet photocopied? No, rather to walk them through the year; to help them find the positives each week, to guide their classroom management, their teaching strategies and to hone their attitude.
If I were leading a school next week my focus would be on text. Not text as in textbook, but text that the learners craft and draft every single day in every single subject. That diary entry or short three sentence lesson summary or expression of opinion. I would make text a topic for daily discussion among teachers in the foundation and intersen phases. It would be monitored weekly.
A solid piece of new year advice for teachers is ‘Don’t do it Alone’. Having a professional relationship with another teacher in your grade, phase or subject is a commitment to a joint growth mindset. Learners are far better off when teachers work in teams.
A good way to start the year is to stress that it’s all systems go – ensuring everyone understands the complete range of behind-the-scenes processes that distribute leadership throughout the school. Talk them through the organogram and spell out the detail from GrR to Gr12.
Now’s the time to commit to a joint interpretation of 2024’s number one word – ACCOUNTABILITY. A teacher takes personal and professional accountability for assessing where the learners are in terms of mastery and commits to taking them to a particularly designated level. This journey is undertaken as a team and teachers should be able to identify the issues and individuals which make accountability such an imperative.
A new year offers teachers the chance to up aspects of their game especially their classroom presence, their range of teaching skills and their effectiveness. That first lesson, the planning it clearly shows and the use of every minute sets a standard with a class. Any experienced and competent teacher knows that a teaching climate with a particular class is unique and dependent on many factors which need to be actively managed. Principals have a role to play in making the school teaching-ready for teachers and learners.
Restarting a school from Monday requires the WHOLE team – that’s every single teacher. The staffroom should be totally free of staff chatters. Everyone should be out there – everywhere – setting the tone for a busy year.
Til next time.
Paul
Coach/Mentor
The Principals Academy Trust
No: 01/24
11 January 2024
Jan 10, 2024
Flight 2023 – very much a joint operation – is ready for take-off. Just like your staffroom on Monday, everyone is involved, with timetables, detailed year plan, updated organogram, job descriptions, class lists and textbook procedures all at hand. Very few schools have all this and key policies in place in time for day one, but then, few schools, like the airline calling Flight 2023, can boast full functionality. Actually, there should be no excuses. By the way, if you have everything in place, just know that you are doing your community and your country proud.
On holiday, there comes a time in a principal’s mind when the festivity and the recharging end. The light turns to green; it’s time to press reset; and the New Year becomes the new School year. That switch happened about ten days ago. When you walk in on your day one, you bring with you that principal spark which lights a school’s energy, the excitement knowing that the campus will soon burst into life and promise, and the confidence provided by quality teamwork and detailed preparation.
From the first moment, you focus on the relationships on which your school depends. Greet with sincerity, show genuine interest, connect enthusiastically with your team and your teachers in common purpose, in joint ownership and in the best interests of your school and its precious learners. Stress that you will face challenges and do the hard things that make good schools great, together.
As the school’s leadership team, your job is to set the tone for the year, essentially by setting the example. Your body language, punctuality, preparedness and even your attire should send a powerful message. Commit to choosing enthusiasm daily. A positive staff mindset will improve efficiency and productivity. How your staff sees you, as a team, matters. Take care of the people in your smaller teams and strive to provide the climate to all to be the best they can be in 2023.
Mark Heywood, the South African human rights and social justice campaigner, in a new year column entitled ‘In 2023, unleash your inner Imtiaz Sooliman’, wrote that transformation and activism are most impactful and enduring when they are addressing tangible issues and start in your own back yard and ripple outwards.
Douglas Abrams goes further by saying that our ability to be generous influences our lasting well-being. He claims that there is ‘strong and compelling research that shows that we come factory equipped for cooperation, compassion and generosity’. Imagine a school’s staff bringing such a commitment to 2023.
I can’t help thinking that, as a teacher, our own back yard is our classroom. Julian Hewitt, CEO of the Jakes Gerwel Fellowship, identifies the classroom as a vehicle of change. Make the classroom the focus of your team’s effort in 2023. There’s no more tangible issue than transforming teaching in every classroom in your school.
A UK teen newspaper, The Week Jnr, chose resilience as its word of 2022. Resilience is the ability to recover from difficulties and setbacks. At its heart is a Latin word ‘resiliens’ which means ‘leaping back’ because something which is resilient will spring back into shape and recover. Teach your school what resilience means and lead the leaping. Big steps. Small wins.
As always at this time, I remind you, that a new year is a great opportunity for teachers, irrespective of their experience, to up their game. A new intake, class or group means a teacher can start over and implement more effective classroom management and teaching techniques which can be entrenched within weeks. They should know exactly what they want to improve and how they will tackle and tweak that improvement. This applies to both better classroom discipline and improved methodology.
Your Gr7s or Gr12s of 2022 are history. You have a new school community. That newness screams opportunity. Harness it to the full. Forge better routines, improved school discipline and a strong school spirit. Do it together.
Fasten your seatbelts.
Til next time.
Paul
Coach/Mentor
The Principals Academy Trust
No: 01/23
12 January 2023
Dec 7, 2023
This is letter number 19 for 2023 – that’s 114 letters since Keeping in Touch in Tough Times was born as the pandemic started. If you’ve missed a few this year because you were otherwise occupied, find them in your inbox and do some holiday reading. Here are the headings to help you find the one for you.
- RICA Values – Easily Memorable for Maximum Impact
- Lessons from the Springbok Team to the Staff Team
- Do You Remember that Advert?
- Classroom Management and the Institutional Three Rs
- Passion – The Driving Force in School and in Life
- Schools are becoming Harder to Run
- The Principal – the Key Driver of a Learning Climate
- Staff Absence – a Principal’s Perspective
- Is Flight 03/2023 Ready for Take-Off?
- Connection: the Heart of the Matter
- Professionalism and the Principal
- Is your school in ‘silent revolution’ or in ‘silent crisis’?
- William’s Dream Job – Deputy Principal
- You Missed Something Special
- A Teacher’s Journey to Leadership
- Leaving Leeuwenhof Humbled and Inspired
- Time to Renew and something New
- Flight 2023 is Ready for Take-Off
Recently, I attended the final five group presentations of our graduating principals at UCT’s GSB. The group topics were:
- ‘Induction Program for Novice Teachers’
- ‘How to encourage and increase teacher involvement in staff development programs that empower them’
- ‘Identifying, addressing and improving Staff Wellness’
- ‘Substance Abuse in a School of Skills’
- ‘Improving Classroom Management’
I liked the balance between topics stressing both what happens within each teacher’s classroom and the behaviour and culture beyond the classroom.
Always good to see principals working together to solve very relevant challenges. Some projects focus on one school like the Agulhas School of Skills, but in the process, provide insight and advice to all schools which, inevitably, will be affected in ways big and small. It was pleasing to see the effective use of easily obtainable data. A good example was the correlation between attendance, especially bunking, and substance abuse; and how bunking dropped dramatically on a Wednesday which included the weekly sports sessions.
Another project compared two primary schools by looking at classroom management and its big cousin, school discipline, at a large rural school, De Heide in Bredasdorp and a small, community-driven urban school, Blossom Street Primary in Silvertown.
Putting principals’ minds together to implement the systemic thinking skills they have learned takes the craft of principalship to an advanced level.
Use the same GSB skills to get your own school community to research and investigate issues identified in your 2023 reflection. That in-depth reflection is vital to school improvement. I’m sure these paragraphs bring back GSB and Dr Elanca Shelley memories!
The last days of the year should be a time of gratitude.
No matter how tough a year it has been, there are people who have shared our journey with all its twists and turns, milestones and wins, big and small.
Take the time to write a handwritten note (it says thank you many times over) and be specific about what you appreciate. ‘Thank you for being so willing to help at the busiest of times’ or ‘Thank you for the welcoming smile you so easily share’.
When you greet your staff finally next week tell them exactly what it is you are grateful for, what it is that makes your staffroom a precious place, and what it is you are looking forward to in 2024. Your carefully constructed words and list of things you appreciate will deepen their sense of connection, belonging and self-worth.
Gratitude takes time and sincerity to express.
Giving thanks – properly – is part of the privilege of being a principal.
That’s it for 2023. Rest, Reflect and Recharge and Return Ready for 2024.
Til next time.
Paul
Coach/Mentor: The Principals Academy Trust
No: 19/23
06 December 2023
Nov 22, 2023
As a principal I tried, with stakeholders, to develop a list of values to reflect what we were about as a school. However, over the years, we added and refined the list in line with the policies, programmes and projects we developed. At last count, our values – beautifully represented on all stairwell steps up to the first floor – included: integrity, excellence, expectation, can-do-attitude, opportunity, innovation, individuality, joy, questioning, service, style, camaraderie, respect and diversity. I can do a whole workshop about these fourteen values, explaining each one and giving many examples.
However, this list is more about a proud principal looking back than a 2024 school community looking ahead. School values should be specific enough to guide staff and students to model and shape school behaviour and professionalism. They should be easily memorable for maximum impact.
The WCED has adopted six core values to bolster its vision. You see them everywhere. Even on my morning coffee cup! What values have you, as a school, literally made your own to the extent that your learners bring them to life in the way they behave within and beyond the classroom and into their dreams and ambitions?
What got me thinking about values was my colleague, Sue Redelinghuys, sharing her old school’s values at a planning workshop and she dubbed them RICA values. Now, that, even I can remember and bring to mind every day.
RICA stands for RESPECT, INTEGRITY, COMPASSION and ACCOUNTABILITY. It may not encompass my fourteen, but it provides the basis for decent living and that includes leading, teaching and learning.
Values matter. Even just spending some time thinking about what matters to you personally or what matters to you as a school is an important and valuable exercise. The schools I visit often have values painted in bright colours in prominent places. In some school foyers, the value of the month is clearly displayed, but, too often, it’s the February value and it’s November.
The thing about values is that they have to be lived and that means striving, trying and re-trying every day. For values to matter in school they have to be modelled by committed leaders and professional teachers. They don’t become school values unless they’re seen and felt and entrenched in every classroom and learning setting. You’ll find them in schools that work despite their disadvantage because they are made to matter by driven teams who teach with energy, enthusiasm and hope.
RICA helps to keep it simple.
By now you might know that RESPECT is one of my favourite words in education. Respect for self is your personal morality and work-ethic, your self-discipline, your decision-making; respect for others is the dignity, the courtesy and the sincerity which define your personal and professional relationships.
INTEGRITY means principal, teachers and learners acting in a way that is honest, that is ethical, that is true to oneself, under any circumstances, even when no one is watching.
COMPASSION, in a school sense means creating a culture in which kindness is valued and practised. As teachers we know that a smile, a kind word or a compliment can be very motivational. But, in our socio-economic South African reality, compassion requires us to be genuinely concerned about others and their needs.
ACCOUNTABILITY is the crucial one in our schools – willingly accepting the responsibility to teach, teach and teach with substance and skill in a way which, in turn, gives learners the best chance of rising above their circumstances.
The point is that a school has the chance to define its culture. Good principals actually set the tone for how teachers feel in a staffroom. They don’t just read the notices for the day, they create a climate by greeting with sincerity, by taking an interest in their teachers’ lives, their teaching and their activities, by giving their teachers a voice in the school and by doing so with insight and personality.
If I think of the leaders in my last school management team, I can put particular values to each of the faces around the table. They all knew my core values, too. Together we committed to and worked towards a shared vision and, importantly, to protecting and ensuring its consistency, week after week.
When you reflect on something as positive and as powerful as your school’s values, you are taking real ownership of what you have and what you want. And, together, you are shaping the future.
Til next time.
Paul
Coach/Mentor: The Principals Academy Trust
No: 18/23
22 November 2023
