How to Make Change Feel Safe | A Conversation with Paul Halford

So you've just created a brilliant school improvement plan and it hits the staff room But one of your senior teachers is really worried about their mother's care at the minute and you know that new graduate You've just taken on well They feel like a total imposter and that learning support teacher sat to your right They didn't sleep last night because the child had a whooping cough This is a normal staff room and today we're exploring why change is always a subjective experience And what you can do about it Hey everyone, I'm Shane Leaning Welcome to education leaders the chat topping leadership podcast for school leaders just like you as an organizational coach I've helped thousands of leaders across the world lead with greater confidence Make better decisions and create winning teams and it's on this show that we explore some strategies That are going to help you achieve your goals and transform your leadership This episode is supported by the International curriculum Association stay tuned to learn more My guest today is Paul Halford Paul is a really experienced education leader. He's worked all over the world really He was twice nominated He was twice nominated for Australia's National Excellence Award and he's led schools in remote Australian communities to places even in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Malaysia He has a book out this year called my educated life Lessons from leading schools and this spans some of the lessons that he's learned over his career. It's a cracking little book I really recommend you get it and We explore a few of the ideas from that book today. I think you're gonna really love Paul and his ideas So let's jump straight in So I think that there's two Aspects to the subjective experience in realizing a change in a school I'll do the first one and then I'll come to the second one So what is this subjective experience?

Well, it's actually the emotional reaction that people will have to a situation and in this case It's a suggested change and it might be frustration. It might be anger. It might be excitement It might be trepidation and they're all things that are reactions to change that people experience Because change isn't always welcome but change is necessary if we're going to reimagine our schools and If you're going to reimagine a school, I'd suggest you need to have a plan behind it You could try it to do it ad hoc but my preference will always be to have a very clear plan a strategic plan or Some sort of priority area planning and they're usually driven by evidence. There's some objectivity behind it and If you are authoring that program you would see it as logical you would see it as rational you would see it as factual and Probably ambitious as well and it's very likely that you will present that priority plan to your staff Often in the first week of school going back when it's usually professional development time Some schools it's a week some schools It's two or three days But that would seem to be a pretty good time to present this new plan that you've got for the school And so your rational objective logical plan hits the staff room and you present it to them and You've likely invested a lot in it It hits that staff room Your senior teacher is actually really worried about the home care for her mother Your first year out teacher who's just looking to start her career Well, she spent two weeks getting ready for this and still feels like an imposter Your learning support teacher didn't get any sleep last night because her child has got whooping cough And your grade three teacher is mentally recalculating her mortgage payments Because she's looking at a divorce That's the kind of background that sometimes Your fabulous plan will land in and I think you need to be aware of this possibility because it's likely that it's going to invoke a Subjective reaction which will include things like frustration anger skepticism Trepidation and maybe some excitement and maybe some enthusiasm But even for people who aren't facing pronounced difficulties in their background It can still be something that unnerves them because they're thinking extra work They're thinking I should actually be in my classroom getting my lessons ready for next week So these are the kind of reactions that can happen And it can make you feel as the author of the program as if your program is not being accepted isn't being Taken seriously is being rejected and that in its turn can trigger your own subjective experience That your staff are really not coming along on board with you. So I think you've got to be very careful about

Unveiling a plan and particularly about the timing of it because I actually think that first week is not a good time to do it Because people are so focused on The more pressing issue of come Monday when I've got 2830 children in front of me. Yeah, so I think you've got to be really careful about that the second subjective experience is let's say you've got your plan working and You've begun implementation and implementation is going to require the teachers to change in some way and There is a thing called the implementation dip So that when you first try to take on a new skill or apply a new pedagogy More than likely what you experience is a dip in your performance Because it's new to you You're going to move out of the surety that you had and the agreement with other people that you had about how we do things into an area which has jeopardy and That jeopardy can become again frustration can make you feel like you've lost competence self-esteem can even be affected and it can even create resentment and One of the dangers of it is a retreat from the change Because we don't have any surety about what we're doing and we don't have any shared agreement about what we're doing So we back off to what we do know we have surety about and what we do have agreement I'm very influenced by Michael fullen and the new meaning of educational change and fullen Consistently says most change fails Yes, and it fails for this reason that the managers don't understand this of subjective experience of people So that's the second aspect of it when I was 11 or 12 years of age I was a fanatical football player playing in a team which had a very good coach and At one point he asked me to start to learn to kick the ball with the outside of my foot I could kick the ball with the inside of my foot. I could kick it with my instep I was very good at that, but he wanted me to learn this particular kick, which is difficult to pull off and I found it very difficult to do and I began to say well No, I'll stick with my inside and my instep I really don't need this new kick that you're wanting me to do because I found it frustrating But I was very lucky because my coach had a set of skills That allowed me to vent this frustration He had high levels of trust. We trusted him. He was our coach

He had a good relationship. He was a good communicator He told us exactly what we had to do and he got us to talk about our experience of it We had a shared purpose, which was winning games He didn't blame us when things went wrong, but he expected us to take responsibility And those are key things in getting a change Actually getting traction and achieving itself because as fullon says most of the attempts fail. I love that analogy This is really interesting that we've gone straight into Perception and it's funny when I first heard you talk about Subjective experience I can imagine a lot of leaders going but but change know it it's a thing you go through right? And I like how you framed it at first as when we go into change We're quite sure of ourselves because we've thought about it a lot and we've rationalized it So for us it makes all the sense in the world and then it can really knock us and it's really nice to hear You talk about all those ways that it can knock us as leaders and how we change I know I was listening to you the whole time going. Yep. I've done that. Yes

I know that and i'm sure many leaders are feeling the same so in terms of those Doing something about it your analogy of football and kicking with the outside of your foot is really interesting. You said The coach was great because he allowed you to vent you had good trust and relations There was a good communication between you. He listened to your experience and there was strong almost psychological safety in working together so Translate that a little bit to me from your experiences to working in that change where rolling out in a school Well, I think it's all still the same principles that okay, so it could be a new approach to teaching reading There are often changes in reading at the moment It's moving back towards direct instruction and phonics in australia, which is the one market that I know best And for some teachers who are whole language teachers That's a major challenge to make that and they're going to face a lot of jeopardy in that And they need to have the opportunity and the safety to be able to say to the people who are asking them to change The difficulties that they're experiencing in that And as you put it a safe space in which they can talk about it so Seeing change as a collaborative process Is a really important step that leaders need to make rather than I've made the plan and expecting high fidelity to the plan To allow that the plan can be pushed around to allow that people can express dissatisfaction And dissent and that's part of the collaborative process It should be collaborative in planning, but it definitely needs to be collaborative in the implementation one thing you've mentioned paul is about Maintaining legitimacy and driving change forward and the difference between the two i'm really interested to hear A little more like what do you mean when you talk about that difference and how might leaders use that? Well, I think the idea of a school being legitimate is really interesting So How do you achieve legitimacy? How does your school get seen as credible?

If you're a startup school seen a a startup school way back in 1994 And it was literally an open field which had an administration building in a classroom And it had two demountable classrooms and it had 50 students to start today It's a massive complex. It's got 1,200 students It's got swimming pools. It's got gymnasiums I mean, it's a huge success story but it started in a big field of 40 hectares And a building and a couple of demountables And they were hoping that parents would come and sign up What was necessary for that was that they would appear to be legitimate. They would appear to be Meeting the expectations that people have of what a school looks like what a school sounds like what a school does That's called the isomorphic process where you adopt the industry norms So that you appear legitimate and it happens in every business Most real estate agents you walk into to ask to sell your house look exactly the same And they sound exactly the same. They even smell the same nice because they like you to feel relaxed

So industry norms get adopted so that you get legitimacy If you decide to move away from those legitimacies those expectations You do start to run the risk of people saying but that's not what we do in schools Two of the best examples that I can offer to you would be Summerhill which was founded in the early 1950s by a guy called a s neil and a more contemporary one is called think global Which is an extraordinary school setup. It relocates to a different country each term So this year it's got four terms and four different countries. So it's literally a school with no fixed abode Now that's really moving out of the legitimacy accreditation process Yeah, but summerhill is even more interesting because summerhill was set up by as neil And it was termed a free school. It was a boarding school And neil said lessons aren't compulsory Student behavior would be managed by the students And he was threatened with closure Because government agencies came and said this isn't what schools do You're so far away from what the school should be doing He survived but the important point Is that what neil was doing when he was pushing up against that legitimacy boundary is now common practice today So just about every website I look at Talks about well-being of students talks about students achieving their passion It talks about the whole child And all of that was started way back there with neil with his pioneering work Where he pushed what appeared to be the definition of schooling and it eventually became accepted industry norms today This episode is supported by the international curriculum association now I've been working with the icf for quite a few years But they've been around for 30 years and they've been around championing quality Unlocking potential and improving learning in international schools right around the world I really really love that at their core is a model for improving learning And this model is focused on the learning experience and they have tons of great Curriculum materials pd resources and even an accreditation pathway for schools just like yours So if you're interested and I really do recommend you check them out head over To international curriculum.com

For so many of the good changes that we've seen in education or in other sectors There's had to be a conversation where someone's moved out of the legitimate space I guess or you know the perceived legitimate space But on the other side of me, I feel a bit nervous and cautious because does that mean? We're just allowing leaders to kind of rip up things all the time. Like isn't that also dangerous? Yes, and most change in school isn't radical Most change in school is changes to timetables Occasionally, there's a new syllabus delivered by a government who says okay You change from that syllabus to this syllabus and it's a major change within the school But it's not a radical change and most parents won't even notice that it's happened One of the interesting things about that time with neil and the alternative school movement was That parents didn't want their children to be experimented on That was what you saw a lot We don't want children being experimented on by these radical schools And it's interesting to choose that word because it sounds almost like laboratory rats And yet neil was coming from a place of incredible care for the children that he had in his care. So

Most of the changes that we will be involved in will not be radical They'll be certainly within the norms of the legitimacy that makes a school considered to be legitimate But I do think there is a place for a radical reimagining at certain points schools from when they became compulsory around 1870 with the compulsory school act And I went to school up until the 1970s and I would say for that hundred years schools were just a monolithic block Nothing changed inside them. The 1870 education was not that different to 1970s education But the changes came in around the mid-70s. He started to see New ideas coming in but again, they didn't challenge the actual legitimacy So where do you start with this thinking like how can I utilize that as a leader when i'm thinking of bringing a new change in? Is it just something to be aware of or something to actually actively pursue?

I would be saying we need to actively pursue it because I think there's a desperate need to reimagine education I don't believe that the education that's occurring in most schools is really achieving What they often say they want to which is educating the whole child Which is allowing them to realize their full potential. It's not really happening if we're honest about it Some schools are certainly But the majority of schools aren't achieving anything like that One of the things that I find disturbing is that if you took a typical high school in America or Australia And you decided to sell it the most likely purchaser of it would be penitentiaries Because a high school will convert into a penitentiary. In fact, it's happened in America on a number of occasions Where they've decided to close the high school because of falling numbers and people who provide penitentiaries Purchase them and at very little cost they can convert them into low level penitentiaries That I find really disturbing and that's why I would be saying we need to reimagine because the architecture itself Is causing, you know serious constraints On the education of the children So the reimagining for me is across the board and there's a lot of really interesting reimagining happening particularly Around the areas of people who are dropping out of school and the way that they are educating their children I'm really interested even just in the word that you use Paul and use it throughout your book reimagining like just the fact it has imagination Within it and and how it for me is a call to action as an educator as to how much Imagination am I allowing within the development of the schools I work with or within our sector and now we actually Instead of using our imagination falling on Legitimacy used a word that I didn't manage to scribble down but that word, you know About those just falling on legitimacy like trying to be legitimate and therefore constricting ourselves, right? I think where it goes with leadership is the idea of A gatekeeper a leader who's a gatekeeper who police says what ideas will come into the school whether they'll come into the school As opposed to a leader who would be cosmopolitan to use fullon's term and cosmopolitans are open to all kinds of ideas They might not necessarily implement them, but they're open to the idea They're open to the thought and the thinking and they weigh it up and decide hopefully with their collaboration with their staff if it's a good idea So it's that kind of leader that's required a cosmopolitan open to many ideas as opposed to a gatekeeper Who is often obsessed with that legitimacy?

traditional schools And the way we do things here is the way we've done them for the last 20 30 40 50 years Yes I mean openness is a great character trait for a leader And if we maybe take a step back then into traits of leaders And i'm almost going back to that coach analogy that you talked about that football coach one thing you were talking about was About trust and how this coach cared as well. I wonder if you've got any examples of how Leaders would build hope and trust and care into their practice as a school leader because we know that's so essential Yeah, look, I think school success is built on relationships real estate agents will tell you position position position I would say in schools relationships relationships relationships And relationships are built on trust hope and care Trust I think is the big one because without it You're going to have really big problems in your school. There were some researchers called bryken simmons who? Investigated trust levels and they created a measure so that they could come up And say this school has a high trust level and this school has a low trust level And then what they did was they studied the implementation of literacy and numeracy programs into the schools And what they found was that the high trust schools Had a very good chance of the program being implemented successfully the low trust schools They said had virtually no chance of implementing the new program And related it directly to the trust levels So you need to develop high trust levels in your school And of course the first place is to be walking the walk and talking the talk yourself You need to be someone that can be trusted And also the difficult part you need to trust You need to trust others and accept that at times Doesn't quite work out But you still need to maintain that trust or attempt to build a trusting relationship with them And you can do the bryken simmons test as a leader and find out Where you're actually standing in terms of trust levels care I mean schools All the time talk about how they are caring places and that makes sense that they should be caring places They're looking after children But care and whole child you've got to be careful that they just don't become platitudes And again as a principal you need to show that you care and make sure that people understand that you care The best way for you as a principal to know if you've got a caring school. I would recommend is by annual surveys

So I use annual surveys in most of my schools and I find principals who say to me We don't do those because we know what they're thinking I find it so misguided because You only know some of what some of them are thinking But an annual survey which would include questions that relate to care and to trust Will give you a pretty good and accurate idea of how your students and your teachers and your parents actually view things like care level and trust in your school And you can see it over time through annual surveys. You can plot it I worked in Papua New Guinea for six years and with an agency they had 20 schools And they did the annual surveys and they plotted every school's progress or lack of progress on key indicators like care like trust And if they were low and particularly if they were beneath the system average, you're expected to do something about it Somehow address the issue that's coming through your data So in terms of identifying it, I think all principals should be maintaining annual surveys Over time that include these kinds of questions In relation to hope that's a little bit more difficult to measure So any particular staff member is going to have two types of hope happening around them at any one time They're going to have their personal hopes and one is you know, something like I hope I'm going to have a better life after my divorce Or I hope my son's illness abates in the next few days They got their personal things they are hoping for They've also got their professional things that they're hoping for I'm hoping my new seating plan will lower the level of animosity between these two boys I'm hoping my workload will start to reduce And hopes tend to be fairly privatised as a manager One way of you being able to get access to what it is that people are hoping for I would recommend Would be to have a monthly meeting with each member of your staff in private in your office And just ask them how they're going what's happening. How are you feeling? and Give them that opportunity to express the things that they are hoping for they'll most likely start off professionally But it's very likely that they will also at some point if they develop trust with you Tell you some of the things in the background of their life their domestic issues That will help you to understand Their performance and their lateness to work or their leaving early or things like that I used to call it reflections and it's an investment in time. It's a big investment in your time

but half an hour a month And again when I was in png, I did an inspection of a school in tububl Which is where there's a huge octeti gold mine And the principal they called them moments with michael and he was doing exactly the same thing each staff member came in The only caution i'd give you is If you are working in international education and you're in malaysia or indonesia and you've got muslim staff I would say invite two ladies in to do it together with you For a muslim woman to be in a room with a senior man alone with a dog shut It's uncomfortable for them So just a cautionary warning and that may be true of many other women who prefer to actually Be with a company of another woman Yeah, those conversations are so important and i've heard many Leaders over time say, you know those one-to-ones or not one-to-two's as you just described They are a huge time investment But they pay off huge in those relational aspects and in motivation and just a general feeling of trust and care And understanding the hopes Yeah being cared for the idea that he takes this much time Of his own time is often understood and appreciated by the staff as a demonstration that You're not just talking the talk, but you are walking that walk Absolutely. I really like your approach paul I wonder just to close off this conversation then If we were to think of some thinking in your experience and your and your book It's my educated life and it's lessons lessons from leading schools. So it's about your experience over time So i'd love to ask you what's the biggest mistake? Let's say that you think leaders make when trying to implement change I think the biggest mistake you can have is to lose the trust in the school When you as a leader of the school are no longer trusted by a significant number of your staff Then you have got a big mistake happening And it doesn't happen through a single thing. It tends to be a composite of smaller failures

That have happened So it's a failure to communicate To be open to be willing to communicate with the people around you Fulen says that it's absolutely necessary to be in constant communication Because miscommunication is inevitable So your failure to be a good communicator failure to understand the experience of those you're expecting to change Failure to understand how they're experiencing the change People can lose trust with you They just think he just tells us to do it and we're supposed to do it Failure to provide the opportunity for people to criticize To have dissent from what it is that you believe is necessary That the environment is so lacking in trust that they can't express Their dissenting opinion which often can be very valid Complete validation, but it's just not going to be expressed because they hold back because they know This is not a good idea to express this dissent I think those kinds of issues and problems All coalesce into a lack of trust and the lack of trust is the killer So far as I can see in schools when trust has gone and I have entered schools where trust levels were very low The staff didn't trust the management didn't trust the owner And the owner and the managers did not trust the staff At all They even had cameras in the staff room Monitoring who was in the staff room and what they were doing There were cameras throughout the school, but there was certainly In the staff room even in the principal's office for different reasons, but that school was one of the Sadder schools i've ever experienced the children even seemed angry It was just an environment that there was little care and there was certainly little hope So those key relational attributes had been drained out of it through the actions actions like that of failing to communicate and Failing to understand what you were asking people to do and and failing to be willing to let any kind of oppositional voice be heard Had just drained all the trust out of the institution and I had to tell them that And then they had to pay me money to tell them But Well, I wonder paul then Are you hopeful for the future of education? So when I wrote the book It was edited by a guy called denry machin who's a well-knowner. I think around international schooling in southeast asia And this arose a couple of times denry Said to me No, you're a little bit too angry here Am I oh I'm probably not very optimistic about them. One of the basics of the book is a unesco report on six possible futures for schooling And four of them are not very good, you know closure due to teachers shortages People not going into it more of the same becoming part of corporations where profit is the single motive And yes, there's a possibility of working in schools, which are strong learning communities And you can get a sense of strong professional satisfaction in them But for the majority of schooling that i've seen it's pretty average for the kids who are in them. So

I Am more inclined towards the radical options that are emerging This chat with paul really got me thinking about change in schools That football analogy about learning to kick. I thought that was pretty brilliant wasn't it and it really captured How we need coaches in our schools who create safe spaces for frustration while maintaining high expectations I really liked the distinction paul made too about maintaining legitimacy and driving real change Sometimes we just need leaders who are brave enough to step beyond what's considered legitimate and really reimagine What education could be my goodness. That's never been more important than it is today I love his emphasis too on trust Hope and care. That's not just nice to have theory high-trust schools Successfully implement change low trust virtually never do and that should really make us all pause and assess our own school cultures You can find paul's book my educated life at all good bookstores and online I'll pop a link in the show notes and i genuinely recommend it for anyone serious about school leadership Education leaders is hosted by me shane leaning big thanks to the show editor pete mcgill and for the original music by guilleme silver And thank you so so much for listening today. If we don't speak before

I'll see you here next week If you want to learn more about the brilliant work from the international curriculum association head to international curriculum dot com