Conference Agenda

Objectives

- Discuss how an intentional and systematic commitment and approach to supporting the deep learning and reflexivity of staff can prepare them to effectively build cultures of belonging among a diverse student population

- Describe a powerful critical inquiry approach to professional learning with regards to diversity, equity, and inclusion

- Share concrete and practical steps taken as part of the staff-wide critical inquiry as well as emergent outcomes

- Describe key learnings that can serve to guide schools and school systems to increase the likelihood of significant positive impact of efforts to promote more equitable environments

Educational Importance for Practice

The teaching staff at the Calgary Girls Charter School endeavour to make belonging central to our practice. We believe that the psychological need to belong in a school community is antecedent to successful learning. The research widely agrees on the importance of the construct of belonging in schools yet offers few frameworks or models to guide its operationalization in school-based settings (Allen and Kern, 2017). To enact a pedagogy of belonging in our school (Beck and Malley, 1998), we realized that staff members needed to focus on our own inner work before we would be able to be of best support to students and the broader community. We knew that to enhance understanding and truly live these beliefs and values, time needed to be spent analyzing our own stories, assumptions, beliefs, biases (Sealey-Ruiz, 2021) and developing our equity-mindedness. We co-constructed a cascade of critical inquiry questions and challenges that we committed to working through together.

The emergent outcomes have been extremely promising. Staff were able to speak to how this learning made an imprint on them personally and on our learning community as a whole. The ways we interact with one another and the ways that we program for students has shifted because each of us continues to grow and change. To symbolize our learning, staff took their shared vision of a forest, where the ecosystem has individuality, yet is intricate and connected, to a few students who have turned it into a beautiful art piece to live in the school as a reminder of the commitments we have made to ourselves and one another.

Format and Approaches

In this interactive and practical session, participants will engage with the cascade critical inquiry questions developed by CGCS staff and consider the key elements of the professional learning approach that might be adaptable and transferable to their contexts.

Connection to the Conference Theme

We connect to the conference theme: “Leading schools and education systems that promote equity, inclusion, belonging, diversity, social justice, global citizenship and/ or environmental sustainability”. As schools and educational systems around the world grapple with how to promote more equitable outcomes, more inclusive environments and cultures of true belonging, the crucial importance of the inner work that educators must engage in cannot be taken lightly. We are eager to share our learnings about how a critical inquiry approach to professional learning can truly make a difference.

Purpose of the Session

The purpose of this innovate presentation is to provide a discussion and examination of the utilization of auxiliary school leaders. By auxiliary school leaders, we refer to those members of the school team that are not administrators, teachers, or support staff, but rather support students in other ways. In the United States, examples of these leaders include school psychologists, school counselors, school social workers, and school nurses. These leaders are extremely important to the successful operation of a school yet are frequently underutilized or relegated to administrative tasks.

Educational Importance

Auxiliary leaders such as school psychologists, counselors, social workers, and nurses have the potential to greatly alleviate the overwhelming load that is typically placed on school leaders and administrators. Despite their specialized skills, such auxiliary leaders have not been included in the commentary and research about school leaders employing distributed leadership (Hargreaves & Fink, 200; Harris, 2004; Spillane et al., 2007; Tian et al., 2016). By adequately attending to student discipline, social-emotional learning, and counseling to name just a few, auxiliary leaders may alleviate the workload of school leaders (Hochbein & Meyers, 2021). Currently, in many schools in the United States, there is an inappropriate resource allocation at play where auxiliary school leaders are relegated to administrative tasks, while administrators are forced to pick up the burden of student support issues (Wang, 2022). This is an economic and political failure and is leading to inefficient and ineffective educational practices. The appropriate use of these professionals may also lead to positive outcomes, such as more appropriate student discipline practices (Richardson et al., 2019), improved student and teacher mental health (Paternite, 2005), and smaller racial gaps in academic achievement (Zink & Anderson, 2023) as well as disproportionality in exclusionary discipline (Darensbourg et al., 2010). This is due to the specialized training that these professionals have but are not using. The appropriate allocation of these professionals will lead to more effective schools.

Format and Approaches

In this session, participants will be encouraged to share techniques which they have utilized auxiliary school leaders across different educational settings and locations. A discussion surrounding potential professional development options will be conducted, where participants will have the chance to share their ideal utilization of these professionals and suggest recommendations for professional development and training that may aide in obtaining such a utilization.

Connection to Conference Theme

This session is particularly relevant to the conference theme, quality professional education for enhanced school effectiveness and improvement. Improving professional education and professional development for administrators and teachers on the effective use of these auxiliary leaders will help make schools more efficient and safer for students. The appropriate allocation of resources will also lead to a greater productivity by school personnel, as administrators and teachers will be free to pursue other work and auxiliary administrators will be relieved from administrative burdens that lead to a lack of productivity. These auxiliary leaders may also be recruited into leadership preparation programs, which would lead to a more diverse workforce.

The EdEco Initiative is an ongoing experimental process designed to support a deeper level of connection and education ecosystem coherence in South Africa. Initiated in February 2021, and supported within the South African Department of Education’s Innovation Unit, DBE-E3, the initiative supports education actors to co-sense and co-evolve a model to deepen levels of trust, connection, collaboration, systems insight, co-creation, and learning ecosystem emergence within South African education sector, using a variety of systems change modalities.

Participants are drawn from diverse segments of the education landscape, and include Civil Society, Education NGO’s, Business, Philanthropy, and Public Private Partnership actors. The process has successfully fostered dialogue, leading to deeper levels of shared and generative understanding.

To achieve education outcomes fit for an uncertain future (in particular, the critical learning competencies of character, citizenship, collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking), education systems need to transform to allow for more humanised, experiential, and individuated approaches to learning. This requires a reconfiguration of the underpinnings and philosophical approaches to education, with a shift in the ability of all actors to operate collaboratively and coherently towards the transformation of education, understanding their synergistic roles. This is a Systems Transformation process, requiring Systems Thinking and Systems Action capacity to become embedded within the education system itself.

Globally, this systems approach is being explored through the “learning ecosystem” model. The United Nation’s Transforming Education Summit in September 2022, the work of UNESCO’s International Commission on the Futures of Education, the OECD Handbook for Learning Innovative Environments and World Innovation Summit in Education Learning Ecosystems Playbook all reference the key importance of the establishment of education networks able to support the exchange of ideas and facilitate collaboration and shared learning. This work is relatively unchartered in the South African context. It is this transformation towards systems thinking and approach that we are seeking support in South Africa through the EdEco Connect Initiative.

Despite the common perception that alignment around a unified, compelling purpose is sufficient to enable genuinely collaborative, indeed co-creative work to occur, it has proven extraordinarily difficult to achieve multi-stakeholder collaboration and coherence around compelling global issues such as education. As expressed by Jean Oelwang in her book “Partnering”:

“We mistakenly expect groups and individuals to be able to collaborate spontaneously. Yet this is like expecting a group of amateur gymnasts to come together and instantly perform a gravity-defying double backflip in unison, before they have even mastered how to spot each other in a simple cartwheel”.

The EdEco Connect initiative has been designed as a space to explore, discuss, practice, and build a collective capacity for experiencing and stepping into connection, relationship, and trust, as well as for seeding additional spaces that enable this for others within the sector. Our goal, rather than “scaling this initiative” is to diffuse this capacity into the system, through equipping participants to hold similar spaces in their own workspaces, networks, and geographies, and through connecting and learning from others who are doing similar work.