Part 3 - Te Rito Toi and the crisis of leadership

My very good friend and colleague Gary Roberts (Principal of Hornby Primary School) often says that we have the best job in the world, and I struggle to disagree. He expresses the view that we have such freedom in our positions as leaders of kura in Aotearoa, and I think he's right. While there are clearly some limits on our actions as Principals, we have a huge amount of freedom as leaders of self managing schools.

Within the limits of the direction set by our governance bodies (Boards of Trustees) we have the capacity to determine so much about the direction of our individual kura. Even then, we have the capacity to work with our Boards as education leaders to set the direction of our kura.  New Zealand education leadership researcher/writer Vivianne Robinson created an outstanding model for student centred leadership, one that is still my 'go to', my gold standard, in this regard:

Why then do we see so little attention given to the types of future focussed thinking and leadership that our society and our economy need? Why do we not see the focus on creativity that evidence suggests we need?

I guess you could say that as leaders we all bring our own individual flavour and values to our roles as educational leaders, and rightly so. And I guess it would be silly to think that we could and would all see things the same way. However in the face of a massive body of evidence and thinking I struggle to see how some key trends are not now forming the basis for our educational leadership in Aotearoa. 

Whether it be the thinking of thought leaders like Jane Gilbert and Yong Zhao, the work of the thinkers from Deloittes about what society and the economy needs from learners in the future, or practitioners and academics like Peter O'Connor, there are compelling arguments for embedding creativity more firmly in our kura. Creativity appears to support literacy and numeracy, and improved science and engineering achievement, rather than the other way around (although I suspect the jury is still out on that one?). Yet we are not seeing this across our system, and within our kura., Of course there are pockets of exception, and I'd like to think that our Manaiakalani schools form one of those pockets with our underlying pedagogy 'Learn Create Share'. But even there, it takes leadership that exhibits a relentless focus on this work for change to happen.

So why not? My suspicion is that this is a crisis, a failure in fact, of leadership. My fear is that all too often school leadership is confused with school management. Both are essential, but they are fundamentally different. I also fear that what I am seeing more and more often is leadership that is ego focussed rather than learner focussed, informed by myth rather than evidence.  I worry that I am seeing leadership that is driven by the 'what's in it for me' drive rather than the 'how can I improve the lives of the earners that I serve'. If you like, I think that we have lost sight of the concept of servant leadership.

A belief in and commitment to big ideas is absolutely essential in these times of exponential change. In my opinion we are not seeing the emergence of leaders who are willing or capable of committing to the big ideas. We are not seeing leaders prepared to commit to a big vision for our future. We are seeing leaders who buy into the comfortable, who buy into the idea that what worked 30 years ago is what we need to return to now. Except that it didn't work 30 years ago.

At Hornby High School Te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka we have adopted a bold vision, one that is future focussed:

"He puna auaha a centre of creative excellence" (yes we have corrected the typo). We believe that creativity is essential to our future.  That may mean the creative arts, but it most definitely does mean creativity in any and every curriculum area.  

That doesn't mean that we have forsworn the idea of knowledge and skills. Quite the contrary. However we understand that education now demands much much more. 

As leaders we actually DO have the freedom to lead our kura in the direction required to create the exponential change that we need. We have the capacity to deliver on the promise that is offered by the work of the Auckland University Centre for Arts and Social Transformation, to embed creativity into our kura at every turn, in every thing that we do. We need to listen to Professor Peter O'Connor and his team. We need to be bold, we need to be visionary. 

I am just not sure that we have the individual nor the collective b***s to do so.

Te Rito Toi 2 - some pre-conditions for creativity

Amongst the many things about Te Rito Toi that has grabbed my attention are the 'Creative Schools Index' (a central part of this paper) and the 10 dimensions of creativity that are at its core. I prefer to think of these as possible preconditions for creativity, or perhaps enablers of creativity. 

The dimensions of creativity that informed the development of our research instruments are:
• Collaboration: To work in a group of two or more to develop shared understandings and achieve shared goals.
• Problem solving: To identify and articulate problems and devise strategies for their solutions and/or management considering consequences and outcomes.
• Critical thinking: To investigate the wider social and cultural context of ideas.
• Playfulness: To use imagination to create made up worlds and situations. This
capacity is often associated with enjoyment and fun.
• Environments: The qualities of the environment, including physical, emotional and
intellectual, and their adaptability for a diversity of classroom-based activities.
• Divergent thinking: To think differently about known problems; to evaluate the
knowledge students have from different perspectives and to find new ways of
understanding.
• Innovation: To realise creative ideas in tangible ways.
• Discipline knowledge: To develop expertise in a domain of knowledge that involves
specialised content and process understandings.
• Risk-taking: To be supported when trialling unconventional or previously
unconsidered approaches.
• Synthesis: To connect ideas to develop new understandings or approaches.
• Curiosity: A desire to explore, examine and understand how things are and how
things work.

Yes these are the basis for the evaluation, for the index, but more importantly they offer an insight into possible causal factors that we can intentionally influence within our kura to support and enhance creativity. This is perhaps the biggest issue for kura in general. I have for a long time held the view that teachers don't actively resist change or improvement. Rather they react to change similarly to most human beings in thinking 'yes, I get what you are saying, it makes sense when you describe it like that, but I don't know what it looks like. Show me and I'll give it a go.' These dimensions show teachers what this could look like.

It will please many of the conservatives amongst us to know that 'Discipline knowledge' is right there in the mix. Critics of NCEA have often argued that the qualification is symptomatic of the view that we no longer value knowledge.  I have long argued that this is nonsense. NCEA requires deeper thinking, and you cannot think in a vacuum. You require 'stuff' to think about, specifically you require content knowledge. So in fact NCEA is a much tougher qualification than what came before ... our previous iterations of qualifications appeared to focus on remembering stuff. Under NCEA you need to know stuff AND be able to demonstrate that you can think about it .. a much tougher gig. (That's not to argue that NCEA does it perfectly, but you get the idea).

So here is one way of describing what 'it looks like'. That is, these are things that we can deliberately and intentionally target to support, to grow, creativity with our rangatahi. This rubric offers ways to think about our deliberate acts of leadership, and our deliberate acts of teaching, that make use of any of these dimensions to support creativity.

These dimensions certainly mesh well with our vision at Hornby High School, and our three areas of strategic intent, for Hornby High School.

Our vision (you will hopefully recall) is 'he puna auaha a centre of creative excellence. Our three areas of strategic intent are:

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Our understanding of the need to develop an appetite for risk taking stands out as a signifiant area of commonality. I think I'll be asking our staff to self evaluate on the 10 dimensions. Not because the outcome in itself is useful, but because of the conversations that it might generate and more importantly the ways in which it might empower staff to progress towards our vision. 

 

Te Rito Toi - The Twice Born Seed

My explicit interest in creativity in schools began a decade or so ago when, as a consequence of working in a technology rich school environment, I began to think about the future of schools. The conclusion I reached over time was that schools in their 19t/20th century incarnation perhaps didn't have too much of a future, given that much of what they had to offer was now accessible quite independently of school institutions. My conclusion back then was that the long term future of schools lay in focussing on those things that make us human, because other 'stuff' that we thought important could and quite possibly would be replaced by technology. In that mix I placed (amongst other things) the ability to empathise and to relate to others, and the ability to be creative. At that time I could see no way in which technology could replace those attributes.

At this stage I still don't see technology doing so, hence my ongoing interest in creativity in schools. Along the way I then found the famous Sir Ken Robinson TeD talk 'Do schools kill creativity?'.  I was fortunate enough to hear Sir Ken speak in person at a couple of conferences before his unfortunate passing in 2020.

Fast forward to 2016 when I was privileged to take up the positon as Principal of Hornby High School Te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka. Some of my early work in our kura lay in leading Board and staff to a new vision for the school: 'A centre of creative excellence he puna auaha'. Amongst many other work streams since then we have been engaged in an ongoing conversation about what that creativity looks like in our daily work, because we did NOT mean the vision to be restricted to the traditional creative arts, although we have always seen those as an essential part of what we seek to be.

In 2020 I stumbled upon a paper that has had significant impact on my thinking. Titled 'Replanting creativity in post-normal times Te rito toi', the paper was authored by a team lead by professor Peter O'Connor of Auckland University's Centre for Arts and Social Transformation.

Even the existence of this group came as a pleasant surprise to me - it effected the reassuring notion that we were not alone at Hornby High School.

As if the universe was directing me towards this with intent, over the summer break I read the new Vincent IOSullivan biography of Ralph Hotere in which I learned for the first time of the work of Beeby, Tovey, et al,  that place arts advisors (Hotere included) in schools across the country in a move that created a richness of creative experience for tamariki.

This quote from the paper in particular resonated more than most:

Nussbaum (2010) recognises that the increasingly precarious place of the arts in education in Western schooling poses a direct threat to democracy. She contends:

the insatiable drive for increased profit is at the expense of every other indicator of human value and worth; creating people who are less than fully human:If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements. The future of the world’s democracies hangs in the balance. (p. 2).

The paper also built the case for the positive impact of creativity and the arts on wellbeing, on economic productivity, and on our ability to think our way out of global problems the like of which we have never seen before. As it suggests, when we think about the 2020 Covid lockdown, what was it that so many of us turned to, to get ourselves through that time? The creative arts, and the creative people, in our society. 

This week I attended a public panel discussion in Wellington in which Professor O'Connor and a panel of four were joined by what I think may have been several hundred others interested in education, where the place of creativity and the arts in education in Aotearoa was discussed. yes it was an echo chamber, we all felt the same, but yes also it gave strength to the wairua that I feel towards this work. It was a good investment of time. 

From the 'long blog posts never get read' school of thinking, I'll discuss some of the issues as I see in successive shorter posts