Springboard Trust: Equity as a measurement of leadership (Laurayne Tafa)

 Why do students succeed or don't succeed? 

If we justify by blaming society or the system (curriculum, timetable, resources) - this is drawing on deficit theories. 


Leaders tend to lean towards telling war stories - leading to hoelessness.

Deficit theories can lead to "do-good" programmes or practices.

Key to Agentic Leadership and Decision-making: Need to change the system

Understand why disparities exist

Collecting data sets against key indicators (eg progress, attendance, retention, engagement, etc) - then you can start examining further.

Is attendance a valid reason why students succeed or not? 

Or - is the biggest group of underachievement attending?

Interruptions (leaving class for feeding the chickens, carrying out tasks)? How many of these are school-based rather than home-based?

Engagement - how many students can answer the engagement and learning questions - what am I learning, how do I know I am being successful - what are my next styeps. 

If students are not successful at this - school systems need to change. 


Reject deficit theories

How do I know where disparities exist

Am I using evidence?

What am I doing about it? take agentic actions and decision-making around this. 

Can I articulate the preferred pedagogical approaches in our school? If I visited, what would I see? 

Leaders come from a position that there is nothing wrong with students, families, teachers - however, there may be deficits in the cultural and pedagogies (teaching and relational pedagogies)

Choose the Pedagogies that have been proven to make a difference, only

Use a (proven, accessible and not subject-specific or age-specific) pedagogical framework, so that teachers can begin to understand what works. 

If I can't name our Pedagogical framework, how can I support it and invest in it?

Relationships are part of the pedagogy - Relationships that lead to learning

Once implemented - Māori students thinking of themselves as the role models, respected, trusted and cared for by the teacher - kids can learn together, by themselves - with teacher support as and when they need it. Case studies online through Te Kotahitanga. 

Measuring how well a school is going?

must be institutionalized - used as a set of data that compares

Student voice - non-biased feedback (non-threatening context for the students to share)

observation - measuring whether teachers are drawing on agentic or 

Leaders that Accelerate Equity are those who:

Invest institutionalized distributed leadership (whose job description is it to...?, or to lead teachers through effective pedagogy?) How much time are teachers working in that area?  Teachers need coaches. Coaches need a pedagogical framework

Teachers need to know their success criteria

a family-like context - non-judgmental coaching, based on evidence

Teachers need uninterrupted time to make meaning of their pedagogy - with coaching. If negative - help them reform the practice. 

Job descriptions - invest and institutionalize feedback on effective pedagogy







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