Talking about the big educational issues is the key to school success. By Danielle Townsend.

Teachers already make a real difference to student outcomes, says Dianne Peck, but they must keep challenging themselves to improve.

Until May last year Peck was the assistant principal of Glen Waverley Secondary College in Melbourne's eastern suburbs. The Bulletin recognised her work with a listing in the Smart 100 list in 2004, among leaders in business, the arts, politics and the community.

As the group manager, learning policies branch, at the Victorian Department of Education and Training, her challenge will be to apply the lessons she has learnt in schools to make them useful to a broad audience.

"It's the teachers in classrooms who have the potential to make a great school and who ultimately make a difference to kids' lives," says Peck. She says that it's essential though that schools are provided with the resources, structures and time for teachers to develop.

Research supports Peck in saying that individual teachers have the most significant impact on student achievements. But where does this leave teachers? Often with a lot of responsibility and very little assistance with improving their practices.

"This research can be used to bash teachers around the head," says Peck. "However, it can also be used in a positive way to affirm that the work we do as teachers is significant and can make a huge difference to students. Instead of using the research in a negative way we should be building the capacity within schools to deal with the challenges of the future."

Peck is unashamedly an educational philosopher. While others at a government level are focused on standardised testing for all students, Peck is asking, "Why are we doing what we're doing every day?"

She challenges teachers and school leadership teams to start talking to each other, and to ask the hard questions: Am I doing this as well as my colleagues? What leadership capacity do we need to make great schools? What's the culture we want to create? What does good learning look like? What do our students need to learn? How do we know we're making a difference?

But Peck is also a realist and understands that, to think and talk on this broad level, teachers need time, support and leadership.

"Systems need to ensure that they encourage and support schools to have conversations about these questions which enable their own thinking and learning. Obviously support for school-base professional learning is a critical factor."

Team work

"One of the things I've learnt is that leadership teams in schools make a difference," says Peck. She uses the example of Glen Waverley Secondary College. "The leadership team at the school was 20-plus people and we used to meet eight times a year, simply to discuss how we can build our leadership capacity," she says.

Peck cites Thomas Sergiovanni's model of transformational leadership (see diagram) which takes the focus away from simply providing technical leadership, which Peck says is what happens in many schools. "We spent a lot of time as a leadership team thinking about the different aspects of leadership," she says.

"This issue of how we build leader-ship capacity in our schools is critical, if we are to continue to stop the drive to the private sector," says Peck.

She says that Glen Waverley Secondary College was successful in attracting students despite there being a high number of private schools in the area. "We were able to develop a culture where it was seen as a high-quality public school," she says. Culture is another area where Peck believes schools need to be clear.

"We need to ask ourselves in schools, 'what is our educative purpose?' In most secondary schools kids go from one teacher to the next in a day and very rarely do these teachers have shared views about what effective learning looks like," says Peck.

At Glen Waverley, Peck says one of the important achievements was creating a document which established the purpose of the school as a learning community (see diagram). The three pillars are 'learning to live together', 'embracing lifelong learning' and 'creating personal futures'.

Actions speak louder

But in some ways creating a values statement is the easy part. "Many of these documents mean nothing if simply all they are is talk," says Peck. "We can sit forever and say we're a learning community, when in fact what we're doing in our classrooms is not too much about learning at all, and what we say is going to make absolutely no difference."

Real difference only comes from taking risks and teachers facing the reality of the classroom experience for students, according to Peck. She quotes UK research that says, "Most students in schools are more interested in completing work than comprehending it."

Peck confesses that this statement rings true for a lot of the kids in her classes over the years. "Often, when I use that quote with teachers, they say 'yeah that's our kids'.

"As educators we need to look at our practice. If kids aren't enthusiastic about learning, if they're not interested in under-standing and grappling with ideas, what are we doing that may in fact be leading them to those views?"

To think about these issues, teachers sometimes need to face the difficult fact that there are some things they do better than others, and to then learn from each other. This is the basis of the teaching teams concept that Peck was involved with at Glen Waverley Secondary College.

All the teachers and leadership of the school were required to be part of a professional learning team. "As a staff we'd developed a 'powerful learning map', which outlines what good practice looks like," says Peck. "The professional learning teams were encouraged to take an element of the powerful learning map that they thought wasn't working so well and to work on it within a team."

Peck says the school did a lot of work on providing professional development to assist teachers to work together in this way, but that the difficulty, as always, was time. The school dedicated each Monday night to professional learning, and, while it was voluntary to attend, the events were usually well supported.

Though she believes the school has had a lot of success, Peck doesn't suggest that other schools should follow exactly what Glen Waverley is doing. "Though we should definitely be looking at what other schools are doing, it's a big mistake to take what one school does and transplant somewhere else."

Instead she sees her role as assisting other schools to have the same conversations that were had at Glen Waverley and to find their own model for the future.

"The challenge for schools is to keep questioning, and to never ever stop."

Danielle Townsend is Australian Educator's contributing editor.
Dianne Peck spoke at the AEU's national conference in January 2005.