I am based in New Zealand and for the last two weeks we have been back in full Level 4 lockdown as the Government and Ministry of Education responds to the first community infections of the Delta variant of COVID19.
Consequently, I’m fielding a few interesting calls from educators and IT Administrators that are either wanting some refreshers on how to best use Microsoft Teams for Education for remote learning, or are asking about specific needs for the first time.
My Principal / Head of Teaching and Learning / Head of Student Support etc etc is wanting to do ‘virtual drop ins’ to Teams – not just the video conferencing meetings, but see the chat, assignments, files etc. Help! How can I do this?
(example of the questions I have been asked recently)
The above question is completely understandable: as students partake in a renewed round of remote learning, the senior leaders in schools are wanting to ensure that robust and quality teaching and learning is taking place remotely. This is not always measured by the number of video calls that take place, but other indicators such as the depth of discussion in the Teams Posts chat as well as files being edited or collaborated on and assignments being submitted are all useful.
Fortunately, there is a Teams App built for this and published on GitHub that anyone can download and build – click here to view the instructions. From the installation instructions comes the overview of the functionality of the app:
As learning has moved online, system leaders have a hard time monitoring what’s going on in the virtual classroom. They need a way to drop-in and observe how teachers and students are doing. Also, there is a need to provide temporary access to substitute teachers. In Classroom Drop-in, system leaders can find classrooms and add themselves to it with a specified drop-in period. This will add them to corresponding team or class. They can also assign others (substitute teachers, evaluators etc.) to a class for a short period, as needed.
Admin/Teacher/User can create drop-In with the help of “New drop-in” tab and extend/delete drop-ins with the help of “My active drop-in” tab.
Classroom Drop-in app provides ability to search schools and teams or classes to drop in.
For every drop-in, app sends notification to admin as well dropped-in user.
Admin or System Leader can drop-in self or someone else.
After specified time of drop-in, the access will get revoked from assigned user and the user will get notification for the same.
I can definitely see the value of this app to support school leaders who want to easily check in on classes without needing to be added to all classes in Teams which would quickly fill up their Teams activity feed and make it very hard to see the Teams content they care most about on a day to day basis.
It’s worth noting there are some requirements to get this up and running (all listed in the documentation) and I encourage you to check the full list, but here’s the quick notes:
Administrative access to Azure Active Directory
Power Apps Premium (per App or per User) license assigned to your account (you will be unable to import the Power App without this)
Power Automate license assigned to your account
A valid SharePoint Online license assigned to your account, and permission to create lists and store data
A Microsoft Teams license assigned to your account
Classroom Drop-In is built on the Microsoft Power Platform that allows for low code / no code apps to be rapidly built and deployed and the architecture is outlined below:
It is hard not to feel some sympathy for schools these days.
Whilst the core function and role of a school is arguably to educate students, increasingly teachers, Principals and Board of Trustees are having to manage an ever growing list of complex tasks such as:
Supporting the emotional well being and mental health of students and staff
Providing a semi-enterprise level IT infrastructure where virtually all activities now require fast and reliable internet access
Overseeing the security of the campus, both physical and digital, to keep ever-more sensitive data protected and out of the way of prying hands and eyes
Managing the workload of teachers who already feel over-worked and underpaid
Promoting a healthy balance of activity and diet for increasingly busy students
The list goes on!
To that end, it’s easy to see why educators frequently choose simplicity over complexity when it comes to the digital tools they use in their jobs. This has often resulted in the stealthy use of Shadow IT in schools: the un-authorized use of online platforms by
Shadow IT exists in most organisations – how they deal with it is what makes the difference
teachers and administrators in an attempt to make their lives easier. I wrote about Shadow IT and the helpful suggestions of how to approach this constructively from the Chief Digital Officer of the New Zealand Government and I recently had a back-and-forth dialogue with an educator about this very topic which has prompted me to write this blog post.
We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know
When I first left my career in IT to undertake a Secondary Teaching Diploma I was thrust back into the world of being a student once more and I realized very quickly that while I knew a lot about technology, I didn’t know the first thing about classroom behaviour management, curriculum design or best practice around assessment. I literally didn’t know what I needed to know and was very reliant on the great tutors who guided me through the pathway to acquire the skills and knowledge to become an effective educator.
Sharing and support of colleagues should be encouraged in the teaching profession
In a similar sense, many experienced educators are 100% focused on being the best they can in the classroom and assisting their students to achieve incredible results and to help with this, they are increasingly collaborating with their colleagues both in, and out, of their own school organisations. This sharing has been accelerated by the rapid adoption of online collaboration platforms such as Office 365 and G Suite for Education meaning the days of teachers swapping USB sticks at Subject Association meetings are long gone. Instead, this has been replaced by the click of a button to send attachments in an email, spin up a website, or hit “share” on that document in the cloud.
However, despite technology making it easier than ever to share and collate digital teaching resources, there is a significant catch to this that many teachers are simply not aware of.
Schools, Not Teachers, Own the Intellectual Property Rights
Ideas, along with teaching resources, all exist in the cloud these days. But are they secured?
This reality is something that many teachers simply have never had explained to them or do not understand that any content they create in the course of their employment, be that a unit plan or a creative form of assessment, belongs to their school. As the TKI website explains:
Who owns copyright in a teacher’s or contractor’s original work?
Do not assume that just because you created a work, you can necessarily do anything you like with it. Unless agreed otherwise, the school will own the copyright in any teaching materials that teachers (employees) create during the course of their employment.
Put another way by the Creative Commons Aotearoa TohaToha website (underlined emphasis is mine):
Copyright and Teaching Resources
New Zealand teachers don’t, as employees, hold first ownership of copyright to resources they create in the course of their employment. The 1994 Copyright Act grants first ownership to employers, which in the case of New Zealand schools is the Board of Trustees (BoT). This means that when teachers share resources that they have produced in the course of their employment, they are legally infringing the copyright held by the BoT.
This can cause a great deal of uncertainty for teachers wishing to share and collaborate with teachers at other schools. It can also cause problems when teachers move between schools and wish to take their resources with them.
Now I suspect there is not a teacher alive that didn’t take some of their resources with them when they’ve moved schools and I know that many trainee teachers are actively encouraged to collect and hoard as many unit plans and diverse forms of assessment during their teaching placements as possible, to form the basis of their resources when they land their first job. Similarly, I think most educators see themselves as members of a wider community than just their school and there is a collective sense of comradeship and willingness to help each other – this appeals to the inherent altruistic motivation many teachers possess.
Nevertheless, Board of Trustees, the Chairperson and the Principal should all be thinking very carefully about what their approach is to this potential problem and be prepared to ask some serious questions such as:
If a teacher leaves with their resources, do they leave a copy at the school for the department/syndicate or their replacement?
If they have left a copy, is it in an editable format e.g. the digital masters
Does the school want those resources exiting the organisation and going to be potentially “competing school”?
This is particularly pertinent in situations where a school may have invested tens of thousands of dollars in professional development for staff in an area of education to become a “differentiator” to attract students and boost roll numbers.
How does a teacher or the school feel when resources they have created end up branded with a different school / teacher and possibly shown as a best practice exemplar at a conference?
This classic example of IP theft may sound far fetched but I’ve heard numerous educators describe this exact situation
If a teacher brings resources into their new school and continues to use them, is the school at risk of using IP belonging to another school? Is there a potential legal remedy against them as a result of this?
Fortunately, there are solutions to these problems that with a little determination and vision, most schools can implement to address both real and perceived risks in this space.
Creative Commons and Document Auditing
There are two approaches that schools typically take, often in conjunction with each other:
Granting teachers permission to use Creative Commons attribution to their work, thus allowing them to legally share resources and ensuring that the school retains the attribution.
Effective auditing of electronic resources to ensure they are not openly shared in contravention to school policy.
Creative Commons policies are explained here (again, underline emphasis is mine) and put simply:
A Creative Commons policy gives teachers advance permission to disseminate their resources online for sharing and reuse. The policy also ensures that both the school and the teacher — as well as teachers from around the country and around the world — can continue to use and adapt resources produced by New Zealand teachers in the course of their employment.
As more teaching and learning is done online, these issues around intellectual property are becoming much harder to ignore. A Creative Commons policy is a good way to clarify your school’s position on intellectual property — including first ownership of copyright to teaching resources — which still encouraging sharing and collaboration, which is a core part of the vision of many New Zealand schools.
The above represents a powerful step for schools, empowering educators to collaborate meaningfully with their colleagues in other schools, whilst still ensuring the individual teacher and original school is attributed the copyright. Couched positively for schools, this could be seen as the best form of advertising in the sector, if dozens of school-branded resources are showing up in other schools, reflecting the skills and expertise of the originating school’s teachers.
Getting teachers to think about security and protecting intellectual property is the responsibility of the Board of Trustees
Nevertheless, all schools, whether they have implemented a Creative Commons Policy or not, will want to ensure compliance when it comes to the sharing of resources and this comes back to the heart of the original question of this blog: do the cloud resources used and favoured by educators closely align with the Board’s priorities of protecting Intellectual Property? Over the last 12 months I’ve spoken with a few IT partners working in schools who shared audits of cloud documents shared externally with the school’s principals resulting in a few shocked expressions.
In Office365 there are extensive, enterprise grade tools to both restrict sharing and also enable thorough audits of document sharing. This support article is particularly good providing a step by step guide about half way down entitled “How to identify resources shared with external users” and in the scenario the following table shows all users in the organization who shared resources with a guest user within a specified date range:
The process of sharing a document can best be seen in this flow chart:
Note: The SharingInvitationCreated event is most always associated with external or guest sharing when the target user doesn’t have access to the resource that was shared.
If educators in schools are using Shadow IT and/or sharing resources publicly, even with the best of intentions, they may be unknowingly violating school policy and their terms of employment.
Why Does This All Matter?
When it comes to talking about core role responsibilities, you’re unlikely to ever find a teacher include the protection of intellectual property as being high on their list of priorities. Yet, in the same way that all educators are fundamentally teachers of literacy, they all share a responsibility to not be actively bypassing a school’s security and sharing resources and content in a truly public or anonymous way. When boiled down to it, this is a core part of their employment agreement.
As a result, school leadership teams and Boards of Trustees need to be choosing cloud platforms that achieve the twin goals of:
Security, compliance and auditing that is easily achievable
Authorized sharing of content that is enabled in a protected manner
When either of the above are missing, it creates a classic grey area for educators and other school employees to have to navigate with potentially unhelpful results and outcomes. The reality also becomes painfully apparent: the path of least resistance and easiest sharing of content is not always the best one for schools to tread. More than ever, schools need to carefully weigh and consider their choice of platforms and how they protect both the intellectual property of their organisation, as well as their staff from accidentally “over sharing” content into the wider public internet.
This is an opinion piece and does not represent legal advice
The author has previously implemented Creative Commons Policy into an organisation to enable sharing and appropriate attribution
A view across Lake Wakatipu in Queenstown – a great place to think and connect with Principals from around New Zealand
I’ve spent the first part of this week in the beautiful resort town of Queenstown attending the annual SPANZ conference for Secondary Principals of New Zealand. It’s always valuable listening to the presentations at an event like this, along with taking the opportunity to talk with Principals about what is top of mind for them in their schools and it seems like an accurate way to tap into the zeitgeist of education in the country.
A decade ago I quit my job in an IT company that was focused on the emerging Cloud hosting business and trained as a teacher of History and English – most of my peers thought I was crazy! I ended up as a Head of Department for Social Sciences before moving into a Director of ICT role in the Executive Leadership Team at a large K-12 Independent School. These experiences, coupled with regular chats with friends and former colleagues working in the education space (many of them sitting in senior leadership roles in both primary and secondary schools, most with aspirations to be Principals themselves one day) have informed my thoughts below.
Without wishing to be too contentious and with no desire whatsoever to be offensive, I thought I would share a few reflections on what I have observed and also make some suggestions for an alternative model for leadership roles.
The Typical Progression Into Leadership
As new teachers emerge from training colleges fresh, eager and at times overly idealistic, they are usually placed into a provisional registration program where they receive varying levels of mentoring and feedback to assist them in turning their theoretical knowledge into practical expertise in the classroom. If they have aspirations to move into senior roles and also increase their earnings, they’re generally confronted with a decision after a few years teaching about which pathway to proceed down:
Pastoral Care – usually in a Deaning role of some sort and providing the link between the student, school and home (and often with external social support agencies as well)
Head of Department – managing a team of teachers and overseeing everything from curriculum planning through assessment and moderation, to staff performance appraisals
It is not surprising that the people with management skills (required or learnt in the second pathway above) tend to lead to quicker acceleration into Senior Leadership Teams (variously SLT or SLG). That experience, along with deep curriculum knowledge, normally marks out Heads of Department as future Assistant or Deputy Principals and, all progressing well, they go on to become Principals of their own schools one day.
Senior Leaders: Administrators or Visionaries?
It’s at this stage, when a successful teacher who has proven themselves a competent Head of Department or even an excellent Pastoral Care Leader and has graduated to a SLT role, that I see things becoming a little strange.
Often, the classroom excellence, teaching innovation and educational vision that they have demonstrated in their careers to this point gets stifled in their new roles of Assistant/Deputy Principals as they are loaded up with ownership of a multitude of what can best be described as ‘administrative’ tasks. What does this look like? In my experience and talking with aspiring Principals, often their duties include things like:
Co-ordinating the school photos
Managing the day relief teaching when teachers are sick/away
Timetabling of classes
Managing the various specialised programmes a school may choose to run e.g. enrolling of students into Duke of Edinburgh etc
Running discipline events such as after-school detentions
A variety of other non-educational tasks that certainly need to be completed but do not necessarily require deep educational expertise
All of these task are necessary and certainly they all need to be handled professionally for the smooth running of any school, however it seems to me that in assigning these roles to SLT members they are effectively turned into highly paid administrators. Most, if not all, of these tasks could be successfully managed by a competent administrator who understands processes and systems without requiring a deep understanding of education.
With the exception of perhaps the Principal, most SLT end up focusing very heavily (if not exclusively), on the smooth day to day running of the school. There is scarce time available for deep educational reflections, consistent strategical planning and review, or ongoing mentoring of staff.
What Does Your Work Week Look Like?
A wise Principal once offered the following advice when prioritizing strategy and planning versus the day to day fire-fighting of issues in my role at a school I worked at. They suggested breaking down my day/week into three categories:
‘Business as usual’ activities that need to be done.
Reactionary activity to something unusual that has emerged unexpectedly
Long term strategy and planning
For this leader, they split their time over the three categories above as follows:
20% – planning presentations to parents, assemblies, involvement at school activities etc.
10% – being involved in student discipline, community emergencies, staff issues etc.
70% – thinking and planning deeply for the future success of the school.
By contrast, they suggested that a typical teacher with a full teaching load was more likely to look like:
80% – the bulk of their day is teaching in the classroom, marking assessment and planning for upcoming lessons as well as co-curricular commitments.
10% – perhaps responding to a student incident, parent complaint or something else going wrong.
10% – re-thinking how they might teach units, introduce new units or assessments and professional development
I would hazard a guess that for many SLT (excluding Principals) their split might look something like:
60% – doing all of the administrative tasks listed above such as day relief, managing events like Assemblies, co-ordinating photos etc, teaching 1-2 classes.
25% – responding to things going wrong e.g. discipline issues with students, education outside the classroom trips having problems, staff departing/hiring etc
15% – vision and goal setting for the school.
The above numbers are, of course, going to vary from school to school and leader to leader but I suspect they are broadly accurate because of the ways schools are typically run. Reflecting on this, I have wondered if there is a better way to utilize the particular skills and motivations of educators. I know first hand that when you’re operating in a job outside of your gifting, interests and motivations then it is very quickly draining and stressful. This article from September 2017 led with the opening statement:
The principal of a top Taranaki school has resigned after 12 years in the role – and says other school leaders have congratulated him for getting out of an increasingly stressful profession.
Charles Gibson is one of five Taranaki principals and deputy principals leaving their posts this year.
Kiwi primary school principals and deputies are suffering high levels of stress and burnout because of heavy workloads and a lack of support, a survey has found.
I am not sure any young education graduate imagines the pinnacle of their career is going to look more like an administrative role or running a business than being an inspiring educational visionary.
A Bold Alternative For Educational Leaders:
So what is to be done? Unquestionably schools need to run smoothly and the ‘day to day’ business as usual jobs need to be efficiently taken care of. My thoughts, as intimated above, would be to:
As much as possible, offload the administrative tasks to those who do it best: trained and/or experienced administrators who are ‘process people’ that can adapt their existing knowledge and experience into an educational environment, without necessarily being educational experts.
Free up SLT members to focus exclusively on what they know and do best: educating future generations for the changing requirements of the 21st century workforce and mentoring existing teachers to be the most effective they can in the classroom.
If SLT were not spending hours a week on assigning relief lessons to temporary staff, running detentions for misbehaving students, or performing other administrative tasks, what might their role look like instead? Well, here’s a few thoughts:
Deep and meaningful mentoring and coaching of all teachers, not just those in the first couple of years of their professional careers.
How many teachers regularly have another, experienced educator observe their lessons and provide constructive feedback? Not many I would suggest. Better yet, perhaps some co-teaching could take place allowing a full time classroom teacher the benefit of observing and teaching alongside an expert educator.
Most businesses are increasingly trying to implement effective mentoring/coaching and it makes simple sense for education to follow suit, with the ‘best and brightest’ who have risen to SLT status to share their experience and insights
Find any statistic you like, invariably it will suggest that the majority of students in schooling today will be going into jobs that don’t exist or will look vastly different to what they do today. Therefore, it’s axiomatic that preparing students for that world is not easy. It requires thought, planning, strategy, agility, and a willingness to change direction as appropriate. I wrote about this in October 2017 when I reflected on the “Teachers of Tomorrow”
Knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies. But there is no central bank that prints this currency; we cannot inherit this currency, and we cannot produce it through speculation. We can only develop it through sustained effort and investment by people and for people. And no school system can achieve that without attracting, developing and sustaining great teaching talent. Andreas Schleicher (emphasis my own)
Another telling insight from Andreas Schleicher that I quoted in the blog post above reflects the unique and inherent challenges that education institutes have in trying to be agile and nimble:
Even the most effective attempts to push a government-established curriculum into classroom practice will drag out over a decade, because it just takes so much time to communicate the goals and methods through the different layers of the system and to build them into traditional methods of teacher education. In this age of accelerations, such a slow process is no longer good enough and inevitably leads to a widening gap between what students need to learn and what teachers teach. When fast gets really fast, being slow to adapt makes us really slow. (emphasis my own)
Engage and grapple meaningfully with the issues presented right here and now around things like digital assessment and equity of access to all learners.
Dr Karen Poutasi
I listened to Dr Karen Poutasi (CEO at NZQA) at the SPANZ conference this week and she was talking about the accelerating rate of assessment and the use of Micro Credentials that are focused on providing “just in time” qualifications and relevant skills that employers are wanting. They are trialing this already in Otago – have a look at this link for more information.
The vision of NZQA is to build on the strengths of the current learner focus but to do so by using new tools and in doing this they will be ‘learning locally, leading globally’.
Final Thoughts:
There will be many naysayers who would look at my musings here and declare them out of touch or unrealistic, perhaps even uneconomical. However, a school could economically employ administrators at a ratio of 2:1 or even 3:1 in relation to their Senior Leadership Team. This would reduce the size of their Senior Leadership Teams but in doing so, increase their focus on educational transformation and doing what they love the most.
Significantly, the status quo may not be viable in the short to medium term. Not only is the average length of teaching service reducing (under 5 years from completing training as I understand it), there is an increased drop out rate of trainee teachers as well according to this article from May 2017
Poor pay, high stress, and better career options are being blamed for fewer people completing teacher training.
Figures released by the Ministry of Education show the total number of people training across the early childhood, primary and secondary education sectors fell from 4830 in 2014 to 4220 in 2015 – a drop of 610.
The number of students finishing initial teacher education had declined since 2012, while the number completing secondary teaching qualifications has steadily dropped since 2009.
There is a need to empower educators to do what they’re passionate about – educating and inspiring learners, whilst ensuring that their schools are agile and adaptive to the rapidly changing needs of the workforce of the future. Technology plays a significant role in this, however teachers and senior leaders are the key to effective education. Removing the administrative workload to allow them to be visionaries and forward thinking is the key to enabling our education to continue to be world leading.
It is not surprising that the people with management skills (required or learnt in the second pathway above) tend to lead to quicker acceleration into Senior Leadership Teams (variously SLT or SLG). That experience, along with deep curriculum knowledge, normally marks out Heads of Department as future Assistant or Deputy Principals and, all progressing well, they go on to become Principals of their own schools one day.
All of these task are necessary and certainly they all need to be handled professionally for the smooth running of any school, however it seems to me that in assigning these roles to SLT members they are effectively turned into highly paid administrators. Most, if not all, of these tasks could be successfully managed by a competent administrator who understands processes and systems without requiring a deep understanding of education.
The above numbers are, of course, going to vary from school to school and leader to leader but I suspect they are broadly accurate because of the ways schools are typically run. Reflecting on this, I have wondered if there is a better way to utilize the particular skills and motivations of educators. I know first hand that when you’re operating in a job outside of your gifting, interests and motivations then it is very quickly draining and stressful. 