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FACULTY OF EDUCATION

THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND

from the Centre for Educational Leadership, she has developed a

series of print, online and video resources, which are used to train

others in the facilitation of the OTL™ approach to leadership. To be

accredited as a facilitator, participants attend a nine day ‘train the

trainer’ workshop and must pass nine performance assessments.

The New Zealand cohort of accredited facilitators will go on

to deliver workshops for other principals and educational leaders

throughout New Zealand. Viviane and the Centre for Educational

Leadership have also worked with Bastow Institute of Educational

Leadership in Victoria, Australia where 12 experienced principals

have become accredited facilitators.

“It is very satisfying to get emails from these Victorian

facilitators as they begin to offer this professional learning

opportunity to their colleagues across Victoria. The participant

ratings they send us certainly confirm they are doing a good job.

It is also very pleasing that this work is integrated into a Victorian

government policy to support principals in their leadership of the

improvement of teaching and learning. That provides a shared

educational purpose for this work.”

The train the trainer model is delivered in three phases over

a highly intensive nine days. The first phase involves principals

learning about the OTL™ model and what is required to be a

competent practitioner. They then move on to learning how to teach

the theory and practice of OTL™ in an engaging and responsive

manner. The third phase involves practising teaching what they

have learned during the nine days to prove they can deliver the

OTL™ approach to other leaders in education.

“The workshops are largely about working through on-the-job

issues that participants haven’t been able to resolve. It goes well

beyond talking about how to lead to actually doing it, critiquing

what is done and then improving it until all parties agree that the

walk matches the talk”.

During the workshops, the participants bring important

job-related problems to the table – typically ones that are long

standing and have been difficult to resolve. Initially the focus is

on uncovering and critiquing participants’ assumptions about the

problem and their own and others’ contribution to it.

Once this tacit theory is made explicit, participants learn how

to critique and change their practice so they achieve outcomes that

they and the other parties believe are more effective and more

satisfying.

One principal learned why student spelling and grammar

had not improved despite three different interventions over a

four-year period and expenditure of about $50,000. While he had

discussed the interventions with teachers, he had assumed rather

than checked that they believed spelling and grammar to be as

important as he did.

Once he really listened to his staff, he learned they had done

their training at a time when the emphasis was on writing fluency

and motivation rather than accuracy. As a consequence, they saw

spelling and grammar as less important than he did and they were

not confident of their ability to teach them well.

Now he understood why student results were not improving

and why so much money and time had been wasted. Even more

important, he learned how his own leadership of change had

contributed to the problem and how he could improve his practice

by checking rather than assuming that others shared his own

assumptions about what was important and why.

“The principals see the importance of the OTL™ approach for

them as leaders who are contributing to improvement in their own

schools and across the system,” Viviane says. “That is the driver for

them, and that is the driver for me. At the end of all of this work is

a more engaged and more successful student.”