‘I was relentless’: one principal turned around her school using routines and teacher skills

“I didn’t do much research besides (scouring) the publicly available documentation …

“The college was in more than a million dollars of staffing deficit, had no documented curriculum, a very loosely implemented pedagogical model, a group of leaders who had spun such complicated webs of deceit that we felt like we were constantly peeling an onion, only to find another one of those tiny little onions on the side – we then had to peel those ones, too.

“That was life at Rosebud,” Holt tells delegates at a recent school improvement summit in Sydney.

Musing that she had been called in to untangle ‘the weeds’ of what it takes to lead grassroots improvement at scale, Holt goes on to chart the cultural and instructional turnaround she’s led at Rosebud SC since securing the principalship some eight years ago – a recruitment win she says came as a total surprise.

The initial scene at the Victorian school was fraught, Holt suggests.

“The leadership team consisted of either, ‘I do it my way’, sort of crusted-on types, ‘don’t tell me what to do’, or inexperienced leaders who were treated so poorly and disregarded and occasionally mocked.

“Staff surveying at the time put trust in colleagues at 27 per cent positive, five per cent neutral and 68 per cent negative.”

In her early days in the job Holt made a point to interview every staff member. Their responses were telling, she says. 

“Some cried, some hugged me – and I don’t like hugs. Several told me they would get rid of me, like they got rid of everybody else. Some told me it was their school, and my favourite was that we were ‘the outsiders’.

“…I had hundreds of intentional conversations – some formal, many informal. I was permanently curious, not furious.

“I worked out who the power brokers were (and) picked them off, one by one. I was clear, I was kind, I was unwavering, but I was relentless.”

Holt knew the school urgently had to get clear on its improvement agenda before anything else could fall into place.

“We needed to invest in our staff, and we needed to create high-functioning teams because that trust piece was just so crucial for any change,” she says.

This was no easy feat at the beginning, the principal noted. 

“It was really hard in the first few years. We were an underperforming school.

“We received significant Department of Education attention, always phrased as ‘support’…

“But we were so busy cleaning up and peeling the onion that we weren’t necessarily sure where we should focus.

“There was just so much going on in the place that we didn’t understand. We had a number of false starts. We had some small wins, but we didn’t get very much traction,” she reflects.

Despite these small gains and some solid curriculum work that was underway, student outcomes weren’t lifting in the way Holt wanted. 

The Department weren’t happy, either, she indicates.

“As my first contract ended, I was told in no uncertain terms that our school data needed to improve for me to continue my employment.

“And I knew this, but I was really cranky at the lack of recognition of what we’d achieved so far.

“Regardless, it was true. Hurt feelings and all. We did need to get some traction. We had more students entering our school at what I would say was alarmingly low levels of learning [and] we needed a plan.”

When she happened upon the science of learning and began driving its implementation, Holt says she felt like she was 'on the black market of education'. 

Resolved in her mission to turn the ship around, Holt and her staff embarked on a serious professional learning regime.

The science of learning – and its application in the classroom – soon opened up before them.  

“We went to conferences in Sydney and Perth, we visited schools in Canberra and on the Gold Coast.

“We read and read and read. We listened to hours of podcasts [on double speed].

“We formed our own opinions. We agreed on the direction – all of this was before the Victorian Government was on board.

“I felt like we were on the black market of education,” Holt says.

“Luckily, my childhood of being the slightly naughty but academic kid was proving quite helpful.

“So, we had our improvement agenda. We were becoming a science of learning school. That’s what we thought it was.”

But by far the most crucial lever of change was the work Holt led in addressing the student behaviour, engagement and wellbeing issues that were routinely derailing lessons and learning.   

“Our greatest challenge wasn’t poor behaviour, that was an issue, but it was a lack of engagement in learning and it was a lack of learning rigour – and that’s what we needed to address.

“There was that sort of very laid-back, ‘Peninsula feel’ about the place.”

This vibe manifested in numerous ways amongst students, Holt elaborates.

“Coming to class late, pushing and shoving in the corridors or play fighting, disengaging from a task in a lesson, sitting on laptops, being removed from class and standing in corridors – which is every principal’s worst nightmare, teachers struggling to get through content, (and) parents making excuses with their obsession of their child being ‘happy’.”

Holt’s ‘ah-ha’ moment came when she witnessed a presentation by behaviour expert Dr Tim McDonald.

“I liked that [the classroom mastery approach] was grounded in the cognitive science, I liked that it was solution-focused. For me, this was going to be it,” Holt says.

“So at the start of 2023, we started our intensive and ongoing professional learning and we coached the four key routines and a cue to start (a lesson).

 ”We use an entry and exit routine, a question routine and a voices routine.

‘Our staff are coached teacher skills – the fundamentals of effective classroom practice, essentially, such as … proximity to students, use of names, voice, politeness.”

The classroom routines and teacher skills are used and drilled in consistently across the school at all times, Holt notes. 

“The thing about our routines is that we are relentless in our implementation of them, and in our ongoing coaching and the fidelity to the teacher skills. We still coach every single day at Rosebud.

“Every staff member is still coached consistently. We have an entry level of expectation that is [extremely high] compared to maybe what some schools are doing when they’re talking about routines. It is relentless.”

This approach is a deliberate means of increasing staff’s collective confidence in using these skills, Holt says.

“We include them in staff meetings, staff events, the questions and voices routines happens in classrooms (and) parent information nights, team meetings.

“It is who we are as a whole school.”

Staff have also welcomed Holt’s intensive coaching model and are now used to having up to 10-15 adults in their classroom observing their practice.

In fact, staff from some 200 schools have dropped in to see what Rosebud teachers are doing differently.

It’s been a seismic cultural shift, the principal says.

“We openly refer to the teacher skills in staff meetings, briefings, one-on-one conversations.

“We overtly reference what we’re going to do when we’re doing a presentation. So, if this was me today at school, I would say, ‘I really want to focus on my scanning today...’

“Prior to [this] we didn’t have a coaching model at the school at all or an observation model.

“It was just me trying to get in locked doors quite often – [so, a] huge cultural shift there.

“Everybody understands coaching is just part of [who we are as a school].”

EducationHQ is a media partner of the Australian School Improvement Summit. Read more of our event coverage here and here and here.