Marilyn's+story

This wiki is managed by Marilyn Chambers of QFactor - Learning Improvement Facilitation and Educational Services. Phew! What a mouthful. [|www.qfactor.com.au] In January, 2009, after 'retiring' from Tallangatta Secondary College, I started QFactor so that I can be available to continue providing support, coaching and PD to teachers and students in how to continuously improve learning. I am in business to help people learn.



My first encounter with "Quality Learning" was in 1997 when I was fast burning out as a VCE English teacher, Leading Teacher establishing Middle Years Education and giving middle years students a voice and a presence in the school, P-12 Curriculum leader, member and leader of numerous committees at school and in the community. I was ( and still am) married with five kids. In short, I was running around being so busy, I wasn't really being all that effective - but I thought I was.

My 10 and 12 year old sons gave me a mother's day gift that year, a wall plaque to hang keys on which had three lttle hearts hanging from the key pegs labelled 1,2 and 3 and, above that, a caption which read, "Mum's busy, take a number." This became my shame, my emblem, my drive to change my life and to find a better way to be an effective teacher but, most importantly, a real mother. I was so lucky to be forced by my principal to attend a Quality in Schools PD ( as if I needed __another__ thing to implement!!) I remember being so grumpy that I was required to attend this workshop - but then I started to listen and realised that what I was hearing made sense and just might be what I was searching for.

That was the beginning. My involvement in Quality has led to the transformation of my teaching, my family life, and has helped to make Tallangatta Secondary College the lighthouse school it is. In 1999, with the encouragement of my school and my family, I applied for and was succesful in gaining the first Lindsay Thompson Fellowship which enabled me to spend 10 weeks in the US working with David Langford as he delivered his iconic 4-Day conference and visiting school districts around the US where David has had influence. I even went to Mt Edgecumb High School in Alaska where it all began for David to check him out and make sure that this quality stuff really sticks - it does.

The Fellowship provided me with unique opportunities to learn from inspirational practitioners and to see the pitfalls that would arise in Australia as we implemented the principles and practices of continuous improvement in the quality of all that we do. The thing that grabbed me was that for the first time in my career, here was a set of principles supported by practical, doable practices that would improve things. For the first time I had a foundation of theory AND practice. In previous years we had been urged to improve, given targets and milestones to achieve, but never a method. Conversely we had been bombarded with programs and boxed sets of great ideas - but without a holistic foundation of why we should use them or how they fitted into our practices. They were always an add-on, an extra burden. You know the script.

With the approaches I learned in Quality, I realised that if we understand systems thinking, if we can see the interconnected elements of our systems and can recognise where variation occurs, can see why improvement is needed and can find ways to effectively measure our progress, then we have some hope of making sustainable changes that __are__ improvements, not just change for the sake of it and a vague hope that something might be better as a result. We would also stop chasing people to blame for our woes. I learned that it is processes and systemic factors that cause problems, then people react to those problems. In a busy day I realised that my efforts were much better spent improving and standardising processes through documentation, coaching and sharing than gossipping in corridors and whining about colleagues who meant well but probably did not even know about my failing processes and problems - they certainly did not set out to sabotage my efforts, even if this seemed to have happened. Wow! with that realisation I found hours and hours in my week.

I developed the analogy of a brick wall. The curriculum, the programs that we use, the processes and structures we establish to manage people are the bricks that make up our school (or home or community group or business) and the values, the purposes and the vision are the foundations of our wall. The relationships we develop and the level of care we take to continuously improve our system and include the people in it as partners in improvement are the mortar that holds our wall together and keep it strong. Schools keep piling bricks on their wall - but so often they don't connect to the other bricks and so after a time external factors knock them down - or they are shaken off because they have no connection to the other bricks, or serve no purpose in the wall. In many cases so many bricks have been piled on, there is no order or stability in the wall at all and eventually it crumbles, wobbles or becomes so high and unstable it is terrifying. Some times the bricks and the wall serve no purpose at all - they are just a barrier to learning. I see living the principles and practices of Quality in our organisations as the reason for adding or removing bricks, for strengthening the mortar, for regularly checking the foundations and for making sure that the wall is still needed.

In the past 12 years, my mission has been to find clever ways to simplify the processes I use and make sure that they are focused entirely on learning. Everything I do must make a difference to students - or it is busy work. I also realised that much of what I had been doing was actually denying learning opportunities for my students and making them dependent learners - not interdependent as I hoped they would become. I had my life back. At weekends and evenings when I used to be marking and editing my students' work, I now spent time with my own children. Why? How did I justify this? Well - feedback to students is essential and a critical part of learning - but given in isolation from them and not in the context of reflection by them on their own learning was pointless. My mission was now to find ways of involving students in editing and improving their own work and giving each other feedback, to involve them in clarifying and recognising the criteria for excellence and to give them strategies for self improvement. I had to find ways to set them free from my approval as the measure of their success. I worked to eliminate grading from our secondary school which enabled us all to focus on learning and improvement rather than extrinsic rewards and punishments. The other thing I had been doing wrong (but Oh! so successfully!) was planning for students instead of with them. No wonder they were passive at best and resistant at worst - had I ever involved them in planning their learning? Had I made sure they were committed to the purpose of the lessons or even knew what the purpose was? I was in Montana in 1999, alone and thousands of kilometers away from anyone who loved me, when I realised that most of what I had thought I was good at was working against student learning and independence. If, through this wiki and the workshops and sharing sessions I may be involved with in the future, I can help any of you avoid these mistakes, I am thrilled.

I am indebted to David Langford, Michael King, Jane Kovacs, Rob Palmer and the many students, parents, teachers and principals I have worked with over the past 32 years who have been my mentors and my inspiration. I also owe most of my learning to my family. Thank you, all, and let's keep improving.

This report of my fellowship was written to provide dot pointed great ideas that teachers and principals can use immediately. It tracks my journey in the US and France as I visited many schools and met many inspirational teachers and administrators who shared their learning with me. While the people may be older and may have moved on, their ideas, wisdom and enthusiasm is just as relevant today as it was in 1999.