1. Busy-ness/Business as Usual
Busy-ness/Business as Usual? Potential for the School Leader Quality Standard to Impact Teaching and Learning
Pamela Adams, Ph.D.
Faculty of Education/School of Graduate Studies
University of Lethbridge

2. Re-thinking Business as Usual
What does ‘business as usual’ look like?
Why do we ‘do’ leadership the way it is often presently enacted at the system and school level?
What do leaders of learning do differently?
In what ways can we re-imagine how the School Leadership Quality Standard and the Teaching Quality Standard could be implemented?

3. Paradoxical Intentions Viktor Frankl (1946): Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning
Brainstorm the processes, structures, or practices that will almost certainly ensure that implementation of a SLQS or TQS will fail?

4. Checking Assumptions to Avoid the Magic Table

5. Checking my Assumptions
Formal and informal leaders can, and must, impact the quality of teaching and learning in schools.
Leaders are not always efficacious in orchestrating the professional learning in ways that will enhance student learning.
Facilitating the professional learning of school leaders and teachers is often not coordinated, purposeful, and comprehensive.

6. Paradigms that Guide Implementation of Initiatives such as the SLQS/TQS:
Rationalist
Implementation As
Associative
Implementation As
Constructivist

7. The Exploration Begins:
: 142 schools in AISI, Rocky View School Division, Calgary Professional Development Consortium Science Lead Teachers, Spirit of Leadership in Alberta
What conditions/practices facilitate implementation of change initiatives?
What does teacher learning look like? What does school leader learning look like?
: Chinook’s Edge School Division
In what ways does implementation of a comprehensive and coordinated professional learning plan impact teaching and leading practices?
2012: 2013: Westwind School Division
In what ways does an inquiry-based professional learning model impact implementation of the Principal Quality Standard and the Teaching Quality Standard?

8. 2014 - 2016: Red Deer Public School District
What types of impacts can system leaders have when they implement and sustain a collaborative inquiry model of school leadership development?
: Northern Lights School Division
In what ways does a relentless focus on instructional leadership impact teaching and student learning?
present: Northern Coast Initiative for School Improvement
In what ways does school leaders’ use of an inquiry-based professional learning model facilitate implementation of the Australian Teaching Standards?
2016 – 2018: Greater Victoria Public School District
In what ways does implementation of an inquiry-based model of professional learning impact school leaders’ efficacy?

9. Guiding Principles for Implementing the SLQS/TQS
Learning is a process of growth rather than an episode or event
All participants are competent
Judgment and criticism do not enhance professional practice
Learning is a collaborative process
Effective leading is necessarily distributed and often democratized
The moral imperative of leading learning is to impact student learning as directly as possible
Leading learning causes reflective action that results in conscious competence
Central office has a critical role in modeling the leadership of learning
Educators’ professional practice is enhanced through an ethos of shared responsibility

10. LEARNING TO LEAD & LEADING LEARNING: SHIFTING TO AN INQUIRY-BASED MODEL
Episodic Sustained/Cyclical External Accountability Shared Responsibility Offsite Site-embedded Industrial Differentiated Didactic Reflective Competitive Collaborative Depersonalized Contextualized/Differentiated Privatized Knowledge Shared Knowledge

11. Leading Learning in Your Context: Table Talk
Describe learning that you have facilitated or participated in that included one or more of these characteristics:
Cyclical and Sustained
Site-embedded/job-embedded
Collaborative
Sense of ownership/shared responsibility
Differentiated
Reflective
Shared knowledge

12. Re-thinking Business as Usual
What can you do differently when implementing the Standards?

13. Feel free to contact me at: