How school leaders are developing engaging learning through design hubs

LEARNING FRONTIERS Insights & Ideas 3 1
ISSUE 3
Insights and Ideas
LEADERSHIP AND GOVERNANCE
L E A R N I N G
FRONTIERS
PROFESSIONAL PRACTICES TO INCREASE
STUDENT ENGAGEMENT IN LEARNING

The Australian Institute for Teaching
and School Leadership (AITSL) provides
national leadership for the Commonwealth,
State and Territory Governments in
promoting excellence in the profession
of teaching and school leadership.
As a not-for-profit social enterprise
we’re committed to using the power
of innovation to solve social challenges.
LEARNING FRONTIERS IS A COLLABORATIVE
INITIATIVE CREATED TO TRANSFORM TEACHING
AND LEARNING SO THAT EVERY STUDENT
SUCCEEDS IN AN EDUCATION WORTH HAVING.
The project brings together clusters of schools and other interested
parties – ‘design hubs’ – to explore professional practices that increase
student engagement in learning. Design hubs explore teaching, learning
and assessment practices that are built upon four design principles for
engaging learning.
Learning Frontiers is:
A large scale collaborative enquiry, drawing on the
collective wisdom, experience, ambition and imagination of
participants to develop professional practice that increases
student engagement in learning. Teachers themselves are
constructing the new knowledge the education community
needs to move forward the professional practice of every
Australian teacher.
High quality professional learning for participants in
and out of design hubs. As individuals and in groups,
participants are likely to reconfigure their practice –
leadership and pedagogic – over time as they observe the
benefits of students’ increased engagement in learning.
Teachers are learning from each other, from experts
and others about what engages learners behaviourally,
emotionally and cognitively.
A system level intervention, explicitly intended to
stimulate the growth of new relationships between
schools, and between schools and new partners: families,
communities, businesses and non-profit organisations
and public services amongst others. These new
arrangements – design hubs – are geared to and formed
for the purpose of increasing students’ engagement in
learning. For instance, by extending learning environments
and opportunities beyond the classroom, and for
connecting in-school learning with the outside
‘real world’ of students’ lives.
A scaling and diffusion program, designed to enable
professional practice that increases student engagement
in learning to spread beyond the design hub where the
practice originates.

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4
10
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Insights and Ideas is designed to be an informal ‘research
journal’ for Learning Frontiers. It provides a place to share
learning, evidence and emerging practices from within and
beyond the program, and supports design hubs as they develop
and test their own approaches to engaging learning.
In the first two issues we set out the case for
change in education, explored in detail the concept of
engagement in learning and began to share the early work
being undertaken within design hubs. In this issue we are
focusing on leadership opportunities and challenges. We also
look specifically at how design hubs are developing and the
leadership and governance arrangements that seem to be
working well.
INTRODUCTION TO THIS ISSUE
CONTENTS
FOCUS ON LEADERSHIP & GOVERNANCE
CREATING A CASE FOR CHANGE
LEADERSHIP CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES
Leading your school and leading the hub
Leading innovation
GETTING INVOLVED IN LEARNING FRONTIERS

2 LEARNING FRONTIERS Insights & Ideas 3
FOCUS ON
LEADERSHIP
& GOVERNANCE
In this issue we explore how different leadership roles
and requirements are manifesting through the Learning
Frontiers program, and the implications of this for
school leaders.
We started by conducting interviews with school
leaders who are actively involved in the development
of design hubs, and also with colleagues from
Innovation Unit working alongside them. We wanted
to explore the following dimensions of leadership:
• System level leadership i.e. creation and
development of design hubs for learning
• School level leadership i.e. design and
implementation of new practices for
engaging learning
• Innovation leadership
• Challenges for school leaders in new roles
• Strategies and approaches for developing
leadership capacity and new skills
Throughout this issue we draw heavily on the insights
that came from the interviews. We have also made
explicit connections with the Australian Professional
Standard for Principals and the associated leadership
profiles (http://www.aitsl.edu.au/leadership-profiles).
As in previous issues, material in the form of evidence
from research and practice is included.
KEY
Insights from
principals we
interviewed
Evidence from
research and
practice
Program learning
Extracts from AITSL
Leadership Profiles

Tiffany Mahon
LF DESIGN HUB: Canberra
SCHOOL: Amaroo School
LOCATION: Amaroo, Australian Capital Territory
TYPE: Public (government-maintained)
AGE RANGE: 3-15 (kindergarten to year 10)
STUDENT NUMBERS: 1670
Tiffany has 16 years experience of teaching in the Canberra
area. She has also worked in curriculum development, writing
for the education department and The Australian Curriculum,
Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), before becoming
deputy principal at Amaroo School in 2013.
Tiffany is committed to and passionate about student voice and
personalised learning and her vision for the school stems from
the belief that true engagement comes from feeling completely
empowered in what you’re doing. Her work at Amaroo School has
focused on shifting the approach of teachers away from a focus
on content delivery and towards the creation of an engaged and
enabled learning community that effectively harnesses the power
of technology to support learning.
THE SCHOOL LEADERS WE INTERVIEWED
LF DESIGN HUB: Adelaide
SCHOOL: Birdwood High School (BHS)
LOCATION: Birdwood, South Australia
AGE RANGE: 12-18 (secondary)
STUDENT NUMBERS: 500-600
Over the last five years, as principal Steve has led a team of high
school educators who, bound by the moral imperative of providing
every student with an education worth having, ‘sat back and dared
to imagine’ what an engaging school would look like.
The team and the wider staff have transformed what was a very
traditional Adelaide Hills High School by deliberately moving
away from old structures for organising learning, towards those
that more accurately reflect the world in which young people live.
They sought to engage students in learning that is flexible, and
genuinely personalised, integrated and connected.
LF DESIGN HUB: New South Wales
SCHOOL: Campbelltown
Performing Arts High School
LOCATION: Campbelltown, New South Wales
AGE RANGE: 12-18 (secondary)
Stacey has been a passionate educator for 20 years, beginning
her career as an English, History and Drama teacher, then moving
to be deputy and now principal at Campbelltown Performing Arts
High School in south-western Sydney.
Stacey sees herself as the ‘lead learner’ within the school and
is committed to empowering students as active participants in
their learning. She firmly believes that education has the power to
provide a more equitable future for young people and transform
lives, and she is passionate about creativity and innovation in
education. The school is known for its sophisticated approach to
teacher professional learning.
LF DESIGN HUB: Brisbane
SCHOOL: St Paul’s School
LOCATION: Brisbane, Queensland
TYPE: Private (Anglican)
AGE RANGE: 3-18 (kindergarten, primary, secondary)
Paul began his career as a primary school teacher and in 1999 was
appointed as the founding principal of Burgmann Anglican School
in the Australian Capital Territory, a pre-school to year 12 co-
educational school. Paul became headmaster of St Paul’s School in
Queensland in 2008.
Paul is passionate about creativity and innovation in learning, and
the school vision is to lead in educational thinking and practice.
He has led St Paul’s through a major restructure to create a
unique middle management model designed to coach and
develop teachers in key 21st century pedagogies and in 2009 the
school opened The Centre for Research Innovation and Future
Development. The Centre provides comprehensive, high quality,
targeted professional development opportunities for teachers
based on the coaching model.
Steve Hicks
LF DESIGN HUB: Melbourne
SCHOOL: Wooranna Park Primary School
LOCATION: Dandenong North, Victoria
AGE RANGE: 6-12 (primary)
Ray has been a principal class member of the Victorian
Department of Education since 1978 and has been principal at
Wooranna Park for 29 years.
Ray is a firm believer that if young children are to maximise their
learning, then schools must be a place of optimism, excitement
and challenge, where students and teachers see each day as a
journey that is full of purpose, and where intellectual engagement
and connectedness to the real world are priorities. Breaking out
of the straight-jacket of conventional ‘box-like' school planning
is part of a continuum of radical change that has taken place at
Wooranna Park.
Ray Trotter
Stacey Quince
Paul Browning
SCHOOL: Hilltop Road Public School
LOCATION: Merrylands, New South Wales
AGE RANGE: 5-12 (primary)
Natalie has worked in NSW public schools as both a classroom
teacher and in leadership positions, including executive teacher,
assistant principal, deputy principal and now principal.
Natalie believes that relationships and trust are essential
for students, teachers, parents and the community to learn
together and promote positive, authentic and engaging learning
environments for all. Students are encouraged to be responsible
learners who are actively engaged in the learning process. At
Hilltop Road Public School students learn about leadership and
supporting each other through Peer Support, Buddies and the
Play Leader programs. The school works hard with, and is held in
high esteem by, the local community - instilling a strong sense of
belonging and pride amongst students, staff and families.
Natalie See

CREATING A CASE FOR
CHANGEA case for change is a compelling story designed
to build commitment and prompt action.
In previous issues of Insights and Ideas we set out
elements of the ‘case for change’ in the Australian
education system. We wanted to:
• Create a clear starting point for Learning Frontiers
schools and hubs
• Indicate the level of ambition driving the program
• Spark debate among leaders, teachers and school
communities
• Provide a powerful, framing narrative to motivate
and guide professional practice
School leaders within Learning Frontiers are using
this case for change material, often alongside their
own articulations, to engage staff, students and
the wider school community on both a rational and
emotional level. Learning Frontiers is helping schools
and individuals confront issues that might have
traditionally been avoided, and to engage together
in honest and open debate about what is wrong with
how things are, and what needs to change.
Powers of Persuasion
More than 2000 years ago Aristotle
wrote ‘The Art of Rhetoric’ in which
he described three modes of
persuasion:
• Ethos: the source's credibility, the
speaker's/author's authority
• Logos: the logic used to support
a claim (induction and deduction);
the facts and statistics used to
help support the argument
• Pathos: the emotional or
motivational appeals; use of vivid
and emotional language.
The Heart of Change
Building on his 1996 8-step change
model, in ‘The Heart of Change’
(2002) John Kotter worked with
Dan Cohen to look into the core
problems people face when
leading change. They concluded
that the central issue was changing
the behaviour of people and that
successful change occurs when
speaking to people’s feelings.
They advocate that, rather than
using detailed analysis of a
problem - which has the effect of
‘putting the brakes on’ - leaders
should mobilise solution-finders
by using compelling narratives
that include; ‘Honest facts and
dramatic evidence — customer and
stakeholder testimonies — to show
that change is necessary’.
The Heart of Change: Real-life
Stories of How People Change
Their Organizations, John P. Kotter,
Dan S. Cohen, 2002

A REMINDER OF OUR LEARNING
FRONTIERS CASE FOR CHANGE
Our case for change argued for a different kind
of education that emphasised the need for young
Australians who were successful learners, confident
and creative individuals, and active and informed
citizens (as set out in the Melbourne Declaration).
“When my students are deeply engaged in
learning they experience flow. They are just
there. They don’t want to leave. Time is not an
issue at all.”
In Issue 2, we explored the concept of ‘engagement’ in
detail, looking at different definitions being used around
the world, and the evidence that linked engagement
to student performance in school and success in later
life. We introduced the idea of ‘deep engagement’ as
focused on not just intellectual engagement in learning
tasks, but also on the development of a strong learning
disposition that lasts beyond school.
Learning Frontiers values both short-term engagement
in worthwhile learning tasks and the development of a
lifelong identity as a learner.
By looking at data gathered through the Learning
Frontiers Engagement Survey, we began to build
a picture of the ‘state of play’ with regards to
engagement within Learning Frontiers schools.
What is an education worth
having for St Paul’s School?
Throughout 2014, a team at St Paul’s School, Brisbane
wrestled with the question ‘what is an education worth
having?’ as part of the development of their new Strategic
Plan. They asked themselves what the world would be
like in 2028 when a child in kindergarten in 2015 graduates
from Year 12. Thirty global leaders across various fields
collaborated to help answer the question and created a film
series as a result.
“We’re in a world that is changing so much that you can’t
stand still. Some of my staff complain to me in very subtle
ways, but you can’t slow down because the world is ever-
changing - we have to adjust otherwise we are not preparing
our children for the future.” (Paul Browning, Principal)
In Issue 1, we asked the question ‘Are Australian schools
providing an education worth having?’ and set out an
argument for why we believed the answer to be ‘no’. The
key focus of that argument was that many education
providers (schools and systems) are not meeting the
needs of young people - that schools were created at a
different time, for a different set of purposes, and that it
needs to brought up to date.
Fundamentally, much of education is
disconnected...
• From young people’s needs and their likely future
• From the demands of employers
• From the digital age, modern communication and
participation
And these disconnections mean significant numbers
of our young people are not fully engaged in learning.
Both students and educators recognise disengagement
as an issue and see the need for and potential of
learning that is engaging.
Tim Smith, Mt Alvernia College, Brisbane
38%
I am usually
bored at
school
31%
I don’t try to
do my work
again if I’m not
happy with it
21%
I don’t think
that school is
helping me
become the
person I want
to be
We discovered that…
• At a glance, students’ attitudes towards school work
and effort at school are highly positive
• However, digging deeper, there is a significant
minority of students who do not have a positive
attitude to school or the learning that takes place
there
• This results in some poor learning outcomes and,
as students get older, they are less likely to be
engaged
• Nearly a quarter of students didn’t believe school
was helping them become the person they wanted
to be
• There were some clues in the survey results about
what might be causing a lack of deep engagement
in learning, for example: activities in school are not
‘hands on’, learning seems irrelevant to real life, and
students don’t receive useful feedback.

THE CREATION OF DESIGN HUBS
Learning Frontiers is a collaborative initiative. It brings
clusters of schools and other interested parties
together into ‘design hubs’, through which they are
learning about and testing professional practices that
increase student engagement in learning.
Why design hubs?
Meeting the challenge
Schools taking part in Learning Frontiers are at
the vanguard of a growing number of schools and
education systems around the world that recognise the
need to radically rethink their approach to learning.
Collaboration and risk management
Practitioners need explicit models and processes to
give them the skills and confidence to innovate in
their practice. In addition, school and system leaders
need to ensure that schools become environments
that are culturally and practically conducive to the
development of new practices. Mostly this is about
creating opportunities for collaboration and helping
practitioners to accurately calculate and manage risk.
Sharing the load
Schools working together to develop and test new
practices generate a more robust evidence base
about their impact and effects than schools working
alone. Such schools are also in a position to share
around the activities and distribute responsibilities,
which might otherwise prove too difficult for individual
organisations.
Trusting and productive partnerships
Social capital and trusting relationships develop in
successful partnerships between schools and are
essential for effective collaboration in innovation
processes. There are complexities associated with
schools working in partnership, but also considerable
experience to draw upon to address these.
New opportunities and new players
New players in the education scene include
philanthropic organisations, social entrepreneurs, the
creative and cultural sector and for-profit businesses.
These new entrants represent a great opportunity for
schools hoping to expand their capacity to be creative
about how to better meet the needs of their students.
Facilitative governance
for design hubs
Current models of governance in education are
focused, almost exclusively, on individual schools.
While school governors are drawn from amongst
stakeholder groups and act as agents of the
community and the wider system, their main role is to
govern the single school to which they are appointed.
They set school policy, manage its resources, appoint
and manage the performance of the principal and hold
the school to account.
In the design hubs that comprise Learning Frontiers,
the collective endeavour and shared accountability
to which principals have committed requires, in
addition to good governance at the level of individual
participating schools, a governance arrangement for
the hub that:
• sets vision, values and direction
• creates an authorising environment for
innovation by granting permissions to
act in new ways
• sets boundaries to focus the hub on what’s
important
• holds participating individuals and institutions,
including schools, to account
• allocates and manages resources to deliver the
hub vision.

Critically, hub governance needs to
‘walk the talk’ and reflect the aims and
constituency of the hub it seeks to
govern. So when we think about hub
governance we must attend to:
Emerging features of hub governance arrangements
A Learning Frontiers design hub typically comprises
a diverse group of schools (cross sectoral and cross
phase); individuals and organisations other than
schools (cultural institutions, businesses, faith groups,
parent groups) often with quite different governance
arrangements and priorities; and external consultancy
or facilitation (higher education, AITSL, specialist
independents) whose job is critical friendship and to
supplement the expertise of the hub membership.
Add to this teachers, students and parents; mix in
the radical ambition of the design hubs, occasionally
in tension with how things are currently done in
schools; set all of this within the context of high stakes
accountability frameworks, and the hub governance
challenge emerges as complex and demanding.
COMPOSITION:
• Democratic - emphasising
representation and voice
• Inclusive - involving people
beyond traditional leadership
roles and institutional
boundaries
• Non hierarchical - prioritising
talent and commitment over
positional power or seniority
OPERATION:
• Informal - relational rather than
transactional in their internal
processes
• Flexible - using online and
distance methods as well as face
to face meetings, and convening
ad hoc when work requires it
• Permeable - connecting with
other groups and individuals
to engage with their ideas and
invite them into decision making
PURPOSE:
• Learning - gathering
intelligence from the hub and
beyond to inform decision
making and direction
• Problem solving - initiating
positive action to overcome
barriers to progress
• Equitable - ensuring that
all learners have the same
access to new opportunities
developing in the design hub
For these design hubs to work, their governance
arrangements need to facilitate decision making and
actions that are coherent with the overall vision and
goals of the hub. To achieve this, an explicit design
process has been undertaken in each hub to agree the
optimal, most fit-for-purpose arrangement that enables
the hub to make progress. As with any innovation, there
has been a certain amount of trial and error to arrive
at the current models, and these models may not hold
forever as the hubs evolve and new challenges require
new configurations.
System Leadership & Governance: Leadership Beyond
Institutional Boundaries, Innovation Unit, National
College of School Leadership & Demos, 2007
C
O
MPOSITIO
N
OPER
ATION PURP
O
SE
Who leads
and why,
and who
chooses?
How
leaders
act
The specific
role and remit
of leaders

Design Team
EMERGING DESIGN HUB STRUCTURE

“I see my main role as connecting
people and building positive
relationships. We make good use of
technology, but we also understand
the importance of regular personal
contact too. I connect directly with two
schools in the hub, making sure that
the principals get rich and up to date
information, so they can influence and
be part of decision making. We are in
a very real sense learning from each
other as we experiment with different
organisational forms and work out how
to establish frameworks for appropriate
challenge. All the time we are building
trusting relationships.”
Design hubs are still developing, but they are
working towards a structure which typically
comprises the following features
or characteristics:
Participation
• Between 7 and 10 schools are typically involved
• Schools represent all sectors, sizes and age ranges
Hub engine
• Involves the principals from all participating schools
• The decision making body of the hub - makes key
decisions and sets the direction of travel
• Meets once per term
Enabling leaders
• A subset of the hub engine
• Take hub engine decisions and are charged with
making them happen
Enacting leaders
• Those working within the hub schools who
are taking activity forward
Hub activities
• Hub activities are focused on exploring, identifying
and evaluating the impact of ‘promising practices’
and finding ways to share them within and beyond
the hub, through the development of tools and
resources, and the collection of data and evidence
• All schools are involved in all hub activities
Partners
• Hubs broker relationships with a number of non-
school partners who can support the work being
undertaken
• Examples include; universities (evidence gathering
and research input), technology companies
(resources to connect schools and build digital
tools), design experts (specific support on use of
innovation methods, e.g design thinking, prototyping)
“It took a while to get off the ground.
We developed the leadership and
governance model after about 6
months, meanwhile schools started
doing the work. The governance
model has been critical to getting
things moving, but is still at an early
stage. Everyone has a really clear
understanding of their role - they can
go away and do the work knowing they
have permission.”
“We were nervous about being singled
out as a lab site. The distinction
created some issues in our hub, but
we have tried to communicate it as
a level playing field. We very quickly
broadened the Enabling Leaders group
and half the schools are on it now.”

LEADERSHIP
CHALLENGES AND
OPPORTUNITIES
Within Learning Frontiers, school
leaders are being required to lead
at both a system level, through
the creation and development of
design hubs, and at a school level,
as they support the design and
implementation of new practices that
will lead to engaging learning.
In this issue we set out to explore and learn
how opportunities for different leadership
roles and approaches are being stimulated
through Learning Frontiers, and how these
are similar or different to what school
leaders usually do. In particular, we wanted
to understand the challenges school
leaders are facing in carrying out these
new roles, and the strategies they are using
to develop their own capacity and skills to
overcome these.
We asked the school leaders we
interviewed a series of questions designed
to understand:
• The leadership roles they have in their
schools and design hubs, and the
connections and/or differences between
these roles
• Their greatest challenges and
achievements in relation to school and
hub leadership
• Whether Learning Frontiers had resulted
in any shifts in leadership roles or
expectations within their school
• As school leaders, how they set
expectations and challenge practice that
falls short of those expectations
• How new ideas are introduced into
their schools and what role teachers
play in leading the development of new
practices or approaches
• Their approach to risk and the most
ambitious things they have done within
their schools
• Who else leads in the school.
The following sections set out some of the
leadership challenges and opportunities
that emerged from the interviews, along
with supplementary evidence and insights.

LEADING YOUR SCHOOL
AND LEADING THE HUB
COLLABORATION ACROSS SECTORS
>> New & different relationships
>> Getting on with the work
ROLE OF THE PRINCIPAL IN
ESTABLISHING THE WORK
OF THE HUBS
>> Permission-giver & enabler
>> The problem & power of influence
LEADERSHIP OF LEARNING
>> The principal as ‘Lead Learner’
>> New kinds of leadership within hubs
IN THIS SECTION:
LEADING INNOVATION
LEADING INNOVATION
WITHIN A SCHOOL
>> Embracing uncertainty
and learning from failure
>> Setting out a bold vision
>> Enabling structures & systems
INNOVATING TOGETHER
THROUGH DESIGN HUBS
>> What are we going to learn?
>> Building trust & sharing risk
>> Broadening engagement in
the innovation process

LEADING YOUR SCHOOL
AND
LEADING THE HUB
COLLABORATING
ACROSS SECTORS

NEW AND DIFFERENT
RELATIONSHIPS
School leaders working within Learning Frontiers
design hubs describe a longstanding tradition that
sees Australian schools working very much in isolation,
especially across sectors. So the cross-sectoral nature
of the collaboration taking place through these hubs
is presenting a groundbreaking opportunity in which
schools and professionals from three diverse sectors
(government/public, Catholic, independent) are
working together for the first time.
As many entirely new relationships are being formed
through Learning Frontiers, participants in the hubs
are revealing that it is the particular nature of these
fledgling relationships that is so potent. Hub leaders
are seeing them as qualitatively different from the more
transactional relationships they’ve shared in the past
because they have come from a unique starting point.
These relationships are developing from a locality or
system level commitment to educational improvement
and an openness to shared learning.
Creating these new relationships is not simple, but
leaders within hubs recognise that openness to the
ideas and practice of others is absolutely key. They
understand the need to model what they expect
from the collaboration; visibly sharing what they do
and know with a spirit of generosity and expectations
of reciprocity. But with this kind of openness comes
increased vulnerability as schools and their leaders
admit publicly that they are not getting everything right
- that they have a lot to learn from others.
Collaboration within the Australian education
system: what makes Learning Frontiers
different?
There are many examples of initiatives that
recognise the value of collaboration is not new
in Australia. In higher education, the Australian
Collaborative Education Network (ACEN) brings
together educators, industry providers, researchers
and policy actors interested in integrating workplace
experiences in educational practice (such as
internships or placements). Meanwhile, since 2001,
the coalition of Knowledge Building Schools has
brought together 12 Sydney schools from multiple
sectors to develop, practice and share inquiry-based
professional learning, centred on a commitment to
student voice. At practitioner level, Project Learning
Swap Meet has held a series of DIY events for and
by educators to share resources, experiences and
questions about Project Learning.
Learning Frontiers is unique because, unlike these
and other collaborative initiatives, schools from
across sectors are working together to establish
the Hub’s enquiry priorities, rather than gathering
around a pre-established agenda or the interests of
a specific school. The scale of the Learning Frontiers
network (currently around 50 schools in five regional
design hubs), and the focus on involving non-
education partners (businesses, wider community
and specialist organisations), is also unique and
holds great promise for creating changes at a
system level.
“This is very unusual. We traditionally
see ourselves in competition. Normally
it’s about trade secrets and retaining
intellectual property. But we as a school
are changing our thinking. We know
that collaborating across sectors and
schools is the route to a bigger and
more amazing impact for children.”
“We’ve worked in communities of
schools before but not across sectors.
In Learning Frontiers the purpose is
not to showcase but to build trust and
expose the messy business of learning.
This is challenging. We know learning
in our own school - but at the hub level
the student profile is massively diverse.
Getting a shared understanding of what
engagement or disengagement looks
like is critical, and the more we work
together the more the differences are
falling away.”

GETTING ON
WITH THE WORK
Where old barriers to this new kind of cross-sector
collaboration exist, leaders are finding ways to minimise
or completely remove them. They are recognising
that, ultimately, the hub exists only when individuals
and groups of people connect. The best way to build
trust and good relationships between these people,
and in turn strengthen the collaboration, is to get them
together to do work that they value.
Of course there are practical barriers to this new
collaborative work. It is taking time to establish new
ways of working - organising how and when people
will come together, and what they will work on. But as
achievements are made, trust is built and relationships
develop as the hub develops.
Michael Fullan believes that when principals
connect with and learn from others beyond
their own school, this leads to a willingness and
desire to also make a wider system contribution.
“Our own leaders at the school and district
level must have an awareness that, not only
should they be thinking beyond their individual
districts to the province, but they should
also be extending their thinking beyond – to
other provinces, other jurisdictions and other
countries. And when you define things that way,
there’s a greater sense of identity – the leader’s
commitment gets larger. It’s not only your school
but also other schools, not only other schools
but also your district, not only your district but
also the province, and so on.”
21st Century Leadership: Looking Forward;
An interview with Michael Fullan and Ken
Leithwood, 2012
KNOTS AND THREADS:
THE POWER OF NETWORKS
The image of a net made up of individual
threads and knots is used by Madeleine
Church as a metaphor for how networks work.
Members of the network are connected together
by threads of communication and relationship.
And these threads come together in knots of
activity, which hold the participant members in a
web of activity and communication, out of which
grows the purposeful work of the net.
The strength of the net comes through the work
that the members do together and the trust that is
built through the communication necessary for the
work to happen and to connect with others in the
network. The threads tie members to each other
through joint activity and create the strength to
hold the network together as a whole.
Knots and Threads: The Power of Networks,
Madeline Church, 2005
EVIDENCE

‘Principals encourage staff to contribute
to education networks, support the
learning of others and develop pedagogy.
They model collaborative leadership
and engage with other schools and
organisations to share and improve
practice and encourage innovation in
the education system. They develop an
innovative and outward focused role as
a leader influencing school excellence
across the system.’
Australian Professional Standard for
Principals and the Leadership Profiles
EVIDENCE
COLLECTIVE TEACHER EFFICACY (CTE)
Collective teacher efficacy is ‘conceptualised as the level of
confidence a group of teachers feels about its ability to organise
and implement whatever educational initiatives are required
for students to reach high standards of achievement’. Where
levels of CTE are high, teachers are more likely to persist in
the face of initial failure because it creates opportunities for
a confident group to learn its way forward (rather than giving
up).
Studies show a significant positive relationship between
CTE and achievement by students, and several have
found that the effects of CTE on achievement exceed
the effects of students’ socio-economic status (e.g.,
Collective Teacher Efficacy: Its Meaning, Measure,
and Impact on Student Achievement, Roger D.
Goddard, Wayne K. Hoy and Anita Woolfolk
Hoy, 2000), a variable that typically explains
by far the bulk of achievement variation
across schools, usually in excess of
50%.
“We are a small primary school
in a relatively deprived area and we
are working with big high schools and
affluent private schools - and there is
a genuine respect that could be long
lasting. We each bring a different set of
expertise and each wants to learn from
the other. For the first time you have
some people that share some of your
values, you feel as though you are not
by yourself and you are playing a role in
something larger.”
CTE increases when
leaders clarify goals by, for example:
identifying new opportunities for the school
to develop (often collaboratively)
articulating and inspiring others with a vision
of the future promoting cooperation and
collaboration among staff towards common goals
• encouraging their staff members to network with others
facing similar challenges in order to learn from
their experiences
• structuring their schools to allow for collaborative work
among staff
School Leaders’ Influences on Student Learning:
The Four Paths, Kenneth Leithwood, Stephen
Anderson, Blair Mascall and Tiiu Strauss, 2010
in The Principles of Educational Leadership
& Management, Tony Bush, Les Bell,
David Middlewood, 2010
•
•

‘Principals build capacity by creating a
culture of empowerment, responsibility
and self-directed research that leads
to the development of a professional
learning community.’
ROLE OF THE PRINCIPAL
IN ESTABLISHING
THE WORK OF THE HUBS
PERMISSION-GIVER
AND ENABLER
Principals have a crucial role to play in the setup and
development of design hubs, and, unsurprisingly,
securing their involvement is proving difficult.
Irrespective of how distributed a leadership model
principals may utilise in their schools, or how
practically involved they become in the activity of the
hub, they are the gatekeepers for their school. Initially
principals must give permission for the commitment
of time and resource to the development of new
innovative practice through the hubs but, ultimately,
they also control the level of impact these new
practices can have.
Learning Frontiers as a program has ambitions for
whole-school and whole-system change. Individual
teachers can create small movements in practice
within their schools, but only ever implement them
in a limited way without high-level leadership
engagement. The real potential of design hubs is to
provide legitimacy for a wide range of professionals
in schools to create and test changes to practice, but
the potential to successfully ‘land’ new practices and
take them to scale just doesn’t exist unless principals
endorse and promote them.
In practical terms, variation exists in the different
roles being played by principals across the hubs.
There is however a necessary level of contribution
for the hubs’ work to progress. Every principal must
demonstrate high-level commitment through input
to strategic decision-making, and seek to empower
others to lead working groups and discrete strands of
activity.
“It becomes increasingly difficult to
commit the necessary time to really
engage in this program because
there are too many demands on the
school’s and principal’s time. I am the
only principal in the hub engine, the
others are mostly vice principals. At
times perhaps the commitment to the
program isn’t as strong as my own. We
are considering an ‘associate’ status for
those wanting to stay engaged but not
ready to fully take part.”

Program learning: influencing strategies
issues one and two of Insights and Ideas. These
materials were used well at regional workshops,
where participants explored, discussed and adapted
the content. How could they be used on a wider
basis within individual schools participating in the
hub?
“The practices involved in building
this collaboration are, to a certain
degree, very similar to within my own
school. We need to focus on building
a high degree of trust, allowing people
to share and build ideas, and take
risks together. But we also need to
understand that these people aren’t our
own staff, and the implications of that.”
“Leaders and the teachers who are engaged in
the work of the hubs need to find different ways to
influence others and secure wider involvement and
participation. People focus on one or two influencing
styles rather than trying out new ones and this
relates to marshalling a really compelling case for
change that is both emotional and rational.”
David Albury, Innovation Unit
THE PROBLEM AND
POWER OF INFLUENCE
Leading a design hub is fundamentally different
from leading a school. Within schools, hierarchy and
organisational structures give positional authority to
key individuals, and the principal is clearly in charge.
Within the hub, where no positional leadership power
exists, leaders are confronted with the challenge of
leading through influence and persuasion.
Although the business of the hub is very similar to
the school - development of engaging learning and
associated professional practices - all hub leaders,
irrespective of their capability or experience, are
struggling with this challenge.
Within a school, where participants are bound
together through organisational structures, principals
know ‘what levers to pull’ to make things happen.
Within a hub, where this bond is missing and all
participation is voluntary, how should leaders respond
to the task of earning legitimacy for their leadership?
“At school I am declared by the
government as the leader. But within
the hub I can be influential, but I can’t
dictate the direction - I am one of many
leaders. The kind of people that are in
the hub aren’t the kind of people that
will be dictated to.”
Hub leaders and, to a degree all professionals
involved in hub activity, need to understand how
to influence the thinking and actions of others.
This is how new practices and approaches will
spread within schools and across local systems,
and is particularly important when securing the
engagement of principals and senior leaders.
One of the most important approaches to
influencing others is to marshall and share a really
compelling case for change - one that seeks to
engage others both rationally and emotionally.
In the early stages of Learning Frontiers, a clear
program level case for change was set out in the
form of a short paper. It was then reproduced within

‘A critical determinant of the success of
the school is the quality of its principal.
Learning to lead is at the heart of a
principal’s daily practice and great leaders
never stop learning.’
LEADERSHIP
OF LEARNING
EVIDENCE
The Importance and Impact of
‘Learning Leadership’
Teachers stay in teaching or a particular
school for many reasons, but evidence
suggests that, ‘The factor that explains the
decision to stay or not - by a long way
- relates to the nature of leadership.
Learning leadership is the most powerful
incentive to stay in teaching’.
Hattie goes on to explore the role of the learning
leader - ‘To give permission to teachers to
engage in evaluating their impact and then
using this evidence to enhance their teaching
requires leaders who consider that this way of
thinking and acting is valuable. The core lever
with which to create schools that lead to
enhanced impact is the leader’s belief about
his or her role.’
John Hattie, Visible Learning
for Teachers, 2012
THE PRINCIPAL AS ‘LEAD
LEARNER’
Most of the school leaders leading design hubs
describe themselves as the ‘lead learner’ within
their school. Their commitment to leading learning
stems from high levels of personal passion for, and
professional expertise in, education and pedagogy.
A propensity for learning is a recognised characteristic
of great leaders. Where leadership of innovation is
concerned, leaders are demonstrably curious; they
continually look beyond their own organisation, their
sector and country for sources of insight, inspiration and
evidence. They look not just at what others are doing
but why they have come to be doing it and how they
are able to do it. They are adept at uncovering the story
behind the approach or the innovation and the journey
those leaders have been on. Crucially, they are able to
relate that to the journey they and their organisation is
embarking on.
Within design hubs, these learning-oriented leaders are
finding a new arena for deep exploration and assessing
the impact of ideas and practices, as well as extending
the boundaries of their vision by recognising a wider
canvas for learning from beyond the hub.
“I focus on modelling what I expect
others to be doing. I still teach, I am
part of the moderation process around
marking, I help write project-based
learning units of work. I try to model
very clear expectations.”
“We have created momentum around
a rigorous approach that uses action
learning, practitioner learning, feedback
and evidence gathering. When you’re
working in this way staff set their own
high expectations. Every teacher has
a professional learning plan which is
based on their own performance, they
self assess and identify what strategies
they need to employ and what evidence
they need to gather.”

“Being dictatorial will only take you a
certain distance - at some point you
have to take on a distributed leadership
model. Leadership becomes less about
who you are and what position you
hold in the school, and more about
what expertise you have. We wanted
to create a situation in which staff can’t
pass by things that aren’t right and think,
‘I’ll leave it to the leaders to sort out’.”
NEW KINDS OF LEADERSHIP
WITHIN HUBS
Successful school leaders also share and distribute
responsibility for the leadership of learning - to
teachers and other professionals, and increasingly to
students themselves. At the centre of their approach is
the creation of a culture of collective responsibility for
the success of all children and young people.
Principals within Learning Frontiers describe cultures
that are ‘self-managing’, where the majority of staff are
able and willing not only to reflect on and push their
own practice, but to challenge and help develop the
practice of others. When this culture is embedded,
positional leaders become ‘opportunity creators’;
spotting the times and places when others can be
supported to step up and lead specific activities,
projects or programs. Crucially, this is about distributing
leadership widely and sometimes unexpectedly; for
example to young and less experienced members of
staff who demonstrate passion or expertise in a specific
area, e.g. digital technology.
‘Principals seek leadership potential in
others and provide opportunities for their
development.
They embed a culture of continuous
improvement, ensuring research,
innovation and creativity are core
characteristics of the school.’
Learning leadership is about setting
direction and taking responsibility for
making learning happen. It is exercised
through distributed, connected activity and
relationships. It extends beyond formal players
to include different partners, and may be
exercised at different levels of the overall
learning system.
Leadership for 21st Century
Learning, OECD, 2013
EVIDENCE
“Involvement in the hub has supported
new leadership across our school -
teachers have stood up and taken on
leadership roles which have influence
across other schools and there is a
broader understanding that we have a
responsibility for students beyond those
in our own school.”
“Learning Frontiers is now guiding some
of the work of the enabling leaders in
my school - informing their work as
educational leaders on our site.”

Within the emerging hub structures, Enabling
Leaders are the group charged with taking
the strategic direction from the hub ‘engine’
and making decision about action. They are
expected to ensure the learning work happens
within the schools.
Enacting Leaders are people who lead activity
on the ground - there is some crossover with
Enabling Leaders.
For the schools and principals actively involved in
design hubs, their contribution to Learning Frontiers is
a natural extension or continuation of their approach
to professional learning and the development of
practice. But through hub activity new kinds of leaders
and leadership are emerging. These leaders (called
‘Enabling’ or ‘Enacting’ leaders within the hubs) are
setting up and contributing to work groups focused on
the exploration and testing of innovative new practices
on behalf of all hub schools.
We are beginning to see how collaborative work taking
place through the hubs can develop a new kind of
leadership that is distributed and not dependent on
positional authority, and which is characterised by
professional generosity. These leaders are recognising
that, within the hub, it’s not only about me or my school.
ectTeam
sign
S
PRINCIPAL
ENABLING
LEADERS
ENACTING
LEADERS
EVIDENCE
In Building and Connecting
Learning Communities, Katz, Earl
and Jaafar (2009) argue that “joint
work” (Little, 1990), which they say
includes deprivatisation and a collective
commitment to change, may be at the heart
of the power of networks and other forms
of teacher collaboration. These structures
can provide the opportunity for colleagues
to address genuinely new and often difficult
ideas in a safe environment, away from risk
of censure. Once the ideas are more fully
developed and stabilised, these colleagues
can stimulate and lead the same discussions
in schools with confidence and make the
ideas practical and personal so that they are
more likely to be considered for action in the
school.
Building and Connecting Learning Communities:
The Power of Networks for School Improvement,
Steven Katz, Lorna M. Earl and Sonia Ben Jaafar,
2009
The Persistence of Privacy: Autonomy
and Initiative in Teachers’ Professional
Relations, Judith Warren Little, 1990

`
`
EVIDENCE
‘Building the capacity for
leadership may be the most
under-studied aspect of networks,
yet it might just be one of the most
profound indirect impact measures for
networks. Networks grow leaders – and
not just that, but leaders with values
that relate to wider system effects and
who care beyond their classroom or their
school.’
System Leadership in Action: Where
Do System Leaders Come From?, Ann
Lieberman, 2006
Program learning:
leadership capacity
In the early stages of development, design
hubs have struggled to secure the leadership
capacity required to get decisions made and
activity moving.
There is significant potential or latent leadership
capacity within wider communities and partners,
how should relationships be developed to
ensure this capacity is harnessed?
Dimensions of 21st century
system leadership
System leaders in education around the world
are expanding their leadership practice to meet
the new demands of leading in networks, in
ways that resonate powerfully with the skills and
experience of Learning Frontiers hub leaders
• ●Knowledge diffusion: 21st century
system leaders are outward facing in their
orientation, seeking to learn from others and
promulgate the circulation of new ideas.
• ●“Social” networking: System leaders in the
digital age build strong horizontal linkages
across sectors and even across countries,
which engage government leaders, social
entrepreneurs, business executives,
researchers and civil society leaders
as partners in building innovations for
education and learning.
• Cultural competence: 21st century system
leaders move with ease beyond their
comfort zones. They recognise the need to
develop cross-cultural literacy to access the
learning of others with different orientations
from different systems.
Redesigning Education: Changing Learning
Systems Around the World, Global Education
Leaders’ Partnership, 2013

LEADING INNOVATION
WITHIN A SCHOOL
LEADING
INNOVATION

EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY
AND LEARNING FROM FAILURE
Perceived risk can create fear that inhibits behaviour
change and innovation, and this is especially true in
public service organisations such as schools. Leaders
of public services are required to respond quickly to
external pressures and deliver ongoing change, whilst
also balancing the need for security and continuity, and
ultimately they must be transparent and accountable.
Learning Frontiers design hub leaders are different.
They show a pronounced ability to deal with risk -
embracing the uncertainty that comes with developing,
testing and assessing the impact of new professional
practices in their schools.
Rather than seeking to minimise risk at all costs, these
leaders of innovative schools understand, and help
others to learn, how to manage it. They recognise that
developing and testing very new practices will lead
to at least as many failures as successes, but they
see failure as an opportunity to reflect, learn and,
eventually, to succeed faster.
‘Principals maintain their values whilst
adapting flexibly and strategically to
changes in the environment, in order to
secure the ongoing improvement of the
school.’
EVIDENCE
Recent research has shown a number of different
forms of fear arising from perceptions of risk:
• ●Fear of failure – of what happens if things go
‘wrong’.
• ●Fear of departing from the norm – ‘best
practice’ can discourage fresh thinking.
• ●Fear of freedom – becoming too dependent
on rules and procedures, and losing
confidence in your own judgement.
• ●Fear of the new – of not being able to cope in
unknown situations.
• ●Fear of friction with colleagues – that not
everyone else is ‘up for this’.
• ●Fear of ‘the other’ – being used to working
with colleagues like oneself (such as other
local authority professionals).
Public Sector Innovation and Local Leadership in
the UK and The Netherlands, Robin Hambleton
and Joanna Howard, 2012
Program learning: de-risking
through design thinking
‘Design thinking’ approaches allow school leaders
to alleviate some of the innovation challenges
around managing risk, scaling new practice, and
creating teacher and learner autonomy. Adopting
the maxim ‘fail earlier and often to succeed
sooner’ is countercultural in a traditional school
environment, but a widely held view among the
principals who are leading design hubs.
“We have lots of small teams to
trial things, to really interrogate the
problem that this is trying to solve. We
have been using this ‘design thinking’
approach for years without knowing it
was called this. We do a lot of ‘piloting’
without seeing it as a failure. We are
very transparent with the community
about this - and this means that they
know they can believe us when we
say it is working. But initially, we had
no clear communications plan for the
community, we were just so busy doing
the doing.”

School leaders know how important it is to recognise
individual and team successes (even in the context
of project failure) and to make sure that compelling
narratives around successful risk-taking are created
and shared widely. But they are also assertive about
the nature of the change they are leading, intentionally
making it difficult for teachers to return to practice that
falls within the ‘old paradigm’.
It is this attitude; progressive, boldly and relentlessly
ambitious, tolerant of risk and experimental, yet
discerning, that equips a great school leader to become
an innovative ‘system leader’. And it is within networks,
like those being established through design hubs, that
system leaders do their work. Hubs create opportunities
for system leaders to extend their leadership influence
and to lead beyond their context.
EVIDENCE
In 1982, Peters and Waterman offered the
metaphor “ready-fire-aim” to capture the
action bias of high performing companies that
they studied. Michael Fullan built on this idea
in Motion Leadership: The Skinny on Becoming
Change Savvy, describing leaders who “strive for
small early success, acknowledge real problems,
admit mistakes, protect their people, and celebrate
success along the way...They love genuine results
that generate great pride in the organisation. They
have their finger on the energy pulse of people,
knowing that it will ebb and flow but will be
spurred by positive results.”
Motion Leadership: The Skinny on Becoming
Change Savvy, Michael Fullan, 2009
Principals describe a balancing act between
spending time planning innovation (as far as possible
identifying potential problems before they occur)
and implementing it. Crucially, what these leaders
demonstrate is the confidence to know when is a ‘good
enough’ time to move forward. They recognise the key
moments when the risk of doing nothing is greater than
the risk of doing something new and they visibly take
responsibility if things do go wrong.
Principals working as hub leaders make clear their
commitment to continual renewal and innovation
through both their own ‘learning leadership’ approach
and the systems of support for professional learning
and development they put in place for others.
SETTING OUT
A BOLD VISION
Leaders of innovative schools create a vision for the
change, or changes, they want to see and energise all
staff around this new future. They specify and share
a bold and ambitious vision, making clear why it is
important and that everyone bears responsibility for
making it a reality.
The realisation of a bold educational vision takes
a whole school community and likely involves
professionals making changes to their working
practices. Leaders recognise the need to make risk-
taking and innovation attributes that are central to the
culture of the organisation, and to ensure that all those
who work within the school also see these attributes as
part of their professional identity.
Through an understanding of the importance of intrinsic
motivation, leaders find ways to unlock the passion,
talent and focus of teachers in pursuit of the shared
vision. They provide teachers with a certain degree of
autonomy and agency in defining how that vision is
achieved.
“It’s crucial to have an openness to
failure - recognising that if you fail
you’re one step closer to knowing what
does work. If things fail terribly, then
we’re ok with setting things aside and
changing tack. When testing new ideas
through a design process, trusting the
structure enables that.”
A teacher from a successful hub school
described their principal’s approach to
innovation as follows:
“You carefully shape your message through
your use of language. Language that describes
a vision, but does not dictate or prescribe how
we will get there. This allows for teacher buy-in,
empowering others to follow up on an initiative to
further explore - the Action Learning approach.”

EVIDENCE:
‘When thinking about how to motivate
public servants to innovate, it’s not enough
to just rely on incentives for individuals,
we must also think about the culture of
the society, organisation, institution and
profession in which they are working… This is
not to say that people in organisations have
no agency, but rather that how motivated an
individual is will depend on the organisational
context that they are working within, and how
easy it is to
find the spaces to exercise inventiveness. This
is the ‘wiggle room’ within organisations in
general, and bureaucracies in particular,
where individuals can exercise
their intrinsic motivation.’
Why Motivation Matters in Public Sector
Innovation, Casebourne, J., 2014
ENABLING STRUCTURES
AND SYSTEMS
High expectations for improving and developing
practice need to sit alongside facilitative organisational
structures and systems. Leaders of innovative schools
provide their staff with much more than ‘wiggle room’ in
which to exercise their creativity.
Within their schools there are clear and embedded
approaches to professional learning and development
which elevate enquiry and research, data and evidence
gathering, along with reflection and coaching. The
generation, development and testing of ideas sits
within this wider evaluative framework, and provides a
supportive backdrop for innovation.
At the level of the design hub, school leaders’
contributions to Learning Frontiers are a natural
extension or continuation of their approach to
professional learning and the development of new
practices within their own schools. They are bringing
their experience of successfully managing the risks
involved in practice- and school-level transformation to
working with others who are seeking to do the same.
‘Principals build a culture of trust
and collaboration where change and
innovation based on research and
evidence can flourish. They embed
collaborative and creative practices in the
school, allowing everyone to contribute to
improvement and innovation.’
“All teachers see themselves as leaders
and do take risks. We’ve been very
careful that when things haven’t gone
well we don’t stifle innovation in the
future.”
“And so, you transform the climate in such a
way that the norms of risk taking and support
for learning are recognised as “what the
organisation does.” And you find that when
people adopt that attitude toward making
mistakes and learning, they do better. And they
want to do more and more.”
21st Century Leadership: Looking Forward,
Michael Fullan, 2012

Principals ‘encourage staff to contribute to
education networks, support the learning
of others and develop pedagogy… They
evaluate the personal and organisational
effects of change through regular
feedback from stakeholders and evidence
of impact on student outcomes.’
EVIDENCE
Amabile (1998) highlights a number of
managerial practices that affect creativity:
• ●Challenge, the right level of stretch.
• ●Autonomy to choose one’s own way of working
towards stable goals.
• ●Resources, allowing time for exploration.
• ●Work group features, such as having diverse teams
rather than homogenous ones
• ●Supervisory encouragement, and organisational
support for experimentation and creativity.
How to kill creativity, Terese Amabile, 1998
Use of data and evidence to
support change
Birdwood High School carefully utilises data to
help build the case for change around their new
approaches:
“From the start we collected an enormous
amount of data and we had comparative data
from the two different systems. After three
terms the picture was so stark that we made
the collective decision to completely move to
the new system. We lost some enrolment for
the following year as a result. But we thought
‘we have a moral imperative to stop offering a
system that we had proved is inferior’.”
St Paul’s School (Brisbane) created The
Centre for Research Innovation and Future
Development. Its focus is on research into
pedagogy fit for the 21st Century. For St Paul’s,
evidence is critical:
“That doesn’t mean we don’t take risks and
have a go, but whole scale innovation across
the school needs a pretty secure approach. We
encourage a lot of research - it’s an important
part of our decision making. Staff come forward
and identify specific areas of foci, for example,
single sex classes, and we would ask those
people to come back with evidence and present
it to the senior leadership and we would make a
decision based on that.”
EVIDENCE
Ken Leithwood describes
‘mastery experiences’ where
staff are enabled to learn new
things within a low-risk environment,
building their skills and confidence
as a result. Leaders should provide:
“opportunities to master things without
a huge amount of risk, by being there
to help them through it, or putting them
in low-risk situations where they can
practice.”
Evolving Perspectives: Leaders and Leadership,
Ontario Ministry of Education, 2010
Drive by Daniel Pink (2011) describes
powerful examples of why carrot and
stick approaches often don’t work, as the
desired behaviour tends to disappear once
incentives are removed. Instead people need
autonomy, to work towards mastery (striving to
get better at something), and purpose (feeling
they are contributing to a purpose greater
than ourselves).
Drive: The Surprising Truth About
What Motivates Us, Daniel H.
Pink, 2011
EVIDENCE

WHAT ARE WE
GOING TO LEARN?
Leaders of innovation face a challenge. How to create
protected space, time and capacity to work on the next
successful product or service they know is needed,
recognising that in the short term it will likely take
more energy and effort. Some schools in Learning
Frontiers are just starting out on this journey of service
transformation, departing from a highly traditional
school design. Others have been testing innovations
and creating disruption within the system for decades.
Similarly, schools from different sectors face a range
of different pressures. This means that, when we look
closely, the innovator’s challenge does not appear the
same within all design hub schools.
As school leaders in design hubs identify the
differences in the challenges they face, their level of
ambition and their relative positions on the ‘innovation
journey’, they are identifying the work they need to do
together to ensure there is real quality and depth of
learning for all.
Where leaders and teams from hub schools have
taken the opportunity to co-create shared lines of
enquiry and to study each other’s practice in detail,
they have developed a much deeper understanding of
what constitutes student engagement and engaging
learning. Joint work that is focused on specific
questions about learning allows teachers and leaders
to see beyond surface differences in context and levels
of experience, and to engage in the crucial work of
identifying powerful changes to practice.
“What are we going to learn? That is a
challenge when people are at different
points in terms of the development of
practice. We need to think about
co-creating, not just sharing practice.
When you’re co-creating you’re
designing something that really meets
your needs.”
INNOVATING TOGETHER
THROUGH DESIGN HUBS
Principals ‘lead educational networks by
trialling and exploring new ideas for the
system, acting as a guide to staff and a
coach and mentor to leaders.’

BUILDING TRUST
AND SHARING RISK
Principals point to cultural shifts within their schools as
their most crucial achievements to date. Creating an
environment where teachers and leaders have a deep
trust for each other, and are united by a compelling
organisational vision, releases huge amounts of energy
and creativity. Without trust, changing practice feels too
risky and high-stakes, so leaders employ a number of
strategies to develop trust within their schools and also
in design hub relationships.
One tactic school leaders describe is the creation
of insulated ‘safe spaces’ in which new pedagogical
models and approaches can be developed, tested and
the impact assessed. Within such spaces new ideas are
explicitly welcomed, no matter how disruptive they are
to the status quo. If the design hub structure itself is
seen as a ‘safe space’ for idea development on a bigger
scale, then the role of hub leaders is to convene and
facilitate these opportunities. Within the design hub
structure diverse groups of leaders and teachers are
having new, creative conversations about how they can
work together to make changes to practice and try out
new approaches.
Hub leaders consistently value the relationships they
are developing through hub interactions and the wider
program and they are seeing increasing levels of trust
develop between participating school leaders. As more
collaborative work is being undertaken within the hubs,
the quality of relationships, and in turn levels of trust,
are developing further. In some instances we are seeing
collaborative work between design hubs span across
geographical areas.
EVIDENCE
“Control, discipline and the alignment
of goals are extremely important, but not
to the extent that they sacrifice creativity.
A certain level of failure and a great deal
of trust is the price that has to be paid for
innovation.”
Leading Change, Changing Leadership, Pat
Collarbone, 2012
‘Practitioner networks provide an interplay
between developing relationships with one
another and developing ideas that form the
basis of the ‘work’ of networks. Collaborative
relationships build trust, which is essential to
the development of ideas – and ideas build
network interest and increased participation. It
is this cycle that eventually builds commitment
to these flexible, borderless organisational
forms and begins to provide a foundation for
leadership learning.”
System Leadership in Action: Where
do system leaders come from?, Ann
Lieberman, 2006
“When creating our new models of
pedagogy and alternate school design,
we asked staff and students to opt-in
to these different pathways (including
extending the choice to all feeder
schools). Staff working on the old
model were excluded from meetings
with those working on the new model.
This created complete psychological
safety for new ideas. The downside is
it created an ‘us & them’, with students
and with parents.”
Principals ‘establish innovative processes
to gather regular feedback from
families and the local community that
is systematically used to review school
practices and inform decision-making.’

“Students have lots of involvement in
the learning process - but particularly
in the space of co-created learning we
have been really explicit about the role
of students in co-designing learning.
Students are able to talk about learning
concepts, including design principles.
We took our students to schools in
other design hubs and worked with
them around project based learning.
The result was that students wrote their
own units of work over two days and are
bringing that back to their own classes
to deliver with support of teachers.”
BROADENING
ENGAGEMENT IN THE
INNOVATION PROCESS
Hub leaders talk of the challenges they face in
engaging more people in the innovation process
and the scaling of new practice beyond the ‘pockets
of innovation’ that currently exist. They value the
introduction of specific innovation methods and
processes provided through the program, which are
helping them to create the enabling conditions for other
people to ‘play in the innovation space’.
Design-led methodologies in particular have been
strongly adopted by some hub leaders who are now
looking to spread the approach both within their own
schools and across the hub. For example, the use of
prototyping to develop and test the feasibility of ideas
helps teachers move from abstract to concrete in a
‘safe’ and controlled way. The approach allows the
swift development of ideas in practice and, unlike
traditional ‘piloting’, can be used to test multiple
hypotheses at once.
As hubs are developing, leaders are exploring ways
to involve more staff (and students) in iterative testing
processes, thereby generating more widespread
understanding, commitment and capacity for innovation
and the development of new practices. Leaders stress
the importance of transparency in this kind of work.
They engage a wide range of stakeholders,
including parents, local community members and
hub colleagues, to generate and validate ideas,
seeing this as central to the long term goal of school
transformation. Some schools have extended enquiry
into and prototyping of new practices with the help
of their students; demonstrating a genuinely co-
productive approach to teaching and learning.
Program learning: focus
on Adelaide and Sydney
Design Hubs
Leaders of the Adelaide and Sydney Hubs are
using design-led approaches to enable all
hub members to engage with the key ideas
and content that support the work of the hub.
Ultimately, this supports all hub members to
see each other as worthy learning partners in a
process of joint practice development.
• ●Within the Adelaide Hub every school that
attended their recent two-day conference has
been through the Exploratory Questions and
Design Thinking workshops.
• ●In the Sydney Hub, Campbelltown Performing
Arts High School has worked directly with a
design company to help teachers turn design
thinking into practical prototypes. Around 40
teachers have developed and pitched ideas
for new practice, and now have the licence to
test and improve them in their classrooms.
“Some of what we are doing in Learning
Frontiers is really new. There is influence
in both directions, and one builds on the
other. The work we do feeds into the
hub, gets elevated and challenged, then
feeds back into the school.”

GETTING INVOLVED
IN LEARNING FRONTIERS
Learning Frontiers wants to make sure that
engaging learning practices are available in every
school and to every student. We need to design
a system that supports teachers and principals to
focus on student engagement both as a valuable
end in itself and as a route to improved learning
outcomes.
If Learning Frontiers is going to successfully
develop and spread engaging practices, it will
need to work with learners, their families and
communities, with professionals in schools, and
with partners in business, voluntary, creative and
cultural sectors.

How can you participate?
Schools, individual teachers or principals, and other
organisations can participate in Learning Frontiers by:
• providing expert advice to schools working within
design hubs
• participating in research activities with your students,
such as the engagement survey
• suggesting, trialling, evaluating and iterating new
promising practices for engaged learning in your
own school context
• working with schools to share practices with the
profession and the wider community outside of
design hubs
• convening a network of peers to discuss student
engagement and consider how to apply practices
emerging from Learning Frontiers in your own
contexts.
If you are a student or a parent, you can participate in
Learning Frontiers by:
• sharing your story about engagement with the
Learning Frontiers community (see ‘how to connect’
section)
• bringing together a group of parents, students
and teachers for a conversation about student
engagement and the role you might each play in
deepening it
• partnering with a teacher to develop or trial a new
practice.
Connect with Learning Frontiers
Join our Google+ community
to share resources, ideas
and conversations
Follow us on Twitter through
@LFrontiers and #learningfrontiers
Email the Learning Frontiers
team at learningfrontiers@AITSL.edu.au
Please email us if you would like to access
a text only version of this publication.

NOTES

How school leaders are developing engaging learning through design hubs

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