8 minute read
CURRICULUM AND PEDAGOGY
Ascott racing to success
With an ambitious change agenda, principal Troy Ascott entered Coolum State High School under no illusions of the task at hand. Three years later his bold leadership has ushered the school through a remarkable transformation.
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BY MARGARET RYAN
THERE’S been nothing static during Troy Ascott’s tenure as principal of Queensland’s Coolum State High School since he took on the role in October 2017. He’s rolled out his narra tive to drive change in pedagogies and programs. During this time, student and staff numbers have increased, and the school has gained mor e than $13m in capital improvement. And enrolment numbers are still growing.
By most metrics, Ascott’s approach is working, and there’s more to come. day. COVID-19 has given us a new spanner to throw into the works, and there’s more talk about our wellbeing as leaders”, he says.
“We have to constantly go back to the well inside ourselves to galvanise our resources. One of our biggest goals is to inspire and stay inspired.”
Ascott’s inspiration is former principal, now social activist and author, Geoffrey Canada from Harlem in New York, who says, “when you see a great teacher, you see a work of art”. Canada presented a memorable TED talk and was immortalised in the documentary, Waiting for Superman.
The school in a nutshell
on the Sunshine Coast, but new housing developments nearby have bumped up student numbers.
This Year 7-12 co-ed school had 988 students in 2017 and now has 1360, of whom three per cent are Indigenous. It will have 1800 students by 2024. Class sizes average about 23 for Year 7 to 10 and about 17 for senior students. The school has an ICSEA value of 1029 (up from 1012 in 2017).
Ascott manages 98 teaching staff and 40 non-teaching staff. His school has seven acade my programs in instrumental music, basketball, surfin g, cheerleading, touch football, young entrepreneurs, and an academic learning pro gram for high achievers.
Inc luded in the $13m investment in the school is the Smart Futures Centre, a $6.27m two-storey learning centre, which opened in March 2019. Originally it had eight classrooms upstairs, but now another eight are featured downstairs with smartboards.
Meanwhile, builders are putting the finishing touches on an additional two-storey building at a cost of $6.7m called ‘Wandama’ (Indigenous for ‘far away’). This state-of-the-art building houses two-science laboratories, a health-hub, design centre, senior student centre, and staff room. Next to the new building is a new carpark with 76 park ing spaces. There is also a large under roof area w hich is earmarked for a further two classrooms as the enrolment numbers increase over the next few years. The school also received a canteen upgrade of $412,000 last year.
The Ascott approach
Before taking the helm at Coolum, Ascott had turned around the fortunes of a Logan school and worked in western Queensland and London. His mother was a teacher; his father and grandmother both principals.
Ascott introduced to Coolum State High his signa ture pedagogy, Reading to Learn (R2L), developed by Australian linguist, Dr David Rose.
“This is the third school I’ve introduced it to,” Ascott says. “It’s the best teaching methodology I know for reading and writing for high school stu dents. To succeed in modern life, they need fundamental, good literacy and numeracy skills.”
R ose himself describes R2L as a genre-based pedagogy that starts with reading as a core skill for learnin g and includes a genre-writing approach. It features specially designed teacher-guided activi ties and a professional learning program.
“It unpacks the language in use. It scaffolds the student to be able to reproduce the language patterns and styles of established authors. They have t o read, interpret, and write texts, and that gets increasingly sophisticated, but students who don’t master high school probably haven’t mastered text,” Ascott says.
One challenge he faced getting teaching staff on board to R2L was that some teachers – outside of the English department – “didn’t traditionally see themselves as teachers of text”.
But, pushing through with professional develop ment is paying off in student learning outcomes.
L ast year, Coolum was in the top 10 list of Sunshine Coast schools which had improved their NAPLAN results in 2019 over the previous year.
The school’s results for all categories in 2017 were ‘close to’ or ‘below’ students from other schools with a comparable background. Jump to 2019, and all Year 9 students performed at close to the average, while Year 7 results were average for spelling and numeracy, but above for read ing, writing, and grammar. Coolum has also used some explicit direct instruction (EDI).
“EDI is much harder for teachers than R2L was – that was more organic. Explicit Direct Instruction has been picked up by some, but not all teachers. It’s not really a goal to have it 100 per cent in the school at the moment,” Ascott says.
The school has put a lot of work into very clear and explicit assessment, and clear rubrics, as part of its thrust to celebrate evidence-based teaching.
“We’ve also developed a partnership with the University of Queensland’s Science of Learning Research Centre. A small group of teachers is part of a group doing a trial that started last year in retrieval practice. It’s linked to the Queensland Brain Institute and highlights my passion for research-based practice and how the brain works.”
Ascott says his job is about a “constant dialogue with teachers around research-based practices and things that really work to make a difference”. He does get some backlash, though, with teachers questioning the role of their professional judgment in these areas. To counter this apprehension, Professor John Hattie is scheduled to do a professional learning ses sion at the school early next year.
A focus on the evidence
One metric of which Ascott is proud, is about student pathways. Nineteen per cent of the school’s 201 7 graduates went to university. A third of 2018’s graduating students went on to university educa tion, with the school hopeful that studies will r eveal a greater percentage again of 2019’s graduates have gone onto tertiary education. The school plac ed in the top 10 of Sunshine Coast schools for OP score results for its 2019 graduates, the Queens-
land equivalent of ATAR scores. And he’s expecting more than half of this year’s graduating students to take up the challenge of university education.
wealth repeating. I believe education should be the great leveller in our society, but it’s not acting that way. It’s working to enshrine poverty and privilege,” Ascott says.
Looking at the role of public education
“Public education was established to interrupt that cycle and give every kid a chance to transform their lives. It’s about every single student having the opportunity to live a life of choice, not of chance, at the end of Year 12.
“[It’s] to have the mindset and educational back ground to build a foundation for long-term success thr oughout their lives, especially as the world continues to change and evolve in ways we could nev er predict. It’s not about everyone going to uni,
but about our students having a clear, deliberate, and ambitious plan for their future.”
Ascott’s committed team make the dream of tertiary education tangible through ‘Hello World’ ex cursions to three nearby universities for a tour and immersion in hands-on activities.
“For kids who are the first in the family to go to university, they have to touch it, smell the air there. Otherwise, it’s not something that’s real to them,” he says.
But teachers have to accept the challenges to give students this foundation for their career and life paths.
Getting staff on board
According to the school’s 2019 annual report, surveys for students and parents/caregivers for satisfaction rank mostly in the high 80 per cent and 90 per cent last year, most of which have lifted over the past two years. Suspensions, exclusions, and enrolment cancellations have all shrunk during Ascott’s tenure.
However, with an ambitious change agenda, Ascott still has more work to do to lift school staff morale after it took a bit of a tumble in the tr ansformation’s early days. One way he’s tackling that is through engaging renowned speaker and happiness mentor, Toni Powell. She’s presented at the school throughout this year to dev elop school leaders and help staff find the right balance for wellbeing.
A personal narrative to connect with the school
What you can do in a school of 400 compared to 1400 is quite different. Your systems have to grow, adapt, and improve,” Ascott says.
And part of that is about his teaching philosophy.
“You’ve got to decide what’s your personal narra tive and be able to tell it in a compelling way. U nderstand there will always be resistance, your personal sense of resilience [as a principal] needs to be fairly strong. You can’t be perturbed at the first signs of resistance,” he says.
Ascott says he’s benefited from mentorship through the US-based Breakthrough Coaching. It gave him a “structure for growth” and a “laserlike” way to manage his time to focus on things that made a difference.
“All leadership is situational. Something that works in one situation can fail spectacularly in another.”
Ascott urges senior leaders to view their role as building a nation of the future.
“We have a really important and powerful role, and that relies on finding some connection with people.”
