Chris Colley: 0:13

Welcome back to yet another episode of Shift Ed Podcast. We're scouring our beautiful country province of Quebec, canada, in search of amazing people to talk to about education and well people, I brought you a real nice treat. Here we have Megan Webster, who dabbles in education intensely, with training and coaching, and you've probably heard of her or seen her present here in Quebec. She's worked with a lot of you and today we're really happy to welcome you, megan, to come and talk about the things that you do with us here in Quebec.

Megan Webster: 0:57

Thank you, great to be here.

Chris Colley: 1:00

I always like to start, megan, with a little kind of your how did you get here? What was your journey into education?

Megan Webster: 1:17

What was it like and what kind of roads did you take and choose to take as you came into this profession? Well, like so many of the people who I'm sure are listening, I have been playing teacher since I was like three or four years old and had a chalkboard in my bedroom where I gave my sister homework and everything. So I have dreamed of being a teacher since I knew that such a thing existed and have been just loving my career, just loving my career. So I started my career as a teacher. I was at Con Ed at Queens and worked for about 12, 13 years as a teacher, and during that time I had an exceptional opportunity around professional development, and the person who was in charge of curriculum and instruction at the school that I worked at led our school on a journey of professional improvement that really changed my practices and helped me become a better teacher, and I saw that she was helping our school become a better school.

Megan Webster: 2:17

I was seeing my colleagues change their practices. I was noticing that what we were talking about in the staff room was different. Our concerns were changing, even our complaints were changing, and I was really curious about what that magic was because, like everybody here, I've been to a zillion PD days. Most of them are kind of interesting and fun, and it's nice to get away from school for a day to learn something new, but almost none of the PD I'd ever attended had changed my life.

Megan Webster: 2:48

So what I wanted to figure out was why was this PD so good? Why was this PD leader so good? What was she doing that was so different? Why did it work so well and how could we try to replicate those conditions? So that inquiry led me to do my master's and then later my PhD, and really I have been investigating the development of expertise in training teachers ever since then. So I graduated with my PhD in 2016. And since 2016, I've been working full-time in that milieu. Really, my great passion is supporting teachers, principals and district leaders to think about how we can reorganize our school around the axis of learning to better serve students.

Chris Colley: 3:38

Amazing, amazing. And what was that training that you talked about? That was transformational for you in how you saw. Could you explore that a bit more with us? Yeah, what?

Megan Webster: 3:51

was it.

Megan Webster: 3:55

It was all about understanding by design. What exactly do we want students to learn? What do we want them to understand and be able to do? How will we know if they've learned it? What will we do when they don't? That's where we started, and then, once we, as a school community, got very laser focused on what it was that we wanted students to learn, the next step was so obvious, which was how do we then differentiate the learning environment so all students can learn those core ideas? And over my journey as a teacher, those remain the essential, most important questions. What do we want students to understand, know and be able to do? What will we do when they don't? What will we do when they do when they already know it before we start teaching? And then, how do we modify the learning environment to support all students to achieve those learning targets?

Megan Webster: 4:44

And it's so easy to say it just flows off the tongue, doesn't it? But it's so hard. It's so hard to do that and being absolutely crystal clear about the competencies that we want for students and figuring out how much can this group of students learn in one hour and how can I set them up to master one really important thing every single hour that I have them. That absolutely transformed my practice and it has transformed. When I'm working on these questions with schools, I see that it changes what happens in those schools because it's so core, it's so practical and as soon as you start working on it, you start seeing the benefits with students. When we shift from what we want students to learn, when we sorry when we shift from what I'm going to do with my students today to what I want them to learn today, everything changes. So that is that's the thing that changed my early career, and what I'm thinking about a lot these days is how do I train people to do that work with schools? Right, right, how do we scale that up?

Chris Colley: 5:55

What are requests coming to you, as I imagine it's principals or heads of pet service, et cetera reaching out. You know heads of pet service et cetera reaching out. What do they tend to come to you as like, we're looking to what like? What are some of the things that you get asked to come and support them?

Megan Webster: 6:13

Yeah, great questions. So some of the needs that I hear from director generals, from directors of service at the school board, is really around the need for coherence and alignment. There are so many things that we want to improve. You know, if I asked a DG like, write down what are some of the problems in your schools, they would give me a list of 200 things. Right, some of them are small. They just need, you know, a couple of people to spend a bit of time and money thinking about it and we can figure it out. And some of them are huge, and so it's thinking about what are, what are the one or two or three things that we need to really focus on, that we need to go all in on to improve. And then how do we get coherence all the way down to the level of the student? So it's one thing for the director of finance and material resources to come to agreement on something, but then how does that trickle down to the students or, similarly, teachers asking for something, but then it doesn't move up to where the decision makers are and human resources and finance, and so that initiative is kind of stymied. What we really want is absolutely crystal clear alignment from the district office to the classroom, with everybody singing the same song and moving in the same direction, where we can really funnel our resources, our time, our energy, our power to just a couple of things that we think are going to make a huge difference for students. So that's that need for coherence and alignment is a need that I'm hearing from district leaders.

Megan Webster: 7:52

Another thing that I'm hearing from principals is the need to act as pedagogical leaders in an environment of overwhelm that principals have just such enormous jobs with so many demands on their time. So many of their demands feel really, really time sensitive, like there's a parent sitting in your office and they're about to blow their gasket, or there's a kid who absolutely needs an intervention right now Things that are hard to say. Well, I'm going to deal with that next week. So the principals want to be pedagogical leaders. They are longing to do systematic, proactive work and yet their demands feel absolutely overwhelmed by urgencies. So thinking about how to support principals in that milieu.

Megan Webster: 8:42

And then the requests that I'm hearing from teachers are that the kids are different. Kids have changed. There is something that has happened over the past five years where the classrooms do not look like what they used to look like in very dramatic ways and teachers are saying we don't know how to respond to these new needs. We have to really evolve our practices to respond to the students' needs and we're not sure how With our current skills, resources, time, subject time allocation. We don't know how to do what we used to do with the kids we have now.

Chris Colley: 9:25

And so they went out, megan. Obviously pandemic created such a wave throughout the system, almost a tsunami of sorts, where it really changed. Can you zone in on that a little bit more? What have you heard, how the students have shifted, because I've heard similar things. Yeah, it's very curious. This kind of demographics, almost, of how our classes are made up, has changed so much. Can you elaborate a bit?

Megan Webster: 10:00

on that. I'd be happy to riff on this based on my gut feeling, but the truth is I don't know. So everything that follows is a hundred percent speculation and I'm not sure. I think there's a few intersecting factors that are bearing down on kids now that are having a tremendous impact on their ability to be resilient and to develop their social emotional skills, and I think that's the core of it, right, and I think it's the social emotional piece that's having a huge impact on academics, as opposed to the other way around.

Megan Webster: 10:35

Some of the things that I think are making a really big difference is that the kids in school today have been raised on screens and they have very little time for unstructured free play. In particular, they have almost no time of unsupervised, unstructured free time outside with peers of different ages. So these are kids who have highly, highly supervised and regulated outdoor lives and often very unstructured and unregulated screen lives, and I think that combination is I don't know, but I have a hunch, and I think lots of researchers would agree with me, that that's a toxic combination and that kids are not having access to emotional, to developing their emotional, social and emotional skills in real life, with real people, and they are not developing those skills on screens and I think another thing that's happening is that parenting has changed. Right are having emotional dysregulation at home and we see it in classrooms. When kids are dysregulated in schools that teachers and parents will turn a screen on and immediately it quells the problem. So what is happening in those moments when the screen is used as a buffer between kids' big feelings and them working it out is that they never learn how to work it out. So kids are very dysregulated and they are not learning how to develop those skills.

Megan Webster: 12:13

These are some hunches. I also have a feeling you know too much processed food and pandemic. You know. I think there's lots of different things going on, but the facts are that the rate of children with identified special needs is like triple what it was in not so long. The rate of children who teachers would like to have assessed but haven't been assessed yet is like the waiting list is years and years long. Psychologists are telling me they're like playful can't take any more. Clients are telling me they're like playful can't take any more clients. There's something going on, or probably more precisely, a lot of things going on, and the needs in classes have really changed.

Chris Colley: 12:59

Yeah, for sure, I was reading this book, actually called the Anxious Generation, which talks exactly about what?

Chris Colley: 13:01

you were just mentioning. So I think the hunch is a lot of people are feeling that as well, that hunch that it is. What do you think about getting rid of cell phones in schools? Like, just as your opinion? Like I'm not saying remove all technology, but the school can provide the technology when it's appropriate and when they need to use it as a tool. But have you thought about some of those arguments that they're having now around? You know, keeping yourselves at home.

Megan Webster: 13:27

Yeah, it's funny. I've been thinking about it a lot and have been hearing very strong opinions on both sides and I think there's both really interesting merits to both, and I think this is going to be the art is how do we help children use technology as a learning tool in school and provide screen-free real life for kids at school as well? So I'm kind of I don't, I can't, I'm still figuring this out, but one thing that strikes me is that schools that try to cut it halfway and say no phones in class time, but phones at recess and lunch. I'm almost wondering if that's the opposite of what we should be doing. I don't know if you've walked through a high school cafeteria lately at lunchtime, but it's silent and it hurts my heart to see this. I'm almost wondering cell phones only in class and at lunchtime, no phones. Use your phone when it can be a tool for learning and when you don't need to learn at lunch and at recess. You know the phone goes in the zipper bag. I don't know where.

Megan Webster: 14:43

You know there's some schools that are taking interesting the things that Higgs research has found is that students themselves ask for screen-free opportunities. Students themselves are saying this makes me anxious. I hate Instagram, I'm addicted. Help me by taking it away from me. And so I think we also need to involve students in these conversations. You know, I think they have a lot of insight into what's good for them and we can, and we can ask them as a part of the consultative process, you know, and have these decisions being taken congruently from the shop floor, you know, the students themselves to the head office and make these decisions based on consultation, data and research and make really clever decisions. But I think, you know, we've done a lot of like kind of willy nilly, like no phones or all phones, or you know, and, and, and I think we we need to put our heads together to figure out how to do this.

Chris Colley: 15:56

For sure, for sure, it really does sound like again another mindset shift needing to take place, where we start seeing things a little bit in a different way. Now I mean, you know, as I know, education is a slow machine that moves and it does take years to establish. You know cultures in schools and you know seeing things differently. What have you found the most successful ways or examples of not only changing teacher mindset but also that it seeps down into the students as well, where they can start seeing things differently? You know, like we always have this fixed mindset versus an open mindset, what are your practices that allow or enable that to take place, or at least the conversations to start happening? And if you have any success stories, I'd love to hear of how that takes place success stories.

Megan Webster: 17:00

I'd love to hear of how that takes place.

Chris Colley: 17:02

So you're talking about how to shift towards a growth mindset at scale. Yeah, yeah, how would that process start? Like I imagine it has to start at the teacher level before it goes down into the student level. What are some of those success stories of where you've you were able to kind of see that growth happening and that we're not limited? You know that we're not all the same, or we're born with these set of skills and that's all we got.

Megan Webster: 17:26

Great question. There's kind of I hear kind of two, two questions in what you're asking. One is how do we change practices at scale, and one is what do we need to understand, know, be able to do in terms of instilling a growth mindset in our students? So let me take these one at a time.

Megan Webster: 17:44

So, when it comes to seeing change at scale, especially around practices, well, the first thing we recognize is that it's really hard and changing practices is hard. We recognize is that it's really hard and changing practices is hard. So what do we take from this? We take from this again that teachers practices are generally incredibly resilient to change, which means you can't just mandate it. You can't have a PD day and say this is how to do think pair share. Now, everybody do it. I'm going to come around and see if you've done it. We know that doesn't work right. It takes something different. And think pair share is about as easy as it gets right. When we think about something like teaching to a learning target or differentiation or taking a UDL approach, these things are actually hard. So we certainly can't mandate RTI right, that's really hard.

Megan Webster: 18:41

So first step is recognizing that teachers' practices are resilient to change and thinking we need to not ask people to change very much at once. We need to think about one or two things that we're going to focus on for years. We're going to work on RTI for the next five years in this school district because RTI is actually incredibly hard and if you want to do it right. Almost every single thing a teacher needs to do as a teacher needs to change. The way I think about my learning targets, the way I assess, the way I record, the way I assess the way I work with my colleagues, the way I work with my principal, the way our schedule works, the way subject time allocation works right Everything needs to change. That would mean that we would need to have coherence, from the DG to the spec ed text, that there is a very clear and shared understanding about what is the change. Why are we taking this change, that this change is something that teachers have already expressed a need and a want for, so it doesn't feel like something imposed, and that from the very top, that the DG herself is saying I'm going all in on this.

Megan Webster: 19:54

This means that the way we design our schools material resources, the way that we hire HR, that every single department is aligned around this, that we don't say we're going to take an RTI approach without talking to HR first, because they're going to say this is going to totally mess up the way we think about workloads, give us some time. And then the union is going to say that's going to change the way we do workloads. We need to have a voice here, as they should. So there's so much work that needs to happen at the district level to make sure that we are aligned and actually ready to see through this change. Then we need to think about so the top needs to listen to the bottom and then align at the district level, and then we need to really support principals deeply to implement this right, because everything goes through the principals.

Megan Webster: 20:43

It doesn't matter how beautiful the idea the DES has, the DES can only access those teachers via the principal. So the principals need to endorse the plan strongly and then they need to follow through on the plan and in order to endorse and follow through the plan for them, they have to feel that they need it. So they need a voice in the decision-making table. They need to be able to influence how that rolls out, because they are the ones who understand the culture and the skills and the challenges in their school environment. The principal needs to be able to tweak the model to something that makes sense for their staff right and they need support to be able to do all of that.

Megan Webster: 21:24

So we need to, I think we need to deepen the bench at the principal level, right. And then we need to think about what's happening in the Department of Ed Services and we think do each of these consultants that are the kind of missionaries for their discipline? Are they really thinking about the master of RTI in history? We need to think about how to support them, because they're going to be the ones who have this precious face time with teachers that can make that grade 10 history teacher understand how they can teach this course to get the kids to pass the exam while taking an RTI model, right. And then we think about teacher professional development, right. So poor teachers. Teachers always have this beautiful pd offered to them. They go to the conference. I love rti. It's so beautiful. This is what our kids need. This rti is the most you know. This is I'm sold. And then the principal says, oh, but this will never work because the workloads don't make sense. And the union says this is never going to work because the workloads don't make sense. And, anyways, our school isn't big enough. We don't have any extra classrooms for small groups to work at. So this is.

Megan Webster: 22:45

So what happens? Teachers get inspired and then they have their hearts broken, right, right. No wonder teachers are resilient to change. They say the last time I got excited about initiative, you broke my heart, so why am I going to get excited this time, right? So we need to make sure that, if we're going to inspire teachers, that we've actually thought about everything around that change and make to actually make that change possible.

Megan Webster: 23:14

This way, when teachers say, oh, I don't want to do RTI because I don't have a classroom, we say, actually, I already thought about that and I've got a special small group room in the library made just for you. And the teacher says I don't want to do RTI because I don't have any time to co-plan with my other English teachers. We say, actually, we thought about that and we built co-planning into your schedule for next year and it's a part of your workload. Now we can actually get things happening in our schools, right. So to summarize, what's the big idea? We need coherence, alignment and really think about how are we going all in on one thing?

Chris Colley: 23:50

Right and Megan, in your experience, like how long would a process like that actually take before you can start seeing some results, or that you see that it's starting to get implemented and used and you know, practices transforming? I mean, I imagine this is, like you said five, six, seven year process that you have to stick to. Yeah, five, okay.

Megan Webster: 24:17

Five, yeah, and I wouldn't expect to see any dramatic changes in year one. I would expect to see minor changes in year one as we're figuring out ooh, that room in the library doesn't make sense. Ooh, material resources needs to build us more classrooms, whatever. There's going to be lots of tweaking in year one. I would expect to see awesome things by year three and four, and by year five, I would expect these things to be like okay, now what? This is business as usual. We don't need to talk about it anymore, because this is just how we teach reading at our school. Five years, and in this fifth year, when it's starting to feel like business as usual, that becomes year zero of the next strategic plan.

Chris Colley: 25:01

Right, so when you were saying, choose one or two things to start, see it through, and then you have the next thing kind of in the pipe, ready to roll or connecting it back to what you've already been doing, you got it.

Chris Colley: 25:16

What happens when and it happens often. Well, it did anyway at my board, where principals would change oftentimes schools, it seemed like every five years there would be a rotation of how do you instill that change in the teachers so that you're aware of the realities of our system, that principals move, so that that momentum keeps going.

Megan Webster: 25:41

Oh, I love this question. I love this question. It shouldn't matter so much when the principal leaves strict to the classroom. The principal is the person who is working through it with us while she's here and then she leaves. But we're still working on RTI when Chris becomes my principal, and what is so insane for teachers is the flavor of the month nonsense with the principal. You know, new principal comes in. I have a new vision it's going to be rti, and then the principal leaves and the new principal comes and my flavor is outdoor education and it's going to be outdoor education.

Megan Webster: 26:23

This flavor of the month nonsense drives teachers bananas, and so a huge part of it is principals needing to um, in a way, check their egos right, like what is the district plan and how can I live this out here as opposed to my plan? No, you know, but it makes sense that principals have done the flavor of the month, absent any vision from the top. So if you, if you are, if I was a principal in a school district with no vision for the one or two things we are all working on, of course I would make it up myself, right? Well, you know, in collaboration with the teachers I'm working with, but it makes sense that they've done that.

Megan Webster: 27:10

But we need to not have vacuums of leadership from the top to the bottom, so that we are all singing the same song. So that we are all singing the same song. That's one thing. The other is that we need to cultivate teacher leaders, because they are the ones who are the most likely to stay right. So what are we doing to cultivate our department heads, our cycle leaders, our in-school coaches, our in-school mentors, our staff assistants? Right, those are the folks that are gonna stay for a while, those are the group.

Megan Webster: 27:39

See Like they put this thing in action, like, yeah, the buck stops and yeah and my dream is that the principal comes in and says to the staff assistant, the department heads, the cycle leaders where are we at in our project around rti? What's working, what's not working? Tell me what's the next step and how I can help.

Chris Colley: 27:57

Yeah, yeah, it's really like listening and having those relationships again develop Like. It amazes me all the time that relationships are like one of the strong like there are. There are currency in education and without those, you know it, it it can kind of feel like everybody's on their own, you know, on their own island. They do their thing, I go and I do my math and I leave, Like, and to break through that, those relationships that are built and create a culture within any kind of school or centre or whatever it might be, when do you find that we can learn more about? I know that you're doing some work with through the dean, with our, with our consultants. What is that been like? How is the response to your training going with with some of our leaders?

Megan Webster: 29:01

of our leaders. I love working with the Dean crew and I've been working with a couple of the communities of practice because, you know. You said relationships are the currency in school. I would say that there's two currencies in school. One is relationships and one is expertise. Right, I've been in schools that have wonderful vibes, right? People love each other. Everybody's so nice it's, you know, but I'm not sure how much the kids and teachers are learning.

Megan Webster: 29:22

Right, but it feels good. And I've been in other schools where kids are learning their brains out in schools, but it does not feel good. You know, the kids might be passing the history exam but I don't think they're loving life at school. And I don't think the teachers are either. Right, they're very siloed and segmented and often full-on animosity, right. So I think we need to cultivate two things in educational leadership One is the relationships and one is skills. So, when it comes to our competency and expertise, so obviously everybody I've ever met at Dean is like a nice guy, like they're like a wonderful group of people, highly, highly relational people, all of the DESs and the consultants. But they are also the key conduits of expertise through our system, right, you know all of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, his every teacher in Sir Wilfrid Laurier, every elementary school teacher who teaches history, has like one person who can answer those most technical, perplexing questions about the history curriculum, right? So those consultants are key conduits of subject specific expertise and it is like just such a joy to work with that team to support the development of how they get that expertise used, how to disseminate that expertise, how they can have many more experts in history that can answer history questions, not just them, right, absolutely, absolutely. So it's a joy. And one of the things that drives me bonkers about Quebec is we have these two role groups. We have the role group of consultants and the role group of everyone in the Department of Ed Services, including the head of the department, for which there is no subject-specific training.

Megan Webster: 31:14

So you can go to school to learn how to become a principal. You can go to school to learn how to become a teacher. Where do you go to become a principal? You can go to school to learn how to become a teacher. Where do you go to become a consultant? What is the master's in leading professional development for teachers course? It does not exist. Where is the course in being a district leader in pedagogical services? That course does not exist. And there's not a lot of PD for that either, right? So our history consultant is going to lots of PD about history and they know a lot about historical thinking competencies, but they are not necessarily going to PD on how to teach teachers how to teach historical thinking skills to students. So they know the content but they often don't have access to training on how to mobilize that expertise for teachers. So when I get a chance to do that really role-specific PD. I get really excited, amazing amazing.

Chris Colley: 32:17

Well, I've only ever heard wonderful things coming from my fellow consultants here in Quebec Well, the Anglo consultants, that is and this has been really fascinating. Megan, I love your words and the reflection. I think the listeners are really going to enjoy your perspectives and comments and really really fascinating your perspectives and comments and really, really fascinating. And your site's just a wealth too. Some great resources there as well, and I look forward to talking to you again one day.

Megan Webster: 32:48

Thanks so much, chris. It's been a pleasure talking about my favorite stuff with you, Awesome.

Chris Colley: 32:52

Me too Love it. Thanks so much.

Megan Webster: 32:55

See you soon. Bye.