S5 E6 - Keeping Your Team's Bus on the Road When Onboarding New Staff

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Hi there, it's Jocelyn here with this week's episode of the Structured Literacy podcast, recorded here in my hometown of Pataway, Burnie in Tasmania. It's the start of the school year here in Australia and most schools have new staff in place. Some are experienced teachers from other schools, some are early career teachers taking charge of their own classroom for the first time. And many are existing teachers moving to grades they've never taught before. For every one of these teachers, they are newbies in one way or another.

It's tempting to assume that just because a teacher has experience, we can simply point them in the direction of a mentor and all will be well. However, this approach is a recipe for angst, confusion and mixed messaging. In fact, not having a proper onboarding and coaching process in place could put your hard-won literacy gains in instruction at risk.

So today I'd like to share some ideas about supporting your new staff and setting everyone up for success. Now, while the school year's already begun, it's never too late to implement good practices, so keep listening.

The Best Start

Let's start with how you can give all staff, whether they're teaching, assisting or supporting, the best possible start. The first thing to understand is that you can't really catch them up to where the rest of the team is. If your school has been on the structured literacy bus for three years, your new staff will always be at least a step behind, unless they're coming from another structured literacy school. When onboarding new staff, it's crucial to prioritise their cognitive load rather than trying to bring them up to speed with the rest of the team all at once. Instead, focus on what's most important for them to make a solid start with your school's existing programs, routines and engagement norms. Once you give teachers these essentials, you can plan to build their knowledge throughout their first 12 months at the school. This doesn't mean that you won't provide some short, sharp professional learning to give them the beginnings of an understanding about why you do what you do. That's actually really important. It just means taking a measured, thoughtful approach to building their knowledge over the long term.

Remember, adults learn in the same way as students. We need manageable chunks of learning and the opportunity to practice with guidance. That's why it's essential to provide a mentor who can guide them as they find their feet. When new team members have prior experience, they're naturally going to draw on that to manage their cognitive load. If they've previously taught in alignment with your instructional approach, that's super helpful, but if they haven't, they'll need to relearn what strong instruction looks like, and we shouldn't leave them to figure this out alone just because they have classroom experience. If we're not careful, what often happens is that the person does what they think is right, only to be told after months that they've been doing it wrong. This creates resentment and makes it difficult to engage them in future professional learning because they no longer feel safe learning within the school environment.

Early Career Teachers

For early career teachers, the journey is different, but not necessarily harder. In some ways, being a graduate is easier than being an experienced teacher in a new environment. Experienced teachers often make assumptions about their capabilities when they might not have the specific knowledge needed for your context, but a graduate, they know, most of the time, that they have things to learn, so they're a lot more open.

Remember that everyone is different and don't be afraid to provide high levels of support, adjusting the direction and guidance to suit the individual needs. When we're first learning, we need structured guidance to achieve quick success, just like our novice students. After a while we start applying what we've been learning and we begin to achieve success, but we don't yet have the experience to handle unexpected situations. Making assumptions that someone is fine because they've taught a few good lessons can leave them feeling lost when they hit their first challenge, which will inevitably happen. And this is where coaching becomes crucial.

Coaching

Research, particularly from people like Joyce and Showers, shows that coaching is almost the missing link in transferring professional learning into classroom action. Coaching helps us navigate the choppy waters of those early days of learning. When we're doing well, we feel terrific, but when we hit something unfamiliar, we often fall into the learning pit of despair. At that point we need someone to provide emotional support, to help us identify what's happening and build a plan forward, because when we're in the learning pit, we are much more likely to blame the program or the resource or the school's approach than we are to say Oh, I think I have more developing to do here. And it's at that point that people go rogue.

The First Classroom

For graduate teachers or early career teachers taking on their first classroom role, the support needed is broader. Gone are the days, I hope, of here's your classroom, here's your students, call me if you have any difficulties. I think we're more aware than ever that pre-service teacher education is often inadequate in areas like just simply understanding how learning works. If your graduates come from one of the universities with up-to-date instruction in initial teacher education, that's really helpful, but at this point in time it is entirely probable that your graduate teachers simply don't have a base level understanding of concepts like Cognitive Load Theory. They'll also need support with parent communication, setting healthy boundaries, managing classroom behaviour behavior and maintaining work-life balance.

It's crucial to partner early career teachers with mentors who are, and listen to this, if you're doing something else, come back to me, who are fully aligned with your school's approach. I've seen situations where the assigned mentor isn't fully on the bus with the school's structured approach to teaching and this leads to confusing and mixed messages for vulnerable new teachers. So everyone's going to the meeting, they're going to the PL, nodding and smiling, and then when they have a private conversation together, the mentor is saying Oh well, this is what we're doing for now, but I've been teaching for ages, don't worry, the pendulum will shift and we'll be doing what we used to do in no time. And that makes it really hard for that new teacher to get on board and to find success.

When it comes to experienced teachers moving to new grade levels, we have some advantages if they've been with our school for a while. They'll understand the core approach, unless you're like most schools where the early years team may be further along in the structured literacy journey than the upper primary team. So remember that moving from upper primary to early years requires significant learning, and teachers might not feel that comfortable admitting this uncertainty. They might think I've been teaching for eight years, why should I need help with a Year One class? But they're essentially novices in their new grade, even if they've been masters of their previous one.

Structured Approaches

To support all staff effectively, having structured approaches to planning time is essential. Maintain a clear vision across the team of what great teaching looks like. In schools where I've taught demonstration lessons, those videos were saved by the school and then became shared examples of practice that teachers could reference again and again. You don't need to spend enormous amounts of money, though, to achieve this, but it's dangerous to rely solely on partner teaching, as in go and observe the teacher next door, as practices can get watered down over time. So you can create a library of relevant teaching examples for your team. This might include YouTube playlists, resources from your phonics program and, even better, captured examples of excellent practice from within your own team. When you have teachers operating at a mastery level in your school's programs and approaches, video their lessons to show others what good performance looks like. That means that when you're onboarding new staff and you're providing examples, you know what they're looking at. You know the sorts of messages that are being delivered through that observation.

Remember that using pre-prepared resources doesn't mean losing touch with your class. In fact, well-designed resources with clear guidance enable teachers to focus on what's most important instructional delivery and responding to students in the moment. And what this means for new teachers, new to our school, new to the grade, new to teaching is that when they have those structured resources, they're getting an increased level of guidance for those early days when they're finding their feet. They are much more likely to be successful when they have something to follow.

However, and I cannot say this enough, the best teaching is based on the needs of students. So we have to build in an expectation that we will be helping our teachers develop with an understanding of how and when to adjust, to contextualise to students or meet their needs. But hear this everyone, it is so important to be clear about the boundaries you need to be in place around adjusting these provided resources and when to stay the course, and having a plan about this helps you to head off any potential rogue actions that might happen, not because someone doesn't want to do the right thing, but the messages were not clear.

It's less common for someone to deliberately ignore the school's approach than it is for them to have an incomplete understanding of what it is they need to do. Now while us personally engaging with professional development is a must, it's also the job of our leadership and our coaches to help staff see what they need to do. I'll say that bit again. It is each professional's responsibility to engage fully with the professional development process, including reflecting on their practice, being genuinely interested in growing in their role.

And my take on this is, if we have people in our schools who are not interested in doing that, well, perhaps they should go and find a different career, because we absolutely want to keep all of the people with us who are committed to excellence in practice for our students. We also need to provide them with the guidance and support to make that happen.

But, leaders, you don't need a 400-page manual of how your school does every little thing. Just break down the key areas of instruction with some example videos and core readings. From there you can build over time. And I'm saying this from the perspective of a leader who was always uber ambitious for what I would be able to achieve in this space and never, ever got it to the space where I wanted it to be. Because when you're a school leader, or you simply just work in a school, the number of things you have to manage is, frankly, ridiculous.

So aiming for perfection in the creation of your professional development work, in aiming for the creation of these resources and the manual of how you do things at school, only sets you up to fail. So what can be a one pager? How can you simplify the process? And in simplifying you will actually gain more clarity around what you want your team to do, and when they have clarity, then they're going to be much more successful.

That's it from me for this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. Remember, our job is not to be perfect. It is to work with what we have in the ways that we can to get the best outcomes possible, and when we focus on that, amazing things are able to happen. So until I see you again in the next episode. Happy teaching, bye.

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