Murray Bridge Leading CRS

Context

​Murray Bridge High School is a regional high school situated in the active and growing rural city of Murray Bridge, which is in many ways becoming outer metropolitan.

Murray Bridge High School was established in 1913, with 25 students in one room at what is now the  Murray Bridge North Primary School. At the time the school emphasised the teaching of Agriculture, and this has continued to the present day.

The school moved to a new location in 1920 and grew in numbers with students travelling from satellite country towns by train, or by milk boat. Today students from these, and other areas, are transported to the even newer larger school site (opened 1971) by bus.

The school and its community can be characterised in the following ways:

• Murray Bridge High School provides for a diversity of students and offers pathways to cater for all students: academic and vocational education as well as special education. Students come from a range of socio-economic backgrounds.
• Many students live in low income households, and are dependent on education as an opportunity and pathway to improved life choices.
• In 2023 the school employed 96 teaching staff and 43 non-teaching staff.
• Murray Bridge High School is classified as Category 2 on the Department for Education Index of Educational Disadvantage.
• By the end of 2023 the school diversity was characterised by a population that included 15% Aboriginal students, 10% students with disabilities, 7% students with English as an additional language or dialect (EALD) funded background, 2% children/young people in care.
• The school is currently led (2024) by a female Principal and female Deputy Principal. The school is further supported by learning area leaders and whole school leaders. The school has five learning areas:
• Global Perspectives (English, HASS and LOTE)
• STEM  (Maths, Science)
• Creative Design Visual and Performing Arts, Digital Learning, Technology Studies)
• Healthy Lifestyles (PE, Outdoor Education, Home Economics)
• VET

The school’s whole of school leaders take responsibility for

• Student Pathways: Year 7,8, 9, 10, 11, 12
• Special Options and Students with Disabilities (Inclusive Education)
• Aboriginal Student Pathways
• Student Wellbeing Leaders
• Local and Global Promotions

At MBHS all staff are expected to put Aboriginal Learners in the forefront of their thinking when planning programs of work and differentiating learning for students interests and needs.  This means consulting and collaborating with Aboriginal Leaders within the school regarding Aboriginal Students, to be inclusive of all learners and to build positive relationships with students.

Challenges and commitments

With the appointment of the school principal in 2019, Murray Bridge High School undertook a process of rethinking its relation to the local community and the culture of the school. The school led by the Principal undertook a consultation across the community including parents, Aboriginal communities, local council, industry, government services and staff.

Stemming out of this consultation the school clarified a number of forces that regulated and constrained its capacity to flourish and identified a number of commitments to affect the culture of the school.

Challenges

In beginning her work  the Principal engaged the school in critiquing the outcome of the consultation. The staff identified a conjunction of forces or groups operating within her school that were affected by historical associations with the school. Each group’s relation to the school can be particularised in the following ways:

• People who had attended  Murray Bridge High and maintained toxic memories of having been at school
• the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority, made up of a number of groups reflected the complex nature of Aboriginal communities across the local region. It became clear from the consultation that the Aboriginal community had maintained rules of engagement and disengagement with the school.
• Communication between Aboriginal communities and the school had been characterised by a degree of mistrust about the function of schooling
• Many of the satellite townships, populated by settler communities, brought a history of insular relations as well as complexities of non-attachment to the life of the school
• A floating population of 457 visa families not only added to the superdiversity of the school but also to patterns of wariness and lack of connection
• Students living in institutionalised care but without consistent adult connection, including the care of family also figured as a key group.

Commitments

In response to Murray Bridge High School’s critical analysis of community perception and current schooling practices, the school made a number of commitments. Significantly, the school

• acknowledged that it was both located and positioned on Ngarrindjeri Ruwi (Country), and sought to establish a renewed relation with Aboriginal community
• aimed to enhance the visibility of Aboriginal community and to improve Aboriginal student engagement
• developed values and practices, reinforced by its Reconciliation Action Plan, that intensified its honouring of Ngarrindjeri culture, traditions and spiritual relationship to Ruwi (country).
• re-designed the school motto – Palai Namawi, Ngarrindjeri for the future is ours and embedding the image of a swan representing Ngarrindjeri culture.
• established a practice of Ngarrindjeri language translation, which became a high priority for students and staff, as well as the  Murray Bridge community
• used Ngarrindjeri translation on uniforms, signage and in other public spaces aiming to continue to celebrate the school’s region’s rich Indigenous culture and provide a sense of welcome and belonging for the school’s Aboriginal students and their families
• established school neighbourhood groups, named by Ngarrindjeri totems that have significance to Ngarrindjeri people. These were carefully chosen by their students to represent their new neighbourhoods:
  • Kungari – the Black Swan (Blue)
  • No:ri – Pelican (Green)
  • Pondi – Murray Cod (Yellow)
  • Wirakuthi – Frill Neck Lizard (Red)
• recognized that it has traditionally had a diverse demographic, characterised by
  • a significant population who experienced poverty both within the township and in its satellite communities
  • waves of migrants taking up employment opportunities enriching the community.

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Towards a Culturally Responsive School

In recognition of its diverse population the school has aimed to develop stronger community connections with the intention of reframing diversity and poverty discourses and pedagogies.

Murray Bridge High School has engaged with the Culturally Responsive Schooling project to

• leverage its commitments to Aboriginal culture and place and its diverse population.
• embed CRS as an aspect of its reform strategy to provide opportunity to all young people from all backgrounds and
• to provide enabling conditions for the flourishing of learners being / self in community. This has been reinforced its commitments to the school’s
  • Reconciliation Action Plan,
  • school wide differentiation
  • trauma informed practices

Restructuring and rethinking for Culturally Responsive Schooling

When faced with current / past lived experience of school’s disciplinary structures, the school has hoped to find ways to imagine a different way to enact leader, teacher and student subjectivity.

This includes helping students imagining a future beyond Murray Bridge, while maintaining pride in their community. Structurally this has meant

• reconfiguring school time and pressure of meeting performative demands
• rethinking the consequences of streaming culture
• moving pedagogies from deficit / relational rescue to valuing assets of learner and relational knowledge building
• intensifying and leveraging reflective practice collectively
• aiming to systematically building knowledge of school and practices in democratic ways

How the school ran the professional learning

2021

When the school was approached by Dr Stephen Kelly at the end of 2021 to become part of the ARC project Culturally Responsive Schooling, it organised a meeting attended by members of the principal team and Aboriginal Education Representatives. At this meeting participants were inducted into the principles underpinning Culturally Responsive Schooling and the aims of the project. School leadership and the Aboriginal Education Representatives determined that there was an alignment between school’s strategic direction, its current state of development and where it wanted to move to next in resigning whole school culture and pedagogy.

2022

Five teacher-leaders were identified to participate in the first year of the project with the principle aim of modelling the practices of CRS to other teachers at the school in the subsequent year. Each of these teachers were chosen because of their

• passion for Aboriginal education and for some experience in teaching SAASTA
• strong and respectful relationships with their students and peers
• active participation as team members and willingness to contribute and share their knowledge and expertise
• expertise across different learning areas.

In 2022 these teachers gained first-hand experience of action research informed by culturally responsive pedagogical principles. Throughout 2022 they engaged in professional learning and conducted an action research.

Key outcomes of the teacher leader’s work were to

• develop an in-depth study of innovation of classroom practice when exploring and applying CRP.
• intensify their knowledge and understanding of their research outcomes when presenting to a showcase involving teacher researchers form other participating schools.
• provide the school leadership with the empirical data to analyse

• the effect of the action research on the teacher-leader’s classroom practice
• their ability to work as a team to lead each other to deepen their practice

What Teacher-leaders learnt from trying action research out in the first year

When engaging with culturally responsive pedagogy research the teacher-leaders  have endorsed Castagno and Brayboy’s (2008) position that

Culturally responsive educators engage the cultural strengths of students and engage constantly with their families and communities in order to create and facilitate effective conditions for learning. They see student diversity in terms of student strengths; they orient to it as presenting opportunities for enhancing learning rather than as challenges and/or deficits of the students or particular community

The teacher-leaders were also influenced by the view that CRP resonated with the school’s student-centred approach with the aim of

• Sharing power at all levels of the school
• Foregrounding culture of place and community
• Making learning is interactive and dialogic
• Connecting relations to diverse experience, ways of knowing and being
• Committing to a common vision of excellence for all in education

Rescaling action research

The school leadership made the decision to expand Culturally Responsive Pedagogy action research to the whole school in 2023. The decision to scale up to the whole school became an important step in actualising the concept of a Culturally Responsive School.

2023

In 2023 the school embarked on an action research process across the whole school.

Project initiation:

The school began by allocating a full day to whole school professional learning. On this day they were inducted to the aims of the project by Dr Stephen Kelly, Professor Darryl Rigney gave a presentation firmly grounding the project in Ngarrindjeri culture and place. This was followed by presentations of the 2022 action research to the entire staff by the teacher leaders.

In the afternoon staff broke up into learning areas and were led by the teacher-leaders and learning area coordinators to start the process of naming a pedagogical challenge.

On the following day teachers attended another learning area meeting to further activate action research planning.

In the following week, teachers met in transdisciplinary learning groups to further reflect on CRP concepts and the pedagogical challenges that would inform their action research.

Leadership, and delivery of professional learning sessions throughout 2023

Professional development sessions were led by the teacher leaders involved in the 2022 action research and the four leaders of learning areas. Each teacher-leader paired up with one of the learning area leaders from

• Global Perspectives
• STEM
• Creative Design
• Healthy Lifestyles

Professional learning was held in a combination of (a) staff meetings prior to learning area meetings (b) the learning area meetings (c) mentoring conversations (d) learning team meetings

Members of the principal team including the Principal became closely immersed in the process.

Structure of CRS professional learning collaborations/meetings

Staff Meetings: On some occasions brief whole staff meetings were held to orient staff about the focus of the learning area meetings. These were led by the Assistant Principal who participated as a teacher leader in the 2022 action research.

• The Aboriginal Education Team, led by members of the ACETO staff also facilitated whole staff professional learning about aspects of the values (axiologies), knowledges (epistemologies) and ways of relating and being (ontologies) practised in Ngarrindjeri culture. These sessions complemented the culturally responsive schooling project.

Learning Area Meetings: On some occasions brief whole staff meetings were held to orient staff about the focus of the learning area meetings. These were led by the Assistant Principal who participated as a teacher leader in the 2022 action research.

• The Learning Area meetings were facilitated by the by the CRS project leader and Learning area leader and observed by Dr Stephen Kelly and the Principal of the School. Sessions were structured by
  • engagement with a synthesis of readings generated by the CRS project and developed by the teacher leaders
  • each synthesis was designed to lesson demands placed on teachers claiming to be time poor.
  • each synthesis of readings shared key take aways in one page documents as a buy-in for staff
  • the assistant principal (teacher leader) responsible for the CRS roll out offered the following comment:
  • The links to whole readings were easily available so staff could engage further if they wanted to, and it was clear from discussions that some chose to. The underlying expectation was that the readings were the foundation for discussions in both Learning Area and Learning Teams meetings, and influenced action research. Upon refinement of reading rollout the staff provided feedback saying that they appreciated the synthesised versions as they could easily navigate and find links to their own action research process a lot more efficiently.
  • Whole group, small group and individual discussion and responses to questions embedded in the learning area journal. Questions addressed stages of the action research process that teacher leader’s became familiar with in 2022.
• Staff were encouraged to nominate in which term they were to conduct their action research i.e. in Term 2 or Term 3. While some staff accelerated their research design to accommodate a Term 2 commencement, all staff participated in the Learning Area meetings, contributing to learning Area journal responses.
• At the beginning of Term 3, the teachers who adopted the action research process in Term 2 presented their experiences using a scaled down template of the action research process experienced by the teacher leaders. The Principal Team with support from Dr Stephen Kelly were responsible for redesigning this.
• Early in Term 4, teachers who adopted the action research process in Term 2 presented their experiences using a scaled down template of the action research process experienced by the teacher leaders.
• Teacher leaders and learning area coordinators acted as discussants at these meetings, recording observations and suggesting common understandings / knowledge about practice and learners surfacing out of the project.

Learning Team Meetings: In addition to learning area meetings the transdisciplinary learning teams held facilitated discussions working to an agenda decided by the Principal Team and Learning Team Leaders. These agendas were clarified in management meetings involving the Principal team and learning team leaders.

The learning teams were considered to be horizontially structured with no single individual taking responsibility for delivering PD, rather learning team leaders

• facilitated dialogue between teachers about practices being considered including CRP and CRS.
• recorded responses to the structured discussions to be shared in a central digital repository available to all staff.
• encouraged all staff to take responsibility for contributing to professional learning of each other through dialogic discussions about practice.

Mentoring meetings: Throughout the year staff met with each other about the aims and challenges of engaging with the action research. Generally, these meetings were informal but were characterised by:

• structured professional conversations: teachers meet with members of the leadership team to discuss professional learning plans?
• ad hoc meetings between teacher leaders to check on processes being used, materials needing to be developed advice and support in leading the whole school research
• ad hoc meetings between teachers and teacher-leaders (and sometimes members of the principal team) confirming processes to be used and getting feedback on challenges, questions and pedagogical approaches being used.

Post professional learning meeting reflections:  A number of ad hoc meetings were held throughout the year between Dr Stephen Kelly and the members of the Principal Team to assess progress being made in the action research process.

In school project team meetings: The aims and processes of conducting action research were addressed periodically within leadership meetings involving the principal team, learning area coordinators, pathway coordinators and learning team leaders.

One special meeting was held with members of the principal team, learning area coordinators and the CRS lead teachers to confirm approaches leading up to the Term 4 learning area presentations of action research / systematic reflective practice.

Ethnographic study of 4 teacher researchers: Four teachers were identified in late Term 2 as participants in the whole school ethnography being conducted by Dr Stephen Kelly. These teachers were observed engaging in action research of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and participated in reflective discussions with Dr Kelly during and at the end of lessons.

Use of CRP website and teacher leader 2022 action research: many teachers referred to past examples of CRP action research when seeking guidance on how best to approach their action research.

How did this fit with existing PD structures?

The approaches outlined above were timetabled within existing (i.e. staff meetings, learning area meetings, leadership meetings and structured and informal professional conversations) and new professional learning structures. The learning team meetings were trialled in 2023 for the first time.

Support materials developed by the school.

The Principal Team led by the Deputy Principal developed a number of digital journals/records of discussion to be kept  and made available to

• Learning area
• Learning team
• Individual teachers

The learning area journal helped direct learning area discussions, and record reflections generated by teachers participating in these meetings.

The learning team journals helped record teacher discussions about practice in the learning team meetings. Each individual teacher was encouraged to keep a teacher journal of their action research. This journal was designed to blend aspects of whole school commitments to differentiated learning and the key questions and moves of the action research template used in 2022 by the teacher leaders.

School support for the prof learning

In order to meet the demands of a whole school approach to action research, focusing on culturally responsive schooling the leadership team felt that it was necessary to find time within the structured timetable to support and facilitate engagement with staff. This meant aligning weekly Professional Learning structures to maximise staff engagement and transfer of ideas and practices across the network of groups, including leaders, learning area and learning teams.

Significantly, the meeting structures were “calanderised” where staff met in either leadership, faculty groups (learning areas, learning teams, staff meetings and flexi meetings. This networked approach involved leadership from Learning area leaders, the five CRS teacher-leaders, The Principal Team, Learning Team Leaders to facilitate discussions.

These various forums provided opportunity for staff to work both collaboratively and collectively. These meetings provided opportunity for the sharing and monitoring of progress, feedback, and ongoing design of action research and regular acknowledgement of the great work people were doing (online staff meetings also assisted with collaboration. This networked meeting and practice-based structure was characterized in the following ways:

• Learning Area collaboration – staff shared challenges and practice within learning areas
• Learning Teams – horizontal cross-pollination across learning areas
• Teacher-leaders exercised expertise gathered the previous year and were each assigned a Learning Area to support throughout the year
• Action research presentations shared with peers helped to generate authenticity and meaning for action research practice
• All presentations were uploaded in shared drive for sharing of practice
• The Principal Team (including the Principal) took part in discussions at leaders meetings, learning area meetings and learning team meetings. They also worked with staff on CRS objectives through the structured professional discussions.

Criteria for success

The Principal Team developed the following success criteria

• educators can identify pedagogical challenges and collaborate with their peers to design and implement changes of own practice in response to these challenges
• students and Educators will draw upon their own and other’s experiences in order to develop a deeper sense of connection and self
• educators will trial multiple pedagogical practices in response to their day to day challenges
  • They will be encouraged and supported to trial multiple approaches to classroom practice that come from a strength based approach
  • Educators are actively engaged within reflective practice and are recording their experiences within their teacher journal
  • Students are actively engaged through two-way communication and feedback throughout the implementation and development of pedagogical practices and their impact (WEC)
  • Evidence of higher engagement through student growth and achievement data (GPA)

Plans for the future

2024 – Co-Designing Pedagogical Alignment & Impact

In 2024 MBHS teachers will work together to review and refine 4 focus areas (see appendix 5) underpinning the next School Improvement Plan. These include the embedding of the

• DfE Expert Teaching Framework,
• Strategies for Public Education – Areas of impact,
• the Berry Street Educational model (informing trauma effects in education)
• Culturally Responsive Schooling (see appendix?).

The experience of whole school action research informed by CRS principles will continue to be used to inform other aspects of the School Improvement Plan. This includes

• maintaining school structural supports developed in 2023 such as the intentional use of Action Research / Structured Reflective Practice in meeting and professional learning time
• finding time to release teachers and teacher leaders to intensify their reflective practice
• investigating other ways of “reducing the clutter” of teachers’ work
• using evidence and knowledge built out of structured reflective practice
• building ways to enable ownership and including parents/community.

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Conclusions

Outcomes

In observing outcomes of the two-year CRS process the Principal Team have noted that

• Staff and students engage in more two-way (dialogic) communication – the team felt that engagement levels had increased and relationships outside of the classroom had been strengthened
• Shared staff spaces had been ‘buzzing’ – there had been an increased number of discussions about possible adjustments to pedagogy as opposed to just venting and blaming the students
• Students had been engaging in more dialogue with one another – see one another as assets within the learning process
• There has been greater connection for students and staff and between staff and students, especially for those who previously didn’t feel they belonged to the school community
• The school was creating a culture in which educators, students and all members of the school community aren’t afraid to fail and are honest about their challenges.

What was learnt about leading CRS?

A key observation made by the Principal and Learning Area Teams about the challenge of creating a culturally responsive school has been the need to recognise

• the differences in other people’s life worlds and acknowledging that cultural diversity needs to be viewed as an asset (see appendix 4).
• that when school community members mutually respecting others they will build connections within the school, and
• feel a sense of belonging to the place of school and community place and
• find a space to enact their identity.

In order to meet these features of a culturally responsive school the leaders also observed that

• time is key – opportunities for educators to collaborate and work through the process together
• develop reflective practice habits throughout all initiatives – sharing thoughts, challenges, ideas etc.
• accepting that not everything will work as desired, but shouldn’t be a reason for not trying
• clearly defining the ‘why’ with staff assists in buy in
• CRS is not about compliance – it is about supportive structure to engage with theory and take risks to address a challenge
• it is important to reframe perception of student deficits to assets by changing pedagogical practice.