I haven’t published anything for 6 months. Rather, I’ve spent my time being overwhelmed with the publishing others have done and trying to keep up with people’s takes on the madness of the sheer volume and pace of system imposed change on schools. In my 45 years of involvement in schools and education I’ve seen nothing like it. When I read the writings of those involved with Aotearoa Educators Collective (AEC) (you know who you are) and Derek Wenmoth’s regular pieces I am in awe and haven’t felt that I could add anything of value to the current context.
Those of you who have read my posts in the past know that I regularly go on about the importance of being aware of then being true to your driving values and having the courage to stick to them, especially when the ‘weather’ gets roughest. I’ve often used Julia Atkin’s circle framework to describe how to do that:
You’ll also, possibly, know that I am a fan of frameworks that we can use to help us stay true to our vision; at least a vision that inspires us to contribute to an education system that allows students and teachers to thrive, one in which students and teachers both have agency.
Apart from Julia’s Circles, which have been the foundation of how I have operated and support others to do so, my go-to frameworks are below: the first drawn from Margaret Thorsborne’s work on Restorative Practice and encourages us to operate as often as possible in the top right corner by being Warm & Demanding. The second comes from Russell Bishop’s work on teaching and leading to the north-east and encourages us to operate as often as possible in the top right corner by combining high relational skills and high teaching skills. The third comes from Disengaged Teens which encourages us to teach and manage our classrooms in such a way that our learners locate themselves in the top right corner where they experience high levels of agency and high levels of engagement.
While out for a run the other day a thought popped into my head: each of these frameworks have us striving to be in the top right corner, how hard would it be to combine them together to make some sort of ‘super’ framework.
So I gave it a go!
The green highlighted texts describe students with that particular combination of engagement and agency (high or low) (from Disengaged Teens) and the yellow highlighted texts describe teachers with that particular combination of relationship and teaching skills (high or low) (from Russell Bishop).
But it doesn’t work in a neat and tidy way e.g. Achieving Students (High Engagement Low Agency) do get great grades so those teachers must display some good teaching skills and couldn’t be described as ‘Undemanding’. I could, however, suggest that they might have a narrow range of teaching skills that they are very good at and do not include those that would support students to be lifted into the top right corner and become Explorers.
Similar inconsistencies exist in the other quadrants, especially those on the left.
Anyway, I haven’t given up on tweaking this to see if I can make it more useful. Any suggestions will be most welcome.
The thought I leave you with, especially if you work and/or lead in schools and are about to kick off 2026, is that you try to look for ways to lift students into the Explorer quadrant by allowing for more, not less, agency on their part and that you show them every day that you care for them as individuals and as learners, and that you have high expectations of them to learn deeply and of yourself and colleagues to find ways for everyone of them to learn deeply.
Of course, the big question is how do we do this? I’ve got some ideas to share in my next post.
