Spotlight on Noel Burke

Vanessa: 00:00

Hello, and welcome to ChangEd, a podcast that lifts the curtain on educational change and brings you into the room with the people doing it. My name is Vanessa, and I'm your host. Instead of our regular episode format, we're going to do what we're calling a spotlight series on each of our team members, so you can get to know us a little better. Everyone was asked the same five questions. Why are you interested in school change? What brought you to this project? What do you bring to this project? What excites you most about NEXTschool? And, beyond NEXTschool, what other hats do you wear? In this spotlight episode, you'll hear from Noel Burke.

Noel: 00:38

Well, I guess it goes back to my own experience in high school, in particular, where I found the way learning was structured and the learning experience was very kind of scattered and although it looked organized, was very unorganized. It didn't have a lot of relevance for me, studying individual subjects, uh, with one exception. I had a teacher in grade 10 who, um, was a draft dodging beatnik. This was in the 60s, you have to remember, that I was in high school. And, um, he was a beat poet and turned us on to a lot of beat poetry and really connected to the outside world, which in the 60s was pretty wild, but aside from that, the rest of it, it just bored me to death. And I thought, surely, I could do better than this. And, I started teaching, you know, a year after I left high school, in high school, and, uh, started a number of different projects. One was an inner-city school where I started a project to orient, uh, students to post-secondary education, uh, when many of them didn't go and there was no kind of outlet for them to understand what the opportunities were. So, it started there and, uh, kind of evolved over time. And so, I've started and managed quite a few projects over my career, all with the interest of improving the high school learning experience.

Noel: 01:58

What brought me to this particular project, was a project I started earlier in 2005, which was the Community Learning Centre Network here in Québec, which now numbers about 90 schools. Where we were encouraging interaction between the school and the local community and encouraging the creation of partnerships and projects that make learning relevant for students in the community. It could be gardening projects, could be help for seniors, and also bringing learning experiences into the school after school. So, we got started with that and we had a lot of good uptake in the project at the elementary level. And, uh, at the secondary level, it was flat. And that caused us to kind of wonder, like, what's going on? Because the same experience happened with the Québec education curriculum reform which began in 2002. Itself got traction at the elementary level and flat at the high school level. So, it inspired us to think, the co-founder and myself, to think, well, could we change the model of community learning centers for the high school? Instead of bringing the community into the school, maybe we want to bring the school out into the community. And we started to think of, well, how would that happen? And we initiated some research, and we started doing visits in a variety of schools that were considered innovative. Uh, some in Ontario, some in British Columbia. We made connections with a school in, uh, New Zealand where there's a lot of innovation going on.

Noel: 03:27

As part of all of that research, I came across a study by the OECD, a 10-year study, on innovative learning environments, which was research across 60 countries globally, whose intent was to identify the most successful innovative practices, not just innovative practices, not something that's different, but something that was a change process that actually had a significant impact in change. And so out of that, uh, project, along with the other research we had done we overlaid what are those most successful practices and put these things together as a hybrid of good practice and successful practice. So that's how we started this project and we've had a phase one and a phase two, 1. 0 and 2. 0.

Noel: 04:12

You know, I love the expression fail forward. Uh, 1. 0 didn't fly. Mostly because we put it out as a recipe. You know, here's the three most innovative practices and here's how to put them in place. This really was disingenuous to teachers in schools in the sense that, well, we have the answer and we're gonna give it to you, and you, you're gonna make it happen. But, it didn't really generate local ownership of the project. The pandemic came along, which gave us a chance to you know, lick our wounds a little bit and also write a blueprint for 2. 0, which really focused on three specific needs of students from all the research that we saw and three elements that we would implement.

Noel: 04:53

One of the features of the project is a daily check-in called a learning hub, student flex time where students can, at the end of each day, the last hour of each day students can take co-curricular courses. Some are academic, some are interest, some are remedial, some are enrichment. And teacher flex time, which is this notion of taking all teacher spare periods aligning them vertically so that they teach two days on and collaborate with each other every third day which is like an extraordinary change. Scenarios for those every third day could be individual work of the teacher, preparation, corrections, whatever, could be curriculum management - working in small teams, managing curriculum and starting to move to an interdisciplinary mindset. And a third could be professional development. Now, when did you ever see every nine days professional development opportunities for teachers? Not to necessarily get experts from outside, but to develop expertise within the team. So, one teacher might be the project-based learning teacher, the other might be the interdisciplinary, the other might be the literacy expert, the numeracy expert, uh, whatever. So, you know, within the team you start to grow expertise but also confidence in practice. In summary, it's not a program which a lot of people assumed it was, like IB or STEAM or, makerspace, or arts-focused, or Sports-études, it is a structure that supports any of those programs. So, it is a structural framework that enables schools to really accelerate the change process and adapt school culture as they go along. We started to use the terminology container and contents. So, we were providing the container for the project, the contents for the project were locally generated in design workshops that we initiated. And so, 2. 0 is about to become a reality this fall, fall ‘23, with one particular school starting a middle school program where they will implement this hybrid innovative structure.

Noel: 06:57

I think, uh, believing emotionally in the project and its ability to empower students and teachers in a very significant and very different way is what's most exciting. What excites me most about NEXTschool at the moment, and there's surely more to come when we start the, uh, get the pilot off the ground, uh, this fall, is the excitement of the teachers that are involved. You know, the best teachers are those who believe in their subject and are excited by their subject. That excitement is very infectious. So, the school that we're starting in invited from the staff 12 teachers who would be interested in being involved in the middle school NEXTschool project. As we started the design workshops, at first the teachers were quite resistant and I chalked that up to them being so familiar with the scenario, you know, oh, we're here to empower you and, you know, we're gonna help you and do all this stuff. But what we were doing in the design process that I think we weren't completely aware of is letting go. Letting them design, not giving them the answers, just getting into a design process and, uh, and a, uh, tried and proven design process, uh, internationally used. Once they could see themselves making decisions about how this would play out, you could just see the level of interest start to grow.

Noel: 08:23

When the teachers started to design student flex time we said, well, what would you offer in this one-hour-a-day space. And, uh, I thought this is where it's going to fall apart. Teachers are going to say, what do we, you mean we have to come up with something every day at the last hour of every day? This is like huge and it's not in the curriculum, it's not what I usually do. The exact opposite happened. I asked for some suggestions that we could discuss at the next workshop, which is where we are, you know, this week. I got 34 courses sent back to me. Thirty-four! And all of them connected to competencies in the curriculum. Like, if you had gone in as the principal or as a consultant like myself, or a project leader and said, I want you to come up with 34 courses and I want you to, you know, connect it to the curriculum and give me course descriptions and when it would be offered and all of this. They would have laughed us out of the building.

Noel: 09:19

Again, along the lines of what's most exciting about the project is teacher excitement. We were at a parent information night, uh, last week, where four of the twelve teachers came. There were about a hundred and twenty parents in the auditorium. The vice principal described the project and these three features of the project, And, uh the parents were saying, well, what happens in this Student Flex Time? And the teacher started describing all the courses and you could see the parents in the room sort of saying, whoa my kids are going to take courses that they want to take? That they're interested in Grade Seven and Eight? And parents were genuinely enthusiastic about it. What really struck me is one of the teachers said, you know, it, it, in just true teacher fashion, you know, it's June, it was the first day of June, uh, you know, it's June, and we're not usually thinking about September in June. We're thinking about the two months of rest we get from the rest of the year. But I can tell you that we're really excited about September and looking forward to it. And that just, that just blew my mind. So that's, uh, that's what I meant by infectious, excitement.

Noel: 10:21

Some of the, the senior advisors to the project, Michael Fullan among them, Bill Hogarth, being an education innovator in Ontario, Michael Kekulé here in Québec, um,, the experts are excited about it, you know, because, the learning hub, the daily check in exists in many places in many formats. Student flex time exists very minimally now, and you know, a lot of schools have, you know, Wednesday afternoon off or an hour off here and there, uh, but we have an hour every day. But teacher flex time at this level, we haven't seen this anywhere. That is the real, breakthrough.

Noel: 10:56

I continue to teach at McGill in the graduate certificate uh, on educational leadership. Another project that I've just begun is trying to encourage school boards and schools to establish coaching for new teachers. Because I'm concerned, as, as many are, of course, at the, uh, high dropout rate, not of students, but of teachers. Many teachers leave the profession in their first five years, so I've uh, started a project with one school where I'm training a teacher to be a teacher coach for new teachers. I guess the common theme here is the empowerment of teachers.

Vanessa: 11:36

You've been listening to ChangEd. My name is Vanessa Gold and I'm your host. I'm a PhD candidate and part of a research team at McGill University interested in educational change. Each of us brings diverse experiences and expertise to an ongoing investigation of this topic within a current school change initiative being piloted in Quebec called NEXTschool. You can find more information about this initiative and the work our research team has done on our website at www.nextschoolquebec.com. Part of our goal in producing this podcast is to share what we're doing and involve you, our listeners in the research process, speaking with members of our team, other academics, experts, and practitioners amongst others, each episode explores one of many complex facets of educational change. You can expect topics like how to lead change, getting past inertia, the politics of change, and people's lived experiences of school change as it happens all within, but not exclusive to the NEXTschool context.

Vanessa: 12:42

Spearheading the initiative is Noel Burke. Dr. Lisa Starr is the principal investigator of McGill's NEXTschool Research Team and Dr. Joseph Levitan, Dr. Lynn Butler-Kisber, and Dr. Bronwen Low are co-investigators. Five graduate students round out the research team, including myself, Ellen MacCannell, Aron Rosenberg, Anna Villalta, and Natalie Malka. You'll be hearing from all of us as we explore the tricky and important work of making schools better for everyone. This podcast and our research about NEXTschool is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. ChangEd is produced by Vanessa Gold. Music is by Neal Read he's at nealread.ca. A transcript of today's podcast, citations and additional information are on our website, www.nextschoolquebec.com. Thanks for tuning in. We're looking forward to engaging with you.