Welcome

Hello and welcome to the Leading Learning Podcast. My name is Jocelyn Seamer, and if you're here because you heard me mention this show on the Structured Literacy Podcast, welcome, I'm so glad you made the trip. And if you've found your way here some other way, welcome to you too. However you arrived, I think you're going to find this a useful place to spend some time.

This first episode is going to be a little different from what's coming. Most episodes will go deeply into a specific idea, a framework, a challenge, a piece of leadership puzzle that will be worth our careful attention. But before we do any of that, I want to use this episode to tell you who I am, what has shaped my thinking to this point, and why I believe this podcast is genuinely needed right now.

Two Problems

There is no shortage of leadership content in the world. There are podcasts, courses, books, keynote presentations, and a whole industry built around telling leaders what to do. Some of it is excellent, but a lot of it is written for leaders in general. Much of it is written by people who are not leaders themselves. And there's two problems with that. Firstly, school leaders are not leaders in general. You are operating in a specific, complex, emotionally demanding environment, and you are being asked to drive improvement in teaching and learning while managing everything else a school community throws at you on any given Tuesday. And to that second point, that advice is given by people who've not done the work, well, I think we all know the problem with that. Because unless you yourself have sat in the chair, stood in the room, and felt the weight of responsibility for school improvement, I don't think that you can really appreciate what it's actually like and what really helps move the needle on the work.

Where I've Come From

So I want to talk specifically in this podcast about school improvement. And to do that, I need you to know where I've come from. You may not know that I came to teaching in general as a second career. Like a lot of people who end up in education, I took a longer route. Yes, I had been playing schools since I was five, and when we played schools, I was the teacher. But before I set foot in a classroom as a teacher, I worked in hospitality and I led in hospitality, I ran businesses, and I worked in retail, leading and managing retail businesses. I spent time as an adult trainer in corporate environments, designing and delivering professional learning for adults who were being asked to change how they worked or to learn something new. What I learned in those years has shaped so much of what I've done in education when I think about how adults actually receive and experience change. I've learned what it takes to shift someone's practice, not just their knowledge. I've learned about the difference between telling someone something and helping them truly understand it. And I've learned about the fact that when someone resists what you're asking them to do, it is almost never because they are stubborn or because they don't care about students or because they don't want to feel good about themselves as part of a team. It is almost always about fear. I tell you this because much of my thinking about leading and supporting adults formed before I entered education. And as I worked in education, my experiences honed my understanding.

So what I'm sharing with you in this podcast comes from years of watching people across all kinds of workplaces respond, or fail, to respond to new expectations. And one thing I can tell you with certainty is this: the gap between what leaders say and what their teams actually do is almost never about intelligence or willingness. It is just about always about systems and the setup that we give people to engineer the conditions that will help them succeed. And hold on to that idea, that idea that we as leadership within a school environment are the engineers of the conditions that make school improvement and change stick.

My Story with Adam

When I retrained as a teacher in my mid to late 20s, I came into the profession with something that I know was not common. My pre-service education had actually given me a grounding in how reading acquisition really works. I knew about phonics, I knew about systematic approaches to literacy and about the differences between decodable text and levelled text, and about the type of instruction that makes learning work. And then I started working with students. Very quickly, I found a student named Adam. I have permissioned to share Adam's story. He had been diagnosed with dyslexia at about seven years old, and his parents had been told by the psychologist who diagnosed Adam that they would need to think carefully about what jobs would be available to him as an adult because his diagnosis would close doors. And I remember looking at this little boy and thinking, that just does not make sense to me. He is perfectly capable, reading is just hard for him. So I started working with Adam outside of school over the Christmas holidays, and after a couple of months of systematic explicit phonics instruction built around how brains actually learn, that we know now, he went from a child who would hide behind the couch to avoid his book to a child who was chasing his mum around the kitchen asking her if he could read her just one more book. And from that moment on I was hooked completely and permanently to a sense of purpose.

And what followed, as it always does when we find something that works, is that word got around. I ended up with about 30 children coming to my house every week, ranging in ages from 7 to 15, and most of them did not have a dyslexia diagnosis. Most of them had no diagnosable difficulty at all. They were what we now call instructional casualties. Children who were entirely capable of learning to read, but had simply not been taught in a way that matched how they needed. I remember sitting there looking at those kids and feeling something that was equal parts joy and extreme frustration. Joy because I could see what was possible. Frustration because the only reason that these children were at my house learning to read instead of doing that confidently in classrooms was that their families had the time and the resources to get them extra support. And this, I decided, was a fixable problem. But it's only a fixable problem if what students need is what happens at school. And I'd love to say that the last four or five years of changing the way we think about instruction has meant that all these problems were fixed, but they're not. I'm still accepting tutoring students because their parents find me and I can't and won't say no.

Not Just the Few

But it was from this point that I decided my focus had to be on classroom instruction for teaching that reaches every child, not just the ones whose parents can access tutoring. Because equity in education is not an abstract value. It's a daily decision about what we teach, how we teach it, and whether every child in the room gets access to the instruction they need. So that commitment to equity and the belief that a child's postcode or family income should have no bearing on the quality of their learning is the bigger "why" of everything I have done since. And I'm going to be really real with you now. I have thought about taking my leadership work outside of education into the broader corporate space. But there's just something about the mission of making sure that all children learn that I can't let go of. It is a driving principle that will not leave me alone.

So I left my tutoring work and I went into my first classroom in remote Australia in the Northern Territory. So I had a Foundation to 2 class in a community where almost every child was starting from very well behind, and even though there were technically three grade levels in the class, everyone was pretty much up to the same point. So I was fortunate. I knew a bit about what to do because I had been taught in my pre-service teaching and I had been already achieving success in the tutoring space. I also had a literacy coordinator who understood structured approaches and was willing to put the right programs in place. And what we saw was kids who'd been stuck for years on the same level 2 PM reader all of a sudden started to move. And so that experience confirmed something that I already believed, which was that not only does a systematic approach to instruction that is targeted to students' needs work in the tutoring situation, but it works in schools. What I hadn't yet learned was how hard it was to lead others in the work.

I went on to work in a school in Tasmania, then I went back to the Northern Territory into remote and rural communities. All of these were low socioeconomic settings. And these are schools where the stakes for getting instruction right were as high as they get because there was and is no safety net. So I've been a teaching principal, which for anyone unfamiliar with that term means I was running the school and carrying a full classload at the same time. I did all the planning, reporting, the managing of staff, communicating with families, handling building maintenance and the bus servicing and organising the infrastructure plans and all of the things, and teaching children every single day. So if you've done this work, you already know what I'm about to say. And if you haven't, it's the kind of work that is simultaneously the most meaningful thing you will ever do and the thing most likely to break you if you don't figure out how to carry it sustainably.

"I was genuinely puzzled..."

Later on, I held positions where I was in bigger schools as a deputy principal with full curriculum responsibility across the school. We had over 500 kids in a setting that the only way to describe is extremely complex. And then everything I thought I understood about leading change was tested on a bigger scale. And the first thing I had to learn was communication. So early in my leadership life, I believed genuinely that if I was clear enough, passionate enough, and had the evidence on my side, people would understand what I was asking and move towards that. If I had a clear picture of where the school needed to go, they would too. If I had the research and the rationale and I shared it with them, then they would say, yes, hey, I'm on board, let's go. And when that didn't happen, I was genuinely puzzled. And what I had to learn was that just because I said something, it did not mean that people had understood it. What I now say is even when people understand it intellectually, it doesn't mean that they trust it emotionally. Not because they're not listening, but because building deep understanding through professional practice takes so much more than just information. It takes the right kinds of conversations at the right moment, shaped around where that person is right now.

I had some inkling of needing to have different kinds of conversations depending on where someone was in their own learning journey from my pre-education leadership and training work. What I had to learn was how to meet someone in the middle, how to disagree productively, how to look at a situation through their eyes, not to compromise on the vision, but so that we could have the uncomfortable conversations that actually move everyone forward rather than the ones that descend into tension and nobody achieves anything. These are all learnable skills, everyone. I've learned them, you can learn them, they can be learned.

Cognition: Mine and Theirs

The second thing here was around cognition, mine and theirs. And the moment I remember most clearly, the one I still think about happened when I realised, almost with horror at myself, that what I had been asking of my classroom teachers was beyond where their current thinking was. And please hear me, this is not about being intelligent. I was asking my team to think strategically, to see the big picture of where the school was heading, and to contribute to the collective decision making about our journey. I was asking them to hold the multi-year arc of improvement in mind while they were also managing the 30 children and differentiating instruction and responding to individual needs and just getting through the day. And then the penny dropped because I realised that for me as a school leader, the big picture is the profession. It is the school, it is the multi-year arc. But for a classroom teacher, the big picture is their classroom. As I said before, none of this is because people are not intelligent or that they don't care, but it's that strategic thinking about whole school improvement is a specific learned set of skills that develops over time. It's not something we can just ask for and expect to receive. Doesn't arrive because we shared some data or had the right vision statement on the wall. So understanding how adults actually learn, how we process change, why we resist it, what it feels like to be asked to grow in public in front of colleagues, changed everything about how I led. It changed how I structured professional learning, how I understood why some people seem to push back on even the most sensible ideas. And it changed how I thought about my own learning too, because guess what, leaders? You're a learner as well. And we don't always set ourselves up well for that. We're often very judgmental about our own learning journey.

Not by Accident

The third thing in all of this is the culture. So I came to understand that the school I was trying to build, the one where every child was genuinely set up to succeed, where teachers felt capable and confident, where hard things were met with support rather than blame, was not going to happen by accident. It had to be built deliberately by someone who understood that culture is not a byproduct of good intentions. A firm culture of success is the result of consistent, purposeful decisions about how people are treated, what is expected, what is celebrated, and what is not tolerated. When a team builds genuine collective efficacy, that shared belief that what they do together matters and makes a difference, that belief doesn't emerge on its own. But when it does, it's the spark that lights the flame of all sorts of wonderful things. As a school leader said to one of our team recently, there came a point when I stopped having to be the one doing the leading, and the teachers themselves began to take on responsibility for the outcomes, and from that point on, we were truly in it together.

So let's come back to Adam for a moment. Adam was a child who was completely capable of learning to read. He had all the potential in the world. What he had lacked up until that point was instruction that matched how brains are wired to learn. So without the right approach, he was being set up, not deliberately, not cruelly, but systematically to fail. He was being given colouring in to do while his peers were given spelling lessons. And that failure to learn was attributed to him rather than to the system around him.

The Point

And I see the same patterns happening in schools all the time. Teachers and leaders who are capable, committed, and deeply motivated by the sense of service to their students and communities, who are working extraordinarily hard and being set up to fail, not deliberately, but systematically, by the absence of the right knowledge, the right frameworks, and the right conditions. And when improvement stalls or results don't shift, or teams become resistant or exhausted, the failure gets attributed to the people rather than to the lack of sustainable systems of instruction within the school. And this too is fixable. And that is the point of the Leading Learning Podcast. Just as building genuine reading success for students changes a child's entire relationship with learning, building and supporting teachers to build genuine leadership capability changes everything about what a school community can become and accomplish. When we are all set up with the right knowledge, the right resources, and the right support for implementation and growth, then everybody owns it, everybody grows. People start to see themselves as capable and effective. And success breeds success because that flows through to the students in ways that no program or policy can replicate. And that is what strong skilled communication, understanding the cognition of learning and change, and having the mechanisms to build culture looks like when they're working. It's not a framework on a slide, it's not a page in our strategic improvement plan, it's the lived reality of an organisation that is genuinely growing and improving.

The Leading Learning Podcast

So, what's the Leading Learning Podcast specifically? It is a show for school leaders, principals, deputies, assistant principals, curriculum leaders, and anyone who carries responsibility for the professional culture of a school and the conditions under which teachers teach and students learn. So if you work in a system and your decisions shape what schools are able to do, this is for you too. Each episode will go deeply into something that matters in the practice of school improvement. Some episodes will be about communication, some will be around cognition, some will be around culture, and others will just be around issues and topics that people are experiencing right now.

Wherever you are in your leadership journey, whether you're an aspiring leader, brand new into a role, or are a decade or two in looking for a fresh perspective, there is something in this show for you. I look forward to bringing you information, frameworks, and tools to help you build your leadership capability so that you can lead the work of school improvement more confidently and more effectively every single day. So until we bring you the next episode, thank you so much for listening. Thanks for what you do every day. It is so important. Happy leading. Bye.