Building a responsive school
Leading Learning Success
Lead the shift that lasts.
Build a team who understand why instruction works, not only what to do, in every curriculum area and at every year level.
Submit your expression of interest
Leading Learning Success is a twelve-month, whole-school capability building program. It helps your teachers deeply understand how learning works, so they can make the best decisions for the students in front of them, while your leaders build a culture of coaching that helps each person achieve their best.
Does this sound familiar?
Leading Learning Success schools are not starting from scratch. They have an instructional practice their team works to. The next step is to help your team learn to make strong instructional decisions, not just tick boxes for activities and agreed norms.
- Your data grew and then plateaued. The students you are not reaching are a smaller group now, but the approach that shifted everybody else is not shifting them.
- Your team can follow an instructional routine, but they cannot yet explain why it works, so they cannot adapt it when a student in front of them needs something different.
- You have done professional learning in cognitive load and the science of learning, but it is not being used to make day-to-day decisions in classrooms.
- You have worked hard to build buy-in, but your team still is not on the same page about what good instruction looks like.
Download your Leading Learning Success brochure
The full brochure, including how the year runs, what your team commits to, and your investment.
Why most professional learning does not change classrooms
Traditional professional learning sends teachers to a workshop for a day. They come back, perhaps present to the team about what they heard, and school life continues as usual. Bringing an expert in for the day produces the same result from a different direction. Program-based training helps teachers follow the steps of a program, but it does not build a team that can think.
Most professional learning falls short because it focuses on what to do instead of helping teachers understand why it matters, relies on a few champions while everyone else stays disconnected, offers generic solutions to problems that are deeply context-dependent, and expects leaders to support improvement without ever teaching them how to lead it.
Leading Learning Success is a school-based, leadership-driven transformation journey, not a course or workshop. It is designed to help your whole team align, grow and improve together.
How Leading Learning Success is different
How the journey unfolds
Leading Learning Success is built on six pillars that underpin the whole-school approach to improvement and achievement of strategic goals.
Shared clarity
Build relational trust and align around a common vision for instruction.
Deep understanding of human cognition
Explore cognitive science and understand how learning actually happens, and what it means for practice.
Safe conditions for personal responsibility
Help staff take responsibility for outcomes within a supportive, trust-based culture.
Collaborative problem solving
Address real classroom challenges through dialogue, open communication and real-time inquiry.
Strategic application across the curriculum
Applicable to all team members, regardless of their subject-area focus. This is a one-in, all-in approach.
Leadership team capability
Coach your leaders to lead learning through responsive tools and structures. We support leadership development so that improvement continues long after the project is complete.
What a year looks like
Leading Learning Success is whole-school work. Your own leaders run the professional learning using content we provide, and we coach them through it.
Your whole staff
- Collaborate across eight whole-staff meetings, using meeting time you already have.
- Build shared understanding of cognition and how learning actually happens, developing meta language and the capability for rich dialogue.
- Pre and post project data is collected, giving leaders evidence of team development.
- Everyone takes part, including specialists and classroom support staff, as is appropriate for your school.
Your teaching teams
- Apply what the team is learning in their own classrooms.
- Collectively choose engagement norms to solve a real problem present right now.
- Lean into the vision of each person as a leader of learning with the students they teach and support.
- Make instructional decisions based on the students in front of them.
Your leadership team
- Lead the eight steps with our content, so the expectation is held by your people.
- Attend a coaching call, at a time of your choosing, before each of your eight full-staff sessions so that you are prepared and confident to run them.
- Leaders also attend a planning session and an end-of-project wrap-up.
- Complete the Coaching for Clarity course across the twelve months, to refine your school's existing data conversations, planning structures and observation protocols.
- Optional in-person modelling, coaching and planning sessions.
What you have at the end of twelve months
What you will know about your team that you do not know now
- Heat maps show where the real instructional problems sit, by stage and by area of the school, drawn from your own staff rather than from an outsider's perspective.
- What their current level of knowledge about explicit teaching and responsive instruction really is, and at the end of twelve months, just how far they have come.
- What they need from you, as their leaders, to be able to move ahead in your improvement journey.
What your team will be able to do that they cannot do now
- Discuss instruction using the meta-language of cognition and engage in deeper thinking about instruction.
- Reach genuine consensus, using a documented process with the questions to ask and discussion frameworks to keep the conversation moving forward.
- Disagree with each other respectfully and get to a shared position, rather than nodding in the meeting and doing something else on Monday.
- Choose instructional norms that solve the problem in front of them.
What you will have to show for it
- A bespoke report with a plan to achieve your strategic goals, to guide your twelve-month journey.
- Documented evidence of professional development. Not a list of sessions attended, but a reflection of personal growth written by your team.
- Guides and frameworks for responding to each team member's needs, the same way we want our teachers to respond to their students. There is as much variation in our teachers as there is in any classroom of students. You will know how to respond to the range.
- Playbook pages developed collaboratively that reflect the work being done in classrooms.
Brené Brown
Brené Brown says that a leader is anyone who takes responsibility for finding potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.
Leading Learning Success helps every member of your team become a leader in their own classroom, as they find the potential in their students and make clear, effective decisions to develop it.
Coaching for Clarity, across the year
As your leaders lead the eight steps of Leading Learning Success, they learn about the Responsive Leadership Model and how to identify the needs of each team member based on their experience and development.
They then complete the Coaching for Clarity course, applying that knowledge to three critical conversations.
Conditions that make Leading Learning Success a good fit for your school
- Your team works to an agreed instructional practice, consistently enough that the remaining question is the quality of instructional decisions rather than whether people are doing the same thing.
- Your principal is the driver of instructional improvement, not just a supporter.
- You are prepared to make necessary changes as your understanding deepens. You understand that professional learning alone, without action, does not lead to lasting outcomes.
- You can commit to 8 full-staff meetings, 2 full-staff half hour catch-ups, 8 online leadership coaching calls, an online planning session for leadership, and an end of year online wrap up call.
- You and your team believe in the potential of every student to learn.
- You are ready to build a culture of active engagement through professional dialogue and collaborative problem solving.
- You are not actively implementing a new curriculum program in the same year as Leading Learning Success. Split attention dilutes the impact of either undertaking, and we encourage you to take things one step at a time.
Where to start
Leading Learning Success can be completed as a stand-alone program, or in conjunction with a year of Foundations for Literacy Success. We find that schools achieve the best outcomes when they focus on one area at a time and, over time, connect learning about cognition to a specific curriculum focus.
If you would like to combine Leading Learning Success, focused on cognitive load and engagement norms, with Foundations for Literacy Success, our 12-month focus on literacy, across two years, there are two options. Neither is better than the other, and we can help you decide which is right for you.
Start with Foundations
Your word-level instruction becomes consistent before you build the thinking on top of it, so the cognition work has practice that already exists to refer to.
Start with Leading Learning Success
Your team understands cognition before they make instructional decisions, so the literacy work that follows is understood rather than followed.
If you do not yet have explicit curriculum programs in place, or practice varies significantly from classroom to classroom, Foundations for Literacy Success is the place to start.
What school leaders are saying
We have decided to include our whole school, Foundation to Year 12, in the program. Even this early into the program, the staff are having great conversations about learning using the language of cognitive science. We haven't had a consistent approach to engagement norms in the past, but our team is coming together to plan and make collective decisions. We feel so optimistic about our journey moving forward.
Principal
Previously, when I would talk with teachers about inclusion and instruction, the onus was always on the students. This week, a teacher said, "I can see that the cognitive load demands of that lesson were too high for the student. Next time, I will do it differently."
Instructional Leader
I knew that readiness for the instructional work was important, but learning about the Responsive Leadership Model has made this crystal clear. The model has given us a common language to talk about teacher practice. Instead of just getting a retell of student actions, our conversations are now about teacher craft. In the past, we have asked leaders to dig deeper about instruction, but staff didn't have the language or understanding of how learning happens to have that discussion. They do now.
Deputy Principal
Our teachers are increasingly owning decisions and actively applying solutions based on what they are learning. We used to see a lot of busy work, but teachers are now focused on achieving the goals we have set, and this has focused attention on what is really important.
Principal
Our staff are really buying in with deep, positive discussions about instruction. The continuity of the Leading Learning Success approach has been so important. In the past, PL has been run in separate bits, even when we thought we had it covered. We now have one plan that takes us forward and cycles back through our learning so that we are using what we are learning in practice.
Leadership team
I am so grateful to be working with Jocelyn this year. With her knowledge, guidance, and support, we are creating a team of teachers who feel more confident in planning and delivering quality literacy sessions to all our students. They have had to make some significant changes to their thinking, and being able to work with Jocelyn for a year has helped us to embed some of this change rather than just making superficial changes.
Instructional Leader
Frequently asked questions
Do we have to complete Foundations for Literacy Success first?
No. Leading Learning Success is self-contained and does not depend on your literacy approach. Many schools do Foundations first, and many do it afterward. What matters is that your team already works to an agreed instructional practice. If you do not yet have explicit curriculum programs in place, or practice varies significantly between classrooms, we would suggest starting with Foundations.
We are a P-12 school. Does this work for our secondary staff?
Yes. The work is about how instruction is designed and delivered in every learning area, which applies to specialists and secondary teachers directly. Several P-12 schools have completed the program, with secondary teachers finding it highly relevant to their work.
How much time does this take?
Across the year: 8 full-staff meetings and 2 full-staff catch-ups, using meeting time you already have. Your leadership team has 8 online coaching calls, an online planning session and an end-of-year wrap-up call, all booked at times you choose.
Is it online or in person?
The core program runs online, with live online coaching sessions for your leadership team. Schools can also opt to add in-person modelling, coaching and planning days for a fuller experience.
What if our leadership team has not done Introduction to Responsive Instructional Leadership?
You will have access to the recorded course, so your team starts with the same grounding as schools who came through Foundations.
Ready to start the conversation?
Submit an expression of interest for the 2027 intake and we will arrange a conversation to work out whether the problems you are trying to solve are the ones this partnership solves.
Further questions? Email help@jocelynseamereducation.com
Submit your expression of interest