Clip 1: Background

Trevor:

What we had at the end of 2005 were a bunch of people who were really interested and had developed some skills in terms of being effective literacy teachers in their curriculum areas. And so what we were looking at, what we wanted to do, was to try and identify ways in which to spread that work and to develop a base within the school in which the literacy work resided – so that it wouldn’t matter who came and went from the school, but that there was this focus on literacy, that they knew about literacy across the curriculum, they knew about the ways they could effect decent outcomes for kids.

Joanna was already literacy leader within the school. She had had the most to do with us in the course of the literacy work that we had done. So she had the greatest literacy knowledge of anybody within the school, and she had also been identified by the school as the person who was going to lead the next phase of it. So what we were aware of was that, along with being an effective facilitator, you have to have really good content knowledge, and Jo was a person who already had a lot of good content knowledge. So when it came to thinking of effective pedagogical leadership, or in-school leadership, or whatever you like to describe it, we were able to work with somebody who was already down the track to some extent.