Charlie Klein – one of Commonwealth Bank’s Teaching Fellows – had recently become the principal of a one-teacher remote school when a former colleague offered him some words of wisdom.
“You’re using the term ‘my’ but it’s not your school,” the fellow-principal told Klein.
“I have lived on that and worked on that ever since – and that was in 1983,” Klein tells the Educator.
Klein has since moved to the Tjuntjuntjara Remote Community School which currently services 32 students and sits 700km from the nearest city.
“This is not my school, this is the school I work in, this is the community I work in, this is the school I work with and community I work with,” he says. “I still have ownership of this place but it’s not mine and if it’s not mine then it becomes a shared place.”
Despite its isolated location, Klein continues to innovate and has helped bring some of Australia’s leading children’s authors to the area while also introducing a creative approach to science which melds traditional culture with western learning.
“When we have a two-way science program or a cultural program like that, I’ve had a role to play in it and a teacher has had a role to play in it but so has the community and so have other agencies,” he says.
“It’s a shared thing and if you share things, you celebrate as a group and people feel far more comfortable and far more positive in that instance.”
Klein says he’s often had disagreements with others over this attitude but says he won’t back down.
“Of course not all principals are like this but you do hear some talk of ‘my, my, my’,” he tells the Educator. “Some people I meet, they hold it so dearly.”
Instead, Klein says school leaders should be doing everything they can do collaborate and communicate with their professional peers.
“I work really strongly with my colleagues and I drove 900 kilometres for a one-day collegiate group in Leonora then dove the 900 kilometres home,” he says.
“That’s just the way it is, you want to interact and there was no talk of ‘my’ – we were there to work together and support each other so I think people need to forget the ‘me’ and bring in the ‘we.”
While Klein discourages principals from taking full ownership of schools, he admits there’s one instance when ‘we’ quickly turns back to ‘me’.
“As a principal I’m accountable absolutely – that’s where ‘we’ gets lost,” he says. “I have to be accountable for this school but when we work collaboratively with others, when we share the decision making with the community, when we share the work and the workload, then it’s a lot easier to be accountable because we are doing good things and we are moving forward”