Adaptive Solutions for Teaching Improvement in Complex K-12 Situations

This chapter is about school improvement. It specifically showcases an approach to school improvement by exploring a program developed and implemented in a remote Indigenous school in Australia. The program, known as the Global Talent Initiative (GTI), sought to engage a school’s global community, what is referred to as the ‘collective talent’ in the program, to deal with a significant localised school-based challenges. The chapter is less about Indigenous education and more about providing instructive guidance for those involved in school improvement in complex circumstances. The GTI is thus a strategy for how school improvement can be undertaken in such contexts. To deliver on such a goal, and more specifically to explain the GTI, we describe and locate a set of school improvement design considerations in this chapter. These considerations include the global school community, leadership and talent management, community of practice and the use of adaptive solutioning. We discuss each in turn as a conceptual model, before providing an insight into how the GTI, as an example of such elements in action, was enacted in a remote Indigenous school and the outcomes that were achieved. We turn first to a brief discussion about the GTI as context for an outlining of its associated elements.