How much of your beliefs and leadership behaviours stem from your own experience?
This is my third leadership lesson reflecting on my learning from brilliant headteachers and leaders that I've worked with along the way.
This leadership lesson stems from my time as an Assistant Headteacher and Deputy Headteacher between 2006 – 2011. During this period, I was led by two brilliant but very different Headteachers who both impacted hugely on my learning.
Here are some of my leadership lessons:
Horizon scanning and Innovation:
During this part of my career, I learnt how important it is to look outwards to find out about developments in education whether it be regional, national or international. These developments may be regarding education policy, but will also encompass research and educational initiatives.
I was lucky enough to lead in a school which was always trying to innovate and be evidence led, long before that became the current norm as championed by the Education Endowment Foundation and the Chartered College of Teaching. I was hugely influenced by the work of Shirley Clarke and Dylan William in relation to assessment for learning. We trialled and implemented a number of different approaches to help us introduce responsive teaching, building on children’s prior learning.
I was involved in a pilot project inspired by the “Building Learning Power” research that Guy Claxton was leading. I implemented BLP across the school, and ensured that the 4 Rs (Resilience, Reciprocity, Resourceful and Reflective) were developed in every lesson, along with the learning objective.
I was fortunate enough to fly up to Newcastle with a colleague to learn from Dorothy Heathcott, the inventor of the “Mantle of an Expert” approach, who had come out of retirement to speak at a conference. If you haven’t come across this, it’s an amazing strategy when you put the children in the role as experts, and role play learning in a real-world context.
I implemented Sue Palmer’s “Skeletons for Writing” to support and improve our non-fiction writing in all curriculum areas, which had great impact.
I continued to use and embed the BFI ‘cineliteracy’ approach that I was involved in whilst a literacy consultant, especially to support the improvement of reading comprehension and narrative writing.
This period in my career provided me with lots of opportunities to innovate and trial new approaches which kept my teaching interesting and creative, and gave me lots of opportunity to impact positively on pedagogy across the school.
Relationships with parents
Another significant leadership lesson during this period, was learning about how to relate effectively with parents. In my previous experience, I had witnessed leaders both holding parents at a distance, and also being overly friendly. In my opinion, neither of these approaches felt right to me.
I learnt that it was really important to be visible and approachable to parents, for example, by standing on the gate each morning, but not to be reactive to their every issue. I learnt to put in place systems so that the expectation was that problems should be discussed with the class teacher in the first instance, then escalated to the team leader prior to arriving at a meeting with the headteacher.
This approach worked well for all. Firstly, parents were clear about the expectations, and had a chance to escalate issues if necessary. Teachers felt happier, as they didn’t have parents constantly going over their heads, and it raised their status. Teachers also appreciated the support from team leaders. If it was evident from the outset that the issue was significant, team leaders would attend the initial meeting with parents. The headteacher benefited, as less of their time was taken up with reactive meetings. The system also allowed emotions to cool down prior to discussions, which benefitted everyone.
I also learnt how important it is to safeguard staff from unhappy or abusive parents. At the time, parents would often walk into the classrooms at the start or end of the school day and sometimes, this would lead to the teacher being caught with an unhappy parent in front of their class, without support. We introduced systems to protect teachers, such as the system described above, a panic button and also moved parent/teacher consultations into the school hall, whereas before they were held in individual classrooms. These changes tried to ensure that teachers always had the back up and support that they required, whilst parents always had opportunities to arrange appointments to speak to members of staff.
Managing a crisis
Unfortunately, situations sometimes occur that require a considered response from the school. This may be related to health and safety – for example a serious accident at school, or a medical episode, managing significantly poor behaviour, or managing a staffing problem.
I learnt how important it is to not react to these situations with anxiety or fear. These events are usually stressful, so it is really important to acknowledge that and to take time to ‘go to the balcony’ to think, or to reach out to a colleague, perhaps in another school to seek advice or to test out your planned course of action.
If you react to an event with anxiety or fear, the outcome will never be as positive as you would have wished. However, if you can wait, be considered, take advice, or even sleep on it, you will often find that you can achieve a far better outcome for you and the school.
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