Tag: leadership

Big moves to get you ready for the next step in your career

Recently I asked Twitter for help once again (seriously it’s the gift that keeps giving!) I’ve been reading a book by Brendan Burchard called High Performance Habits. The section on Performance and Productivity caught my eye, as I imagine it would most people’s in education with the scarcity of time and an ever growing to do list. In it he discusses Productive Quality Output and focusing on the actions that will have the biggest impact. In fact, he asks the reader to focus on 5 areas in which they want to make moves to grow.

So when it came to deciding my 5 I asked for help, on twitter and of course it delivered. As a Vice Principal I often cover all bases, pastoral administrative, T&L it doesn’t matter if it needs to get done it needs to get done.  But at the same time I can feel lost due to lack of focus. It serves me well but also stops me from developing a deep knowledge of areas I know I need to develop in. I work with a Head who is my direct opposite, as a result we can end up focusing on tasks that come to us naturally. I handle all things people, he handles timetables and finance. As someone who came into teaching late and worked in the commercial sector I’m not shy of handling budgets but school budgets seem to be a different beast.

So, I reached out to the Heads on twitter for their advice on the 5 things they did to prep them for headship to help me get a little focus next year. Below is a list of their feedback and also my own thoughts of how I might go about this.

Thank you to the wonderful Mark Chatley, David Ellison, Alienwife, Dr Heery, Raphael Moss, Baritonedeaf, Simmscoaching, EducatingNotts, Jack Newton, Teacher Paul, Community Head, Steve Palmer, Richard Preece and Reynolds3Simon for their feedback and guidance.

VALUES

This was overwhelmingly the common thread in most of the answers. Decide what values you want your leadership to be based on. At first I thought I had to pick three from a large list but truth be told I only operate from my values and express them without even knowing. Mine are:

Integrity – I wouldn’t ask anyone to do something I would not do or have a go at, I ensure I speak the truth and if I don’t know something I confess pretty quickly.

Growth– The thing I love about education the most is it is a great big adventure, the environment is always changing (ain’t that the truth at the moment!) new challenges are presenting themselves and we learn more about ourselves every minute. Adventure to me means fun and I embrace it with enthusiasm. To me school from any angle is about growth. Growing knowledge, skills, opportunities, community, this value just resonates with me.

Contribution – To me this means giving the best of yourself at every given moment. It’s what I expect from myself, my staff and students. I’m also not great in meetings with people who can only see the problems, although I’m working on being more patient.

What are you values? To answer this think about the values you operate from every day. It was good to ask myself this question and think about it during a long walk.

How does this translate to a school and the development to Headship? I believe if you use your values as an anchor you’ll make decisions in line with them and as a result be an authentic leader. You’re probably already doing it.

School budgets

Apparently, you can never have enough budget experience! I know I need to get myself into budget meetings. As part of a MAT many of the decisions are made centrally but this is something I’ll be asking to be part of as soon as we return. On another note @secretHT1 published a great blog as an intro to school budgets which you can find here.

Network

Another great peace of advice. I recently spoke to some great colleagues about the problems with echo chambers, particularly if you are in a large Trust. It is healthy to hear different views and purposely speak (or tweet) with people who may not agree with you. Raphael mentioned the NPQH in particular as an opportunity to look beyond your school or Trust. I recently spoke to a colleague who suggested that all those on the NPQH do their second project on a Trust school (luckily he is not in my cohort ;)). Although well-meaning I think this is really dangerous and one way in which schools/Trust can become too inward facing. Other places to network are on Twitter (thoroughly recommend joining the #teacher5oclockclub if you can get up early enough #TinyVoiceTuesdayUnites and #FFBWednesday to name a few). Actively seek opinions. A few years ago I also made an active decision to read outside of education and outside of the UK to give myself some perspective.

My next steps are to work with the wonderful Network of people I have found on Twitter to discuss, debate and share as much as I can. Oh, and make sure I do my NPQH project outside of the Trust!

The theory here is to make sure you understand as many different school settings as you can so when you are a Head things don’t take you by surprise or you have different perspectives on tackling a problem.

Get coached/learn from Heads

This took a few different forms. Some people swore by coaching others said they had great Heads who modelled good Leadership for them or bad ones who showed them what not to become. I think all of the above are useful. Taking the time to reflect is critical. I’ve naturally always done a SWOT analysis of a school when I have left trying to be as objective as possible about the school to help me decipher what has and hasn’t worked I suppose to one day get clearer about the school I would like to run. Simms Coaching also recommended listening to podcasts to learn from as many different ideas as possible.

Know your own strengths and weaknesses

Thanks to Mark Chatley for this one! I’ve been thinking about this during lockdown. I’ve taken the Curriculum route into leadership but this year have immersed myself into Pastoral side also. When I joined my current school as VP for T&L and curriculum we had four months until the other VP joined who led on Pastoral and Behavior so I took the opportunity to throw myself into that role before he arrived. It was difficult but it taught me a lot and got me interested in developing school culture.

It’s important to be clear with your Manager or Head about your weaknesses and ask to be developed in those areas. Ask to buddy someone if you have to. I know for myself I haven’t touched timetabling yet and have bought this up so I know it’s coming my way.

Get out there!

I can remember the wise words of a mentor I had during a middle leaders course I completed 5 years ago. She was the Head of a Primary and she said “The biggest problem Headteachers have is not enough people putting their hand up to take care of stuff they need to get done. Do that and you’ll go far.” That advice has never failed me. Although I would recommend you only take it on if you think you can do it or at least give it a proper effort rather than overwhelm yourself.

But after all is said and done it is the advice of David Ellison that I’m left with.

You can never be ready enough so at some point you’ve just gotta dive in! Good luck!

I’d love to hear what steps you have taken to develop to the next step in your career. Let me know.

Curriculum Design 2 (Mary Myatt)

When I say Mary Myatts book ‘The Curriculum: Gallimaufry to coherence’ made me fall in love with curriculum design, I am making an understatement. As Tom Sherrington says in the forward ‘Mary Myatt knows how to hook you in and get you thinking.’ The chapters are concise and straight to the point and it’s probably the only book in which I have paid as much attention to the footnotes (in which she provides a wealth of resources) as I did to the main words in the chapters of the book.

Areas of the book that particularly stood out for me and influenced the way we shape our curriculum at the Secondary school I am currently at are:

Curriculum coherence – which along with Summer Turners book ‘Secondary Curriculum and Assessment Design’ (mentioned in the previous blog) sparked interesting Leadership conversations about the curriculum model we were offering as a whole school. In this chapter, Mary stresses how we are ‘pattern seeking individuals’ and therefore the curriculum needs to tell a story. Each one of our middle leaders has spent a considerable amount of time identifying this story, its key themes and threads that run throughout it and are trying to communicate it to the students. What has surprised me, certainly in history which I teach, is how quickly students from year 7 – 11 have caught onto this, understanding what they need to learn now and how it will connect to what they learn in the future.

Cognitive science – Linked to the above Mary highlights ‘curriculum is content structured as narrative over time.’ This had a huge impact on myself and the middle leaders I have worked with. How do we communicate this narrative to students? It has been interesting to see what teachers are doing. Some have it on their first slide. Others have a big sign on their board saying ‘Why are we learning this?’ which reminds them to start each lesson with a conversation about how the lesson fits into the whole to help chunk information. With it, has come the realisation that this is not something you ‘do’ but something we ‘we will do always.’

Chapters on Curriculum products and Beautiful Work place the emphasis firmly on what the student is doing which is often surprisingly forgotten when middle leaders have their heads down in planning. This shaped our observation forms in which we write not only to look at what the teacher does but what students do. Interestingly, this was particularly helpful when working with teachers who give their all in the lesson but often end up ‘carrying’ it, to help these staff shift some of that responsibility onto the students.

As a Vice principal the section on Leadership has provided with me no end of food for thought about how I structure CPD and give all staff time to understand the finer nuances of their curriculum, as well as how we go about communicating this curriculum journey to department members and students. You are a leader if you find yourself in the front of the classroom so I suggest everyone read this.

Sections on Etymology, Speaking and Writing – have influenced our Knowledge Organisers which we are using this time in lock down to redesign with curriculum journeys in mind. This has also influenced out Literacy programme and our quick low stakes tests which emphasise language.

I could go on forever, this book has nuggets of cold scattered throughout it which are communicated simply but beautifully. Some of the above may seem obvious now as we are bombarded with information about curriculum design but two years ago when I was stepping into a new role it was the simplicity with which curriculum design was explained and how it linked to every aspect to the school, which attracted me to this book. I would thoroughly urge everyone in education to read it so they can see the curriculum for the critical, wonderful, backbone it provides to schools.