A rising tide | What we might attend to most to improve our school

In a previous post, I outlined a model of school improvement that seeks to help leaders to allocate their time and attention. This is summarised on one slide below. The post perhaps did not do the bottom layer justice, given that in this model, leaders would spend the majority of their time on it. As...

Layers of school improvement activity

What proportion of your time do you spend working on the actions in your school improvement plan? We have a school improvement plan and on it there are actions, timelines etc just like every other. Add the end of term 1, we analysed the time we had spent on these actions and I asked the...

Culture setting | More than words

So you want to change school culture? The common starting point is with a mission statement / values / vision of some sort. Indeed common wisdom would suggest starting with why but there are some traps to avoid in working like this. The trouble with values and mission statements Firstly, I think that the terms...

Avoiding the traps of the imagined school

In a previous post, and with a significant hat tip to Matthew Evans, I outlined some of the traps that I see related to the imagined school - the unrealistic version of our school that we hold in our imaginations. This can be somewhat different to the reality of school life. This post seeks to...

The imagined school | Traps to avoid

In The Matrix, the story starts with Neo in essentially an imagined world, far different from the related that his physical body is experiencing. Morpheus offers Neo the choice of taking the blue pill, continuing his blissfully ignorant life in this imagined world, or the red pill, opening his eyes to reality. Matthew Evans wrote a...

Growing leaders | A strategy for succession planning

Like any organisation, schools change over time and this is because the people change. They might change because they are learning and developing their practice or they might change because people come and go. Heraclitus tells us that we never step into the same river twice and likewise, we never step into the same school twice. This river...

Vulnerability

Pat Lencioni is famous for, among other things, his exposition of the 5 dysfunctions of teams. He argues that there are productive team behaviours that minimise or prevent these dysfunctions. Whether we lead a teaching team, a phase, a school or a group of schools, how the team interacts is crucial to the success of the...

Influencing culture

School cannot improve without trusting relationships and there is plenty of evidence to suggest the kinds of behaviours that contribute to trusting relationships. Our strategy should certainly include some sort of codification of these behaviours. We use the metaphor of the horizon in my school and set out behaviours that broaden our horizons; that enable our school...

Building capacity

Let's imagine a school that experiences a reduction in its leadership team. Maybe a senior leader leaves and for whatever reason cannot be replaced. Maybe a senior leader leaves and there is a time lag before being able to have a replacement in post. Maybe a senior leader needs to pick up more teaching because of teacher availability...

If everything is a priority, nothing is

List the things that you think you'd like your school to be better at. The chances are that if you set aside a good chunk of time to do this, you'll end up with quite a list, some quite broad and some more specific. Here are some of the things that might be categorized as broad: Curriculum...