Customised Leadership Guidance and Mentoring

“Strong leadership is essential for school reform to be effective and sustained. Research demonstrates that school leadership is second only to teaching among all the factors that contribute to student achievement.” (Best, J. R., 2006, Developing leaders for successful schools, A report for the National Conference of State Legislatures)

“Exemplary schools have an effective leader who sets the tone for the rest of the school and engages all stakeholders—teachers, students, parents, and other staff—in schoolwide efforts to improve student learning.” (Best, J. R., 2006, Developing leaders for successful schools, A report for the National Conference of State Legislatures)

“Leadership learning that is organized around a model of leadership and grounded in practice, including analyses of classroom practice, supervision, and professional development using on-the-job observations connected to readings and discussions makes a considerable difference to student learning.’ (Darling-Hammond, L., et al, 2007, Preparing school leaders for a changing world, Stanford Educational Leadership Institute)

Our Customised leadership team support and mentoring model, where we first chat with you to find out about your school’s teaching and learning culture, and school priorities, allows us to tailor our support to exactly where you need it at this point in your school’s development.

This initial inquiry into your teaching and learning culture starts with questions such as;

• What inspires you and your staff?
• What is most important to your school?
• Do you have school values? Are they lived?
• What does your school do well? How do you know?
• What are your school’s aspirations?
• What are your opportunities for innovation? How were they identified?
• What challenges does the school face?
• What challenges do you face in the leadership domain?

With this deeper understanding of your school’s context and vision, we are positioned to select the most relevant components from the suite of Professional Learning modules that we offer, maximising the impact of our partnership on your teaching and learning culture, teacher and leader capacity, and student learning outcomes.

“The amount of time people in school leadership positions spend doing their job seems to be increasing. The average elementary school principal works 54 hours per week. High school principals reported working an average of 62 hours per week.” (Best, J. R., 2006, Developing leaders for successful schools, A report for the National Conference of State Legislatures) No doubt this is similar in your context, a fact that must be challenged due to its impact on leader wellbeing.

Determined to support leaders to address this significant work-life balance issue, whilst still attaining quality student learning outcomes, we provide guidance in the identification of opportunities for innovation. We pay particular attention to leadership style, the implementation of systems and structures that develop teacher capacity and systems alignment. This guidance is increasingly important knowing that in an ever increasingly busy world, leaders often find themselves operating in isolation, and with little or questionable systems level support that results in minimal demonstrable improvement.

Our mentor model is based on collaboration, research-based evidence and school-based experience. A partnership that will engage leaders with processes and protocols which are fundamental to quality teacher development and the resulting sustained and improved student learning outcomes.