Category : School Improvement

Three capabilities capture the essence of instructional leadership and its actions; building relational trust, leader content knowledge and complex problem solving. When skilfully integrated they position leaders as active contributors to teacher development which leverages improved student learning outcomes. Our friends at Google tells us that leadership is ‘a process by which an executive can direct, guide and influence the behaviour and work of others towards accomplishment of specific goals in a given situation’. For those of us who find ourselves leading we know our role is inherently social in nature, a true human endeavour, where [...]

“…one of the major reasons why change does not lead to improvement, is that there is too much focus on future practice, and not enough on the forces that explain and sustain current practice…” (Robinson, 2017) Viviane Robinson, in Reducing change to increase improvement (2017), promotes a new paradigm of change. She challenges the endless pursuit of change, questioning whether this change actually makes a difference to student learning outcomes. Instead, she believes “…it is time to stop talking about change and innovation and to focus on the far more ambitious goal of achieving improvement”. Formal [...]

The value of an external set of eyes. The road map to success must be clear, you cannot plot a course to your destination if you don’t know where you already are. Admittedly, there is a small percentage of people in our schools who are not there for the right reasons; for the kids, but they are few. This minority have lost sight of the very reason they chose to enter teaching in the first place, even if it was the holidays, because the demands of modern and effective teaching are such that you rarely switch off. [...]