Beginning a new school year
Saturday 27 August 2022
A new school year is about to begin in the northern hemisphere. How you begin is so important since it sets the tone for what is about to come. Key priorities for schools will be:
- Being a place of welcome: for new staff, students and their families, and for returning staff and families.
- Building the team: a team, (as opposed to a group) are people who share a common purpose and a number of challenging goals. They are people who are interdependent on each other for achiving these goals.
- Upskilling all members of the team: through high-quality professional learning opportunities.
As a culmination of the professional development I was facilitating for the Oeiras International School, Lisbon, this week the Head arranged for all staff to be treated to an evening on a katamaran - a gracious and generous gesture to build team spirit and connections between all members of the community. After the lockdowns of the pandemic we have learnt that education is essentially a social construct: how much we have missed each other.
This year I have been working with two school communities (Vienna International School & Oeiras International School) as they prepare for the year ahead. In both cases I was invited to work with their middle leadership teams to build their capacity as leaders. We explored the following inquiries:
- What are the characteristics of effective teams?
- How do we grow and sustain our teams?
- How do you lead when things go wrong in your team?
- How do we learn as a team?
- How do we grow team capacity?
- What's the difference between leadership and management?
We all know that middle leaders have the capacity to be the engine drivers of the school so how do we give them the professional support and challenge to be effective? During the last 18 months I have been working with the IB to develop their new suite of leadership workshops, one of these focuses on Leading and Managing Teams.
“… middle leaders are the key to closing the achievement between … pupils. To close the gap, we need to reduce the variation within the school and the way we do that is through consistently excellent teaching and learning in every department of the school. It is our middle leaders, the engine room of the school, who deliver that. You cannot have a great school without great middle leadership.” (James Toop: Chief Executive Officer, Teaching Leaders) "