Tag: Support

Featured

The Engine Room: Reinventing the wheel

” There’s no point reinventing the wheel… I wouldn’t bother changing anything…”

On the one hand, this piece of advice sounds reassuring. Why make changes if the current system works adequately, and staff are comfortably behind it?  With workload pressures, recruitment and retention issues and legitimate concerns about wellbeing, one can understand why the above sentiment is expressed. Drastically changing direction can be difficult for your team to adapt to, particularly in this environment. This can cause resentment, if the said change is implemented incorrectly, and it could potentially take a while for your team to warm to future strategic endeavours. That’s not to say you shouldn’t do it! Just that we need to really understand the context within which our teams operate, ensuring that we give due and fair consideration and credence to their concerns.

School foci is often cyclical, and frequent change can seem needless. New leaders, who may have not been at that particular workplace for long, may not be aware of all the fallen-by-the-wayside initiatives that went before. For staff who have ‘survived’ various incarnations of senior leadership, justifiable scepticism may be the initial default. Whether you are a leader who has been parachuted in or simply given an opportunity to progress within the ranks, you should be aware of the experiences that members of your team have had. Simply listening, without prejudice or judgement, is the order of the day. 

Senior Leadership pressure to rapidly make things right can be tricky to navigate. And thus it is important that you, at least in your mind, set your stall out. Ask yourself – in what direction do I want to take my whole team? There is no point hurtling down a path solo in the slim hope that your team follow your tracks. It takes time for people to trust each other, for people to believe in their leader wholeheartedly. So, take your time to explain your rationale. Give time for your team to reflect upon it. If you are implementing the whole school vision on a policy that to date has not been taken up by your team, then you owe it to your team to understand the reasons yourself, before attempting to ‘sell’ it. Don’t do it because you have to. Buy into it. And if you don’t believe in it, have those discussions in the appropriate forum – e.g. a line management or middle leader meeting. As a middle leader you will have to toe the corporate line from time to time. And (unless it’s an issue of safeguarding) you may have to follow suit for the purpose of consistency across the school.

This can, of course, result in some negative feeling towards leadership of the school, especially if your team feel as if they are excluded from the decision making process. For instance, a change of policy on homework, without consultation, can appear to be something that is ‘done to’ the teachers and students. If you find yourself at having to implement this, why not take the opportunity in a team meeting on working out ways about ‘how’ this could be practically rolled out in your Subject or Year group? Their involvement at the pre-implementation stage helps to not only ensure a level of quality control, but potentially some buy-in from your team. 

Between not changing anything and changing it all, there is clearly a well-trodden middle way that needs to be explored. However, before we look at this, it is important that we dismiss the two extreme positions.

Not engaging with the opportunty to improve team outcomes is actually problematic, in the sense of risking complacency. Exploring options is healthy, and doesn’t mean that a change of direction will result. But the fact you have considered it is powerful in itself. If you are in a low-performing team (however you/ or the metrics you use define that), then not doing anything for fear of upsetting the applecart is not an option. The ultimate beneficiaries of a highly-functioning, successful team are students, and not attempting to get your team to the position where they can support them better, does our profession a disservice.

Conversely, very rarely do you need to chuck everything and the kitchen sink out! If you do have to make such a radical departure from the status quo, do ensure that you have planned for what comes after. Frontload the plan, demonstrating that you have carefuly thought through the various permutations and settled on a clear, understandable direction. Detail is important here, and sometimes this can be lost in the attempt to simplify and provide clarity. Don’t scrimp on this. Better still, involve your team in helping to flesh out the direction. This transparency moves away from the clandestine approach, and will provide your team with a sense of ownership, trust and faith in their abilities to provide a fantastic education for the students in their care. 

Successful middle leaders would have occupied that broad middle way, making changes where and when necessary, involving their teams to flesh out the ‘how’ and balancing the needs of their direct reports, senior leaders, parents, the curriculum and, most importantly, the children. 

Speak to other successful middle leaders both within your school and without. Do ask them how long it took them to get the department to where they wanted it – my guess, based on my experience, is that it took longer than initially anticipated. Middle leadership is not a role that one can tick off within a  year – it requires a significant investment of energy and time. Diktats to instill rapid change may appear to work, but they rarely build a foundation for sustained success. Reinventing the wheel is never a wise move, but rarely is setting it alight! 

Featured

The Engine Room: Get yourself a mentor!

The Engine Room is a series of blogposts on Middle Leadership. The name comes from the idea that school middle leadership is the ‘engine room’ of the school, without which schools would not function effectively. Middle Leadership is challenging, and often teachers are thrown into it, without the support and guidance they need. The purpose of this series is to shine some light on some of the challenges middle leaders face, and what one can practically do to address these issues. There is no magic bullet, but I do hope that it helps middle leaders at least feel that they are not alone.

“Congratulations! We would love to offer you the job of Head of Department.”

Of course, you accept. You have earned this. You have raised your head above the parapet and have demonstrated that you have the aptitude, determination and work ethic to be awarded this opportunity.

But then there’s the niggling self-doubt. Have I simply got this because there’s no one else? Have they made a mistake? How long do I have before I’m found out?

If you were anything like me, someone who possessed the requisite ability, but with a penchant for premature career self-sabotage, this may sound familiar. 

My first head of department role was where I learnt my chops, where I learnt to navigate the rough waters of middle leadership. But it would have been much more straightforward had I had some guidance. A mentor who had been there, done that.

Mentoring is not the same as line-management. Although in practice, within schools, these are often conflated. And for good reason – time is precious, expensive and quite simply there may not be staff within your school who have the necessary expertise. 

Whereas line-management is often linked to drafting and meeting targets, or being measured against school Key Performance Indicators, mentoring, in my experience, is more fluid, more ‘human’. There is a need for both, and great line-management should of course be celebrated. The purpose of this piece, however, is to encourage people to embrace mentoring, to find that guide who is, perhaps one step removed from the day-to-day, and who can give you a perspective, based on experience or a disassociated analysis.

I have been both a mentor and mentee. Where it has been successful, I have, in both roles, listened, questioned, and challenged. Specifically as a mentor, I have advised. The last part, I feel is important. Mentoring, in my mind, is not coaching. I am a big fan of coaching, be it rapidly improving classroom practice through the model of ‘instructional coaching’ or whether it is the ‘executive coaching’ variety, whereby someone guides you through your goals to fulfil their potential. As a mentee and Head of Department, I wanted to learn from someone else’s experience, access the knowledge (and skills) they have gained to help me develop and grow. For a new middle leader, or perhaps an experienced one feeling a little stuck, a mentor provides a sense of perspective. When leading a department, I found this increasingly difficult to get this perspective as the year progressed, and my focus turned to assessment, exam preparation, curriculum development and cover. In the years where I had a mentor, the role felt much more sustainable. I was encouraged to pause and take stock, at moments when I was in danger of disappearing down a rabbit hole of perpetual ‘doing’.

Choosing a mentor is not a straightforward process, and I have to confess, a little haphazard. I did not advertise and/or interview (although maybe that’s a consideration?!), nor were they allocated. I found them through training courses, friends of friends, subject-specific Teach Meets and online forums, and oddly enough going for interviews in other schools! Nor were they apparent as mentors when I first met them. I did not simply ‘know’. For the majority of them, all I knew is that they had at times been heads of departments who I wanted to emulate in some capacity. I may had admired the way they motivated their teams, or instilled and celebrated a love of their subject. One of my mentors had a fantastic understanding of the curriculum, and his ability to succinctly explain it to both novice teachers and teachers outside his subject, was something that I genuinely admired. And this is the key thing – they didn’t have to be the perfect middle leader. I’m not even sure that this exists. In all cases, this appreciation of a specific mentor trait, led to some great further conversations, regular check-ins and ultimately the formation of a mentor-mentee relationship that sustained.

The relationship is very rarely formal. This is difficult for teachers as, by the nature of the profession, we are structured: we plan, deliver and assess our lessons at particular times; we supervise break duty at a predetermined moment; we go on holiday when we are told to during the year. We even go to the toilet and eat our lunch during specific windows! It is not a profession that one feels has a lot of flex built in. And yet, mentor/ mentee conversations, whilst could be scheduled in, are often dependent on the ebbs and flow, the stresses and strains of being a middle leader at seemingly unplanned moments during the school year. As we adapt, change and continue to develop the profession in this post-Covid era, it is crucial that we learn to embrace this. Mentoring middle leaders when they need it most, not just at arbitrary regular intervals.

The format of a mentor meeting is not prescriptive. And nor should it be. This is an opportunity to discuss areas of professional life that could traverse a variety of topics. The key thing here is a willingness to have that conversation and engage with the dispensed advice, even if it’s ultimately rejected. Remember, this is not coaching. 

Does the mentor need to be trained? Well, it depends on your definition of a mentor. If we are talking about someone who is providing instruction, and has limited time to diagnose the problem and help the colleague find a solution that they can work on – then, of course, a clear and precise model, expertly driven by someone trained in providing instruction, is of huge benefit. If it’s more of an advice-seeking conversation with someone who has been in your shoes and has valuable knowledge to impart, then training will, in all practically, be quite difficult. Remember, we are not training novices educators here. We are providing a level of bespoke support to middle leaders that schools do not always have the capacity to provide themselves. National Training courses of exist, and they are of course valuable, in the medium to long term. However, picking up the phone and speaking to someone you have chosen to build a strong relationship with, when the problem reveals itself, is often of greater value- at least in the moment, when you are faced with those all consuming challenges.

The final part of this piece is a plea: pay it forward. We are a profession with some amazingly generous individuals. When recruitment drops and staff migrate to other professions, the pressure on middle leaders to simultaneously hold the fort and keep striving for their pupils is immense. Supporting our middle leaders in these moments will undoubtedly have a knock on effect – not just to the individual concerned, but to the departments they lead, the students they teach, and anyone who thinks middle leadership might be for them. The latter is perhaps the most important for our profession. If our teaching and non-teaching staff see a middle leader being well-supported by a mentor, then they will be more likely to see those positions as something desirable, something to aim and build towards. We have a retention crisis in this profession – let’s do everything we can to encourage people to stay. Mentoring won’t be the solution on its own, and will be further down the list after pay and workload considerations, but it could definitely play a positive part in supporting educators who, despite the odds, have dedicated their immediate futures to this valuable vocation.