Skip to main content

What does leadership look like in your school?

A really good question for teachers to ask of their learners is, 'what does it look like when you are learning?' If you give this question to pupils and ask them to draw or write about themselves learning, you will often get a picture of a pupil, on their own, perhaps at a desk, and with a pencil or pen, jotter and books. They might include a computer screen and, if you are lucky, the child in the picture may be smiling. Not so in the example below.




If you have not carried out this exercise, try it. You may be surprised at the results. What you get is the child's construct of what learning is, and what it looks and feels like. If you get results like the one above, you can explore this more with the learner and it can give you some remarkable insights into how leaning is perceived by the learners in your class. It can also be a stimulus for some soul-searching and reflection on your own part. I suspect if you were asked to draw learning taking place in your classroom, or elsewhere, it would look a lot different. So, what's happening between what you think is going on and the learners think is going on?


When you begin to consider this further, you may start to explore and shift your own practice, as well as your learner's understanding of what learning is and how it may look. Yes, there will be times when learning is an individual pursuit, involving reading and writing activities, but more often it is a collaborative endeavour, shaped by others you are learning with. Learning can take place everywhere, not just at school and in a classroom. Some of the most significant learning we experience happens outside of school and when our senses and emotions are fully engaged and employed. When learners begin to recognise and understand this, you are more likely to get pictures with more people in them, not just the individual and the odd teacher. You may get them sitting on the floor with friends and classmates, and you may get them pictured outside in some other environment. You may even have pictures of them playing!


All of this is genuine feedback around their understanding of what learning is, and looks like. The more sophisticated their understanding of learning as a creative, social and cognitive process, the more this will be reflected in their compositions. When learners keep depicting learning as an individual activity, sat at a desk, in a classroom, we have evidence of the model or schema of learning we have created, or imposed on them, and this should make us all think about our practice.


Lets now consider what school leadership looks like as a school leader, through the adoption of a similar approach. If you asked staff, all staff, in the school to draw or write about what leadership looks and feels like, what would you expect to see? Would they show a hierarchy, with the headteacher or principal at the top and cleaners at the bottom, or would they show something else?




This could well be another insightful activity for school leaders to try out with staff. You may need to do this in an anonymised way, in order to get true feedback, and I suppose it may be a difficult activity for a lot of school leaders to undertake. But, I think if you genuinely want to know what 'leadership' feels and looks like to staff in a school, this may be an effective way of capturing that, which is less threatening, and more honest, than some other tools commonly use for such purposes.

You would have some pretty powerful insights into perceptions around leadership amongst all staff. You may ask staff to include job-titles to help you analyse the results across the school. In my view,  it would be great if the illustrations you receive show collaboration and co-operation happening, along with flattened hierarchies, as well as individuals demonstrating 'leadership' roles and activities. But even if this is not the case, you still have some very useful feedback for you as a school leader to reflect on. Perhaps there are still too many deluded headteachers, and senior managers, out there who's perception of how they are as leaders is completely different to how this is seen by the people they are supposed to be leading. Before anything can be done about this, a school leader has to become aware, and this suggestion might be a useful strategy to help you with that awareness raising first step.











Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Six Qualities of Educational Leadership

I wrote a post a few weeks ago (The six tasks of leadership 12/12/15) following an article about Sir Tim Brighouse, who had identified what he thought were the six key tasks for school leaders. My own list was a bit different to Tim's but it also set me thinking about what might be the qualities you would look for in high performing school leaders. I give you my six as a stimulus for discussion and perhaps your own consideration of what qualities we should look for in school leaders. The first is authenticity. I believe all school leaders need to be authentic and to really walk the walk of their talk. There can be nothing so dispiriting for school community members than being led by a leader who says one thing but does another. Remember to say what you mean and mean what you say. I think the highest performing leaders possess emotional awareness. They know themselves well and they know the people they lead well too. They understand the importance of relationships and how to ta

Evaluation: a process, not an event

Throughout my time as a school leader, and since, I have wrestled with the challenge of evaluation, in terms of measuring the impact of change, in a way which is meaningful and useful . Early in my career, such evaluation was very much viewed as an event, or events, that happened towards the end of a project, or piece of work, usually occurring towards the end of a school year. This was often a time filled with lots of scrabbling around looking for 'evidence' that could be put into some sort of report aimed at different different audiences. It felt stressful, concocted at times and often disconnected from the whole change agenda. Evaluation was a thing to be endured at the end of something else, with its main purpose consisting of proving you had been doing something to different people. Some of these would take what you gave them, and put that into their own 'evaluation report' for a cluster of schools, a local authority, or even a national system. A major issue with

Some thoughts for new student teachers

  Having gained a host of new followers on Twitter, who are either completing PGDE, or other student teacher qualifications, got me thinking about the advice, thoughts, comments I would give to those embarking on their own professional learning journey.   It is heart-warming to see, and hear, the enthusiasm of new entrants into the profession. They are passionate about their career path, and are constantly enthusing about the high quality input they are receiving from lecturers, professors of education and practitioners. My first piece of advice would to use those feelings as a touchstone, to go back to and revisit, throughout your career, but especially when you are facing challenges. Teaching is one of the most satisfying and rewarding professions to be involved in, but throughout your career you will encounter a myriad of challenges, and during these times it is often worth your while reminding yourself of why you came into the profession, and re-consider your early enthusiasms.   W