Principled Headship E-Book

Terry Mahony

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2004

Seitenzahl: 217

Beschreibung

Principled Headship provides headteachers and those who want to be headteachers specific and usable skills in success leadership. Utilising the techniques of Neuro- Linguistic Programming (NLP), it introduces some of the newly emerging methods to clarify and strengthen beliefs and values in order to achieve higher levels of personal effectiveness. Pioneering a programme of exercises using a combination of left- and right-brain approaches, it includes indirect suggestions and visual image associations.

Leseprobe

Principled Headship

A Teacher’s Guide to the Galaxy

Revised Edition

Terry Mahony

Contents

Title Page

Author’s note

Preface

Foreword

Introduction

“Beam me up, Scotty”

Journey into space

Part One: The extent of the known Universe

Planet Headship

Getting your pilot’s licence

Mindscapes and moonscapes

It goes with the territory

What planet are you on today?

Science fictions

Principled Headship

How does a good head walk?

Acting from the centre of your principles

The acting head

The centred head

The principled head

The two-sided head

The inside-out head

The fast-food eatery at the end of the Universe: The McDonaldisation of education 

Which way is ‘up’ in space?

Part Two: Life, the Universe and Everything

The universal principles

Values on the line  

1. Awareness Skills

Sense and non-sense!

Much of our life is spent on automatic

Lose your mind and come to your senses

The intuitive leader

Filters of the mind

Some common mental filters  

2. Emotional Skills

Emotions colour all our thinking and behaving

Emotions are facts 58

Emotional intelligence is more important for a head than academic intelligence  

3. Analytical Skills

Mental Mapping

Strategic thinking

Systemic thinking – the circles of the mind

Language limitations on thinking

The universal S.A.T.  

4. Linguistic Skills

Communication

Have I reached the person to whom I am speaking?

Misterious missages

Beyond the sound barrier – the Meta-model of language

Speaking with Martians  

5. Behavioural Skills

Behaviour

Management

You can make a difference!

Leadership

Redrawing the map

Alien views

Part Three: What is headship today?

Take me to your leader!

Putting it all together – working the principles

The learning school

Learning levels

Being in the right orbit

Adult learning

The head as learning leader

The head as leading learner

The dancing school

Learning with a purpo(i)se

What’s the difference that makes all the difference to a school? 123

Shared leadership

‘Flocking’ leadership

The Final Frontier: To boldly go…

Walking in space

Six steps to the heavens

Words into action

The four pillars of wisdom

Recommended reading for the journey

The Known Universe

The Expanding Frontier

Cyber-space-stations

Index

Copyright

Acknowledgments

This book has its origins in the learning I gained in walking alongside my teachers, Stan Putnam, Dave Marshall, Ian McDermott and Robert Dilts; and its development in working with many Hampshire teachers. In finishing it, I drew on the experience and advice of my colleagues in the Education Department. I thank them all.

I have written this book with Walt Disney’s words in mind:

“I would rather entertain people in the hope that they will learn, than teach people in the hope that they will be entertained.”

Author’s note

When I wrote the first version of this book, it was because I wanted to remind myself of the foundations of my original motivation to become a teacher. The final two decades of the last millennium had witnessed the rise of the competences curriculum for both teachers and students, and of improvement (output) targets for schools. Combined with procedures for quality assurance, I feared that the education of young learners would be staffed with teacher-technicians working within a factory school. I wanted to revive Lawrence Stenhouse’s dictum that education was a moral enterprise, which, for me, means schools have to be values driven. John Elliott (1991) descried the fact that the professional competence of educators was being defined as mastery of pedagogical techniques rather than a mastery of the self in the service of expressed professional values. The framing of competences for teachers results from an (understandable) emphasis on the cognitive aspects of teaching and leadership and is therefore weighted towards the thinking skills. I drew attention to the missing domain of the affect – of the emotion. Daniel Goleman’s many writings on emotional intelligence have helped restore the balance between the cognitive and affective domains, so that more leadership training now explicitly explores the related skills base of the ‘soft’ skills of being a head teacher.

After accompanying a group of teachers on a study visit to a school in a shanty town just outside Cape Town, a member of the group remarked that the visit “provided me with more learning and self-reflection than many of my past planned educational goals and targets. It re-affirmed my beliefs in people as wonderful human beings, in education as the best of the creative professions and provided me with some of the funniest, saddest and most memorable moments of my career.” He had had his core values and beliefs revivified as he saw the teachers in that school live them in their teaching. Values that had, in his own country, got obscured by the demands for relentless improvement, by the imposition of national curricula targets, external assessment and competitive league tables. The political, social and economic challenges facing educators in the Cape Town schools are huge. They were matched only by the commitment of the teachers to do the best they could for their learners for the betterment of the wider community and the future of the country. For everyone in the group, therefore, the emotional impact of the visit outweighed our educational intentions. Our experience reawakened in each one of us, our original cognitively constructed educational values, our commitment to our own learners and a pride in the abilities of ourselves as professionals and the whole enterprise of the education of young people. The expression of such large-scale values is totally in keeping with Csikzentmihalyi’s (2002) findings on how to achieve ‘flow’ in your life.

Those pressures to meet local and national targets are greater once you become a head teacher. So a question for you may be how, right from the first day in the post, do you resolve the conflict between being yourself and conforming to the expectations you think others will have of you? If you fail to resolve this struggle successfully, you run the risk of playing roles and adopting behaviours that are alien to who you are and ultimately dysfunctional and damaging to the school. Carl Rogers (1983) asked can you, as a head teacher, “dare to be you”? That is, can you be, in his term, ‘authentic’? That is, can you be true to yourself, your beliefs and values, and lead the school according to a clear set of principles? Can you walk your own talk? And in that talk can you express yourself sufficiently well as a person so that what you are will be clearly communicated?

In the Asian martial arts, you are exhorted to always move from your dan tien, your physical centre of gravity, the point just below your navel. This is the way in which you remain balanced in all your actions. More than a balancing point, the dan tien is seen as the centre of your physical and spiritual energy. My spiritual dan tien contains the set of core beliefs and values from which, like the physical centre, I draw my energy and shape my actions. As a teacher, I hold the belief that if I can teach anything at all, it is “I can teach what I am” – I can offer myself as a model. As a leader, can you behave in such a way that will be perceived by the school team as trustworthy, consistent and reliable? So that your behaviour will not be perceived as threatening, but liberating and empowering? I hope that this book helps you answer these questions for yourself.

However well-intentioned my aim in writing this book, it cannot give you the skills to be a good head teacher. What this book can do however, is open up your mental map and present ideas for you to reflect on, and experiment with, in your everyday life.

Preface

I don’t know if this was your experience but when I was at school the teachers seemed like a different race to us. I think this was partly because I never had a sense of them as people who were learning anything or indeed had anything to learn. They were the teachers and we were the students. They were the dispensers of knowledge and we were there to be taught. Right up to the age of 16 when I left I never had a sense of them as being learners like us. Any idea of a partnership in which both parties were involved in learning would have seemed an extraordinary idea then. This segregation between those who knew (teachers) and those who didn’t (students) reached its apotheosis in the view most of us had of the head. The head teacher, who in my school was known as the headmaster, was a figure of truly Olympian remoteness. He was a figure in a flowing academic gown seen from a distance – unless you had done something wrong, in which case you could expect an uncomfortably close encounter.

I first met Terry Mahony when he took his NLP Master Practitioner training with us at International Teaching Seminars in 1996. I knew nothing about his background but early on in this five month programme I recognised in Terry a really committed learner. Here was someone who wanted to know, someone in fact who was a trainer of teachers who was eager to learn and who I knew would then teach others. Since then I have seen him in a number of our other NLP programmes. What has impressed me is how he has taken what he has learnt in each of them – the training, consultancy and health programmes – into the education field.

There is something enormously fulfilling in seeing your students go on to produce their own contributions to the field. In my home I have a very special bookshelf which has only books written by my students which they have given me. For me it represents a behavioural demonstration of a real learning partnership – what I guess I never really felt myself when at school – where the student is sufficiently empowered to make their own contribution.

My hope is that this book will further such learning partnerships between heads and those in their care. Principled Headship has an enormous amount to offer anyone who is in the very challenging position of being a head in any kind of educational establishment – actually in any kind of establishment. Its focus is both on the how tos but also on the beliefs and values which need to inform our behaviour if we are to be successful and fulfilled. That’s why, in truth, this book is for anyone who is in a leadership role, who wants others to learn and grow – and who is not afraid to be a learner.

Ian McDermott 

Foreword

The purpose of this book is to give you specific and usable skills in leading a school into and beyond the millennium. School improvement is the theme of this era. Head teachers are facing challenges previously unknown. I don’t just mean the challenge of headship. I mean the challenges you will face in headship about your headship. Challenges to how you are leading the improvement of the school, at a national level from external inspection, at a regional level from local advisory teams and at school level itself, from an active and effective governing body. It would be good, wouldn’t it, if all head teachers were sufficiently well skilled to lead improvement confidently? This book offers you a fresh and practical approach to how you can clarify and strengthen your inner beliefs and values so that your own leadership behaviours will develop subtly. It does this by providing you with a map of principles and beliefs covering the field of leadership in schools. As a map it allows you the freedom to design your own route through from where you are now, to even more successful leadership. It is also a manual to turn those principles into operation as it contains activities to explore changes in your own thinking, your own emotional awareness and management and your language. Together, these will, by the end of the book, promote changes in your own behaviour to make them more congruent with your beliefs. With the changes you make will come higher levels of personal effectiveness through the greater motivation and co-operation of your staff.

It has been arranged as a sandwich – a packed lunch for a journey. Part Two, the filling at its centre, provides the material for your future growth and development into a healthy person. It is a practical guide to developing the skills that will make your practice of headship more satisfying. It is based on the belief that you have the capacity to attain your goals and enjoy fully being a head teacher. Don’t read this part of the book unless you want to change, for it can change how you think and behave in a way that will bring you new achievements as a leader. The outside slices, Parts One and Three, are as fundamentally honest and nutritious as bread. You can consider them as wholemeal if you like because they contain kernels of protein that are linked to the filling and therefore complement and balance the centre.

“This guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”

Douglas Adams The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Introduction

“Education is… a journey into the infinite, a participation in the movement of the universe”

Herman Hesse

“Beam me up, Scotty”

How often have you wished you could use Captain Kirk’s famous phrase to follow his example and fly away from an alien, threatening form of life in an inhospitable school? To feel the relief of rematerialising in the warm safety of your own familiar mother ship? As a head teacher, facing the unknown wonders of the future, where is that special place? Where will your security lie?

Isn’t the best place in your own principles, your own beliefs and values?

If you think you can answer ‘yes’ to that question, then the next question to ask yourself is:–

What principles guide my behaviour as a leader?

Since your principles are the launch pad of your behaviours, articulating your principles to yourself links your language with your behaviour. Scientists claim that of the 80,000 thoughts you typically have today, 60,000 will be the same thoughts you had yesterday! This is because you live most of your life on automatic, following long-established patterns of behaviour. In a similar way to a computer, our complex behaviour in everyday contexts is based on many, much simpler, programmes at a deeper level. These behavioural patterns are established in the neural pathways of our mind and are evidenced in our speech. The words we use give others clues to what sort of pre-programmed patterns are going on inside us. Conversely, our speech and behaviour can develop and reinforce such neural programmes. The study of how language and action affects the central nervous system is known as neuro-linguistic programming. It was first developed by John Grinder and Richard Bandler (1975) who studied transcripts of the language of acknowledged leaders in the field of conversational therapy. Behind their classification of the language patterns used by these models of excellence, they uncovered similarities in their thinking and belief systems. This is the work that gave rise to many of the principles in this book. They come from current ideas about how you form your own individual beliefs and how you sustain those beliefs in your daily living. Out of this study has come a range of techniques and procedures designed to allow you to develop your own inner resourcefulness and achieve your goals.

There are many writings describing successful heads. They are the results of research studies linked to theories of leadership or case studies of excellent head teachers and have titles like ‘the eleven characteristics of an effective head’ or the ‘eight attributes of great leaders’. They are good guides of what to look out for and aspire to. They don’t usually tell you how to acquire and develop them. These attributes and characteristics hang in the air in front of you, like the grin on the Cheshire Cat: appearing, appealing to you and then disappearing, leaving you wishing you could see the whole cat – and grab hold of it. The problem is, as Alice remarked as she wandered in Wonderland, “I’ve often seen a cat with a grin, but a grin without a cat? It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life”. It seems to me that many management books are collections of such grins. A guide has to be more than a list of external features. It has to utilise the modelling process of Bandler and Grinder. This book describes a set of internal beliefs, which work outwards, allowing you to shape yourself into the best leader that only you can be as the first step in that modelling process. It offers a way of linking the studies of excellence with your own daily management actions.

Education is a people enterprise and relationships are the key to the successful accomplishment of its primary task of pupil achievement. People are the school’s primary resource. There is no school improvement or curriculum development without people development. The quality of interpersonal relationships – between staff and between staff and pupils – is the greatest single factor in the development of the school as a learning community and therefore of gains for all its students. It is the relationship between teacher and learner, not the technical skills of teaching, which are the strongest determinant of what a child learns. In the same way, what ultimately helps or hinders the improvement of a school is the relationship between the head and the individual member of staff, not the technical skills of management. That is why this book focuses on those key principles that are the basis for building good relationships with and between people.

Imagine what it would be like to lead a school that really works, where you have all the time you need to do the things you want and have the respect and co-operation of your staff as well as the support of all the parents. A school fit for children. That would be like heaven, wouldn’t it? But how do you get to the heavens? Sylvia West, a head teacher in Cambridge, began by posing, to her colleagues, two vital questions in 1993 about being a head:

“What values will you/did you bring to headship?”

“How will you attempt to realise these values in the practice and organisation of your school?”

This book offers some answers to both those questions, because it is a compilation of the distinctive guiding principles that many head teachers and other managers have found to work in the daily round of leading a school team towards its goals, to reaching its chosen stars. According to the Collins dictionary, a belief is ‘a principle accepted as real or true’ and a principle is ‘a standard or rule of conduct’. The principles in this book conform to these definitions.

Valuing is a basic human process. Each one of us expresses preferences and antipathies for certain people, certain situations and occasions. These preferences, even if not well articulated, determine what we are drawn to and what we shrink away from; what we desire and what we reject. As you visit many different schools, it is easy to detect differences in their atmosphere, culture and ethos. This is not surprising, as they all reflect and sometimes magnify, the values of their individual community. And head teachers, like the communities they lead, have different values, which take expression in the feel of the school and are therefore easily detectable to an outsider. This is because values are defined by the visible behaviour. The ringing words in a school prospectus can sound off-key if they are not lived out in the school by its community. To answer Sylvia West’s question you need first to describe your values to yourself and then think about their realisation in action. The principles of this book are based on values which can be operationalised as behaviours, through the selected activities. You can clarify your values by doing the activities.

However, you may not think you can believe all these principles yet – this does not matter. Take the ones you can believe and live them. For the others, when you are ready, act as if you do believe them, because a personal value remains a whisper in your mind until it is put into practice. Watch what happens as you do. They may feel strange at first, as you will find the changes in your relationships interesting. Listen to what others say around you and judge their effectiveness for yourself.

Journey into space

When did you last see the full glory of the night sky? Even if you live in a small village, it is difficult to get a sight of the sky that is totally free of man-made lights. Take time to find a place and a night and treat yourself to the view. You can see just how bright the starlight can be, how many different sorts of stars there are, the Milky Way in all its magnificence. For the Celts, the stars were so many holes in that fabric created by warriors breaking through to the heavenly light at the centre of the universe. You can let your mind travel deeply into the darkness and the brightness of that space. I think of education in these universal terms – such a rich bluey-blackness, setting off so many jewelled lights. I have chosen that space, and its exploration in fact and in fiction, as the theme for this trip into headship, because like all teachers I know the value of a good story in promoting learning. You may recognize your own galaxy in it somewhere.

In voyaging around your galaxy, I hope you will find that this book is more like Dr Who’s Tardis than Captain Kirk’s Starship Enterprise. Like a Tardis, it may sometimes sit oddly in its landscape – small and not quite in the right place or time. On opening it up though, you can see that there is far more to it than first meets the eye. Instead of a telephone booth space, there are many rooms all equipped with the latest neuro-linguistic technology. A proofreader said to me that’s why the language and syntax used in this book sometimes sounds quirky. If, like her, you are a native English speaker, it will just sound unfamiliar, but you will be surprised how easily you will get used to it. Preparing for university in the 1960s, I wanted a career in rocket science. It was the business to be in. There was no more exciting, ground-breaking technology; it was literally white-hot technology and would shape the future of mankind. I think of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) as human rocket science for the next decade. And just as rocket science is now commonplace, so too will NLP be as it is incorporated into initial teacher training. For teachers have the most to benefit from its applications in the classroom. Also, unlike rocket science, the technology of neuro-linguistic programmes is easier to understand and use. It links what we know about the neurology of our body, mind and senses, with our verbal (and unspoken) communication patterns to help us better understand our thinking and behaviour patterns. As you use the technology – the practical programmes of action – to gain that understanding, to explore your own experience and what you do with it, you can bring about change and more personal effectiveness in your role, in your own professional mission as a school leader.

Captain Kirk had a mission “to boldly go…” What is your mission as a head? What guides your behaviour? The Teacher Training Agency may not have used the word mission, but it has defined the ‘core purpose’ of headship as:

“To provide professional leadership for a school which secures its success and improvement, ensuring high quality education for all its pupils and improved standards of learning and achievement.”

How you fulfil this as a head teacher will be governed by your values and your personal vision.

As you may know, the Tardis allows you to travel in space and time. So does this book. As you read it, you may find yourself returning to parts of your own past universe – to where your values spring from, or where your beliefs developed, but its main purpose is to take you forward, “to boldly go” into the future.

Live long and prosper!

Part One

The extent of the known Universe

 

Planet Headship

Unlike Captain Kirk you are not exploring for exploration’s sake. You have a destination in mind – headship. What would a map of this, your destination planet, look like? What sort of terrain will greet you on arrival? In the 1960s as we planned to reach the moon, debate raged as to whether the dust covering of the moon would be a few millimetres thick or several metres. Everyone wanted assurance that the landing spot would be solid and stable and not like quicksand. How do you ensure your chosen landing site is safe?

What is headship territory? Has it got a recognisable topography? Who has drawn a map? In the 1990s the British Teacher Training Agency drew up the first map of what it saw as the basic landscape of headship – the National Standard for Headship. Its National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) is a classification of the attributes, skills, knowledge and task areas of headship. It listed eleven leadership skills, five communication skills, four self-management skills and three decision-making skills. The knowledge