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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
Whether you're already leading or you have it on your radar, this book's for you. Don't expect a textbook full of highfalutin theories though, this book is rammed full of practical ideas that you can use instantly to help you in your current role or to get the position you want. How do you create a brilliant team? What is needed to establish an awesome ethos? How do you do those difficult personnel things? How do you make an impact? Answers to all of these questions and more are based on the combined 100 plus years of the authors' leadership experience in a wide range of educational settings. You'll find a cornucopia of pick and mix tips, strategies and stuff that really works and will make your leadership brilliant! Leadership doesn't come from formulae or from the latest list of government standards. Neither does it come from the school handbook or a 'values' poster in the staffroom. If you pick up 100 different leadership books you'll find 100 different nuanced definitions. Fundamentally, brilliant leadership is inspiring people to go the extra mile. There's a difference between 'outstanding' and 'brilliant'. Brilliant is self-made, inside out, creative and beyond the bounds of any simple description. Brilliance is a calling and brilliant practitioners go well beyond the call of duty. Middle leaders are the backbone of any school. At their best they challenge, manage, plan, develop and inspire colleagues to make learning brilliant for kids. Middle leadership covers a broad spectrum of roles and titles: curriculum leader, pastoral leader, key stage coordinator, subject coordinator, head of department, school leader, head of year, school leadership, head of house, head of faculty, subject leader. This book is aimed at anyone in middle leadership, regardless of job title, whether long in the tooth, new to leadership or wanting to get into it. Dip into this book and you'll find a wide range of tools, strategies, advice and top tips to help you be your brilliant best. Gary, Chris and Andy cover the myriad of issues facing middle leaders with their customary mix of good humour and solid, experience-informed advice. Topics covered include: starting a new role; whether in a new school or following internal promotion, what your colleagues and the kids will expect of you, identifying personal strengths and areas for further development, shifting your focus from your to-do list to your to-be list, having an impact, building rapport and a team ethos, planting seeds of positivity across the school, tips for holding effective meetings, how to plan improvement which works for your team and meets the expectations of senior leaders, planning, implementing and evaluating change, dealing with negative colleagues, overcoming issues and personnel problems, understanding and owning your thinking, celebrating successes, modelling and sharing best practice and developing a brilliant team. The Art of Being Brilliant series was a finalist in the 2017 Education Resources Awards in the Educational Book Award category.
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Unsurprisingly, there is agreement among most educational researchers that the most powerful influence on pupil performance is the teacher. Of course school improvement helps, but the ‘school effect’ is much less than the ‘teacher effect’.
In our focus on both of these, we tend to overlook the impact of the department or the house/college on pupil outcomes. This book repairs that gap by helping those in what might be called the engine rooms of schools – as leaders of departments, faculties, phases or houses – to be reminded of simple things that can and will make a difference, and in the process make schools better places to learn and live together.
Most teachers will be familiar with this quotation by Haim Ginott:
I’ve come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate orhumor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanized or de-humanized.1
Indeed, I have seen it on many a staffroom noticeboard.
But the next most important influencer of the weather is the middle leader. This was brought home to me in my first months visiting London secondary schools as part of the London Challenge. I had called on 150 in the first nine months and was asked by the schools’ minister how many I would send my own child to. I thought for a while and, much to the minister’s surprise, replied honestly that I would cheerfully have any child of mine in at least 135 and probably, after a little thought, in a further dozen, leaving just three which were so broken that we needed urgent action to help mend them.
I vividly remember visiting one of those three schools and being sat down to talk with the school council students. As an opener to discussions, I explained that I came from Birmingham and knew urban schools quite well. Thinking of the street gangs in Birmingham at that time (such as the Burger Bar and Johnson Crew gangs, about which we were really worried), I enquired of the north London school’s student council members whether they had trouble with gangs. ‘Not in the maths corridor,’ came the unexpected reply!
Now, I tell this anecdote not because it convinced me that the school was broken, but because it made me think that there was something to work with. After all, in an otherwise hopeless climate, the maths department was making it possible for the teachers and the students to learn and enjoy learning. As an aside, it eventually turned out that the school soon improved as a focus on middle leadership paid dividends right across the school – admittedly with new school leadership. For leaders of schools, as we know, affect the weather too.
So here’s a book which can make an enormous difference from three people who have years of experience, boundless optimism, considerable energy, unquenchable intellectual curiosity and a good sense of humour. All of these and more are needed by successful middle leaders, but I am sure you will be more likely to have them as a result of having this book at your elbow.
Sir Tim Brighouse
(Sir Tim has been professor of education at Keele University as well as chief education officer in both Oxfordshire and Birmingham local authorities. He spent some time as ‘London schools tsar’ and has, according to the Guardian, ‘made a career out of enchanting teachers and bamboozling critics’.)
1 Haim Ginott, Teacher and Child: A Book for Parents and Teachers (New York: Macmillan, 1971).
Chapter 1
THE STRUGGLE
It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
Elinor Smith
Before we begin in earnest, we would like to doff our metaphorical hats to you. In fact, consider this a tug of the forelock: you are amazing. Holding down a school leadership position, at whatever level, means you inhabit that dichotomous position of having the most important and the most difficult of all jobs. You are truly all things to all people, as well as a master juggler, keeping several balls in the air while spinning plates with your feet. It’s not surprising that you’re exhausted!
Throughout history humans have been living with scarcity. But now the only scarce thing in our lives is time. The chances are that your lifespan of 4,000 weeks is zipping by in a blur. All this fast stuff means that we’re living life beyond the legal busyness speed limit. If there was a busyness traffic cop, he’d be clocking you and doing a double take at his speed-gun. You’d be pulled over for the offence of ‘living life way too fast to the point of being a danger to yourself and other people’.
If you follow the busyness police analogy through, you’d have to go on a speed awareness course and learn to live your life safely. And then, just like a real speed awareness course, you’d sit there grumbling that it was unfair that you’d been pulled up for racing through life. And then some smart alec trainer would come in and show you some gruesome PowerPoints about folk who’ve lived their lives too fast – burned out wreckages who have coronaries and several failed marriages behind them. And you’d all look at your shoes and think, ‘He’s got a good point but it won’t happen to me.’ Perhaps, for a few weeks after your life speed awareness course, you’d actually slow down and be more mindful. You might even savour a sunrise and your marriage, but gradually you’d get caught up again and, before long, you’d be clocked above the limit once more.
The opposite of busyness isn’t slowness. As we’ll see later, it’s pure unadulterated attention to the moment. It’s pondering, thinking, musing and wondering. These are all the things that are absent when you’re speeding through life.
We meet a lot of school staff who are close to exhaustion, crawling towards the next half-term that will provide an all too brief pit stop before they re-enter the race. The relentless pace is particularly full-on for department heads, middle leaders and head teachers. But in true trooper style, you soldier on as before, victims of what science calls ‘learned helplessness’. There are several horrible examples of animals being subjected to electric shocks to see how they respond to stress. (Before we go any further, we’re absolutely with you on this: we’re all for reversing the procedure and subjecting these scientists to electric shocks. If we wired up our lab-coated friends to some electrodes and sent some voltage through them, we think they’d learn something very valuable: it hurts, it’s cruel and they need to stop doing it.) That aside, guess what? If you subject dogs to electric shocks they will try to avoid them, but after a while they will give up and accept their role as victim.
I think we can all learn to be helpless. We can all become victims of busyness. We’re exhausted but we look around and see that everyone is suffering in the same way, so what can we do other than go along with the scam?
So here’s a thought: did you ever opt in to being manically busy? Did you ever sit down and decide that your aim would be to cram so much into your life that you reach the point of physical and emotional exhaustion? We think the days of being on top of things have gone. We have to let go of our ideal of clearing our inbox and getting organised. In fact, letting go of that belief can be quite a relief. Take it from us: you don’t have to be in control; that particular game has ended. To be blunt, it’s beaten us. Tony Crabbe suggests that we need to find ways of moving from ‘drowning’ (a helpless feeling of going under) to ‘immersion’ (a deep focus on something that’s important to you).1
We’re so concerned about having too much to do that we thin-slice life, living it in slivers instead of big fat wedges of awesomeness. Real joy requires undiluted attention. But, of course, we’re always multitasking, so in our haste to experience everything we experience thin slices of next to nothing. This next sentence takes some grappling with but here goes: we fill every available moment with something and end up with nothing, whereas filling some moments with nothing means you get everything.
Read it again, this time sloooowly. It’s up there with the famous ‘rules of cricket’ tea towel, but it does make sense – we promise! And now strap yourself in for some controversy: we think busyness and thin-slicing might be the easy options. Working long hours and then going home to log on to even more emails, and cramming your electronic diary with too many appointments and not enough time, is a ruse. All this histrionic waving of hands is a whole lot easier than holding them up and saying, ‘Hey, you know what, something’s missing.’ As Robert Holden says, ‘If there’s something missing in your life, it’s probably you.’2 We meet so many people whose agenda has become more important than them.3
We have evolved from humans who lived in societies where not much changed, and when change did occur it was likely to be significant and perhaps even life threatening. From this background we have inherited a cognitive frailty towards novelty which throws us a present-day conundrum: we don’t like change but modern education is awash with it.
Change can be scary, right? Arnie in the Terminator films is scary too. Cast your mind back to 1984 and the first movie in the Terminator series. Schwarzenegger is a six-foot, leather-clad, Harley-riding, shotgun-toting, take-no-prisoners cyborg, sent from the future to kill Sarah Connor. Luckily for Sarah, there’s also a good guy who finds her first. Phew! There’s a very tense scene in which the goodie and Sarah are taking refuge in a parked car while Arnie cruises nearby, scanning for his prey. Gulp! The Terminator T-800 is programmed to kill and he’s not going to stop until Sarah Connor is roadkill. The good guy is trying to explain why Sarah needs to take him seriously. Copyright deems that we can’t bring you the exact dialogue so here it is, paraphrased:
Good guy to Sarah Connor, in a desperate tone: ‘Listen and understand. It’s out there. It cannot be bargained with. It cannot be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop. Ever!’
He was, of course, referring to the one-track minded, unflappably evil Terminator. But we think you can substitute the word ‘busyness’ into the dialogue and it still makes perfect sense. Go on – have a go. Roll this one around in your head:
Listen and understand. Busyness is out there. It cannot be bargained with. It cannot be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop. Ever!
We’re not suggesting that busyness is quite as scary as being chased by a murderous machine. But we are suggesting that busyness is, in its own inimitable way, coming to get you. It probably won’t turn up on a Harley and we’re praying it won’t have a shotgun. More likely, it will shape-shift into the form of a school restructure, four staff on maternity leave at the same time, several staff off with stress, some new technology, an angry parent or a surprise school inspection (or, in a conspiracy of Sod’s law, all of the above at the same time). Remember, it absolutely will not stop. Ever!
In our experience, too many leaders are still imagining ‘change’ to be a six month thing, something to be gotten through and then everything will settle down. But we doubt that’s true. The modern world of education dictates that change, and the subsequent ripples of busyness, are a permanent phenomenon. Change is not something to be got through, it’s something to get accustomed to. We’re not suggesting this is good news. We appreciate that change is exhausting. If you’ve been in your job for ten years or more, you will end up seeing the same things coming round again and again, so it’s easy to get jaded and cynical. But instead of rolling your eyes, be ready for it. How? By being positive about yourself and investing in your skills, knowledge and attitude. This is the best way to make yourself ‘change-proof’.
Not so long ago, the chances are you would have lived in a little house and had a small field, a goat and some chooks. You would have led a simple life that never extended beyond your village boundaries. You would probably marry your cousin. It was a humble existence carried out on a small flat earth, overseen by (a) God. Life was grim but, if you were lucky, you wouldn’t suffer too much and you would be happy when you died.
And then Copernicus came up with the idea that the Earth wasn’t the centre of the universe. It got a whole lot worse when someone sailed to the edge of the horizon and didn’t fall off the end. Mr Darwin came along with his newfangled notions about evolution and the whole God thing wobbled a bit. Physics gave us some hard-and-fast laws before morphing into its steroid-pumping alter-ego, quantum physics. Stephen Hawking bamboozled us, in his synthesised voice, with quarks, big bangs, singularity and the Copenhagen interpretation (don’t ask!). Even string theory is beginning to unravel, replaced by M-theory’s 11th dimension. We found out that billions of Euros were being diverted into an underground bunker at CERN in Switzerland where they were colliding some particles in the quest to discover how the universe began.
At exactly the same time that the Higgs boson was messing with our understanding of the immutable laws of physics, there was a leap into what we will call ‘quantum psychology’. The predictability of energy and matter is all well and good, but once feelings, thoughts and consciousness get involved then the universe becomes very unstable indeed. By the time we watched The Matrix in 1999, we started to wonder whether we were living in a parallel universe. The big question that we still daren’t go near is, ‘What is real?’
And that’s why this book is different. It’s got both feet in the real world while, at the same time, daring to visit your ‘reality’, which is all rather bizarre because when you get there you’ll realise that your reality isn’t real. This is one of those ‘new age’ statements that may or may not make sense to you, but the start and end point of this book is you and the world you create.
Unlike the simpler lives of our ancestors, people today are presented with a multitude of choices, not least which path to take. Life is full of easy roads, well signposted and leading to self-absorption and material accumulation. Guaranteed, there will be big neon billboards guiding you that way. Then there are the roads less travelled and certainly less well lit. These roads lead off into the distance but, we promise you, most of them are M25-esque – ultimately bringing you back to your starting point.
Now, here’s the interesting thing: although not a nailed on certainty, it’s fairly likely that the easy roads will lead you to fragility, insecurity, exhaustion and discontent. They are never-ending journeys in which you’ll be chasing good feelings across the horizon. It’s the other, less well-signposted roads that lead to greater happiness and joy. Like Homer’s Odyssey or Coelho’s The Alchemist, the less travelled road brings you full circle. Indeed, people far wiser than your humble authors have suggested quite vehemently that life is about nothing more than the journey; that you are the starting point and the destination.
So, a final thought in our opening call to arms. We’re all of a certain age so we grew up watching Tarzan (the Johnny Weismuller one, not the Ron Ely one), who wore his loincloth very well indeed. In almost every episode someone fell into some quicksand. And they’d struggle like hell in the swampy conditions, sinking deeper and deeper. Cheetah (who wasn’t a big cat but in fact a chimp – stay with us, folks) would throw his arms about and scream his concern. Tarzan would translate, telling the person to stop struggling. It seems that the act of struggling was actually dragging them deeper. So, now up to their necks in gunge, they’d attempt to stop writhing and Tarzan would throw them a vine that they’d grip with their teeth and our hero would haul them out. Unless they were a baddie in which case they’d keep struggling and go under. It was ace viewing.
Make a note of your key areas for development and what you might do to improve on them, but don’t forget to consider what you’re already doing well. Be aware of your weaknesses but never lose sight of your strengths.
