Supporting the Leaders of Learning

Imagine what we could do if we had the money… A reflection on what we achieved with a grant to professionally develop the middle management in our school.

The Grant

The Invergowrie Foundation, who ‘advance the education of girls and women within Victoria’, granted Strathcona BGGS $12000 to support the professional development of teachers from 2013-15. Although confident practitioners in the classroom, teachers often feel ill prepared to lead teams of colleagues and welcome more support. We received this grant for our proposal to develop our Heads of Departments (HODs), Year Level Coordinators (YLCs) with their leaders the Dean of Studies and the Dean of Students (31 teachers in total). As Dean of Studies, I was keen to develop our teacher leaders, some of whom had requested assistance in leading their teams. 

Tuning In

To identify needs I asked each HOD and YLC to list two key professional priorities in their roles and the major challenges they faced to meet these priorities. From the list generated we distilled two goals for each team:

HODs  

1. time management
2. managing difficult situations

YLCs   

1. goal setting to meet the age specific needs of students in their year levels
2. managing challenging communications with parents.

Where the Money Went

We engaged Mark Riches of Level Consulting Services to work with each team. In the half dozen sessions he led us on a journey of what I call ‘team self discovery’, introducing management and leadership tools and concepts along the way. A small portion of the grant was used to provide food during these extended sessions at the end of a school day.

Some of the money was used to enable the Dean of Students and me to participate in some more intensive leadership training through the Australian Schools Colloquium. This was a ten-month long, partially funded, series of interactive webinars run by the Australian Institute of Management, working through a range of leadership tools that have already influenced our practice and facilitated some changes in the school.

The remaining part of the grant was used to develop those in middle management with further leadership aspirations. We were able to fund two staff members to attend the ACEL conference in Sydney and three to attend the Aspiring Leaders Conference at Bond University on the Gold Coast.

Some things we Learned

We gained many management tools and individual staff members developed professionally in different ways through this process. Perhaps the greatest gains were in our understandings of ourselves and each other. This included a growing perception of our role as a team, understanding  how each member contributes to that team and what the team has achieved, including working through some difficult technological changes with our teaching staff.

One of the changes is that the HODs team meets much more frequently now, allowing time for deeper discussion of key decisions and also time for developing our shared purpose and understandings. The support we can provide each other and the shared expertise is another gain. Facilitating the building and maintaining of relationships between team members is an important role of the team leader and essential for delivering the collaboration that is required in a dynamic and creative team.

While the challenges will remain, having tools, support and perspective has gone a long way to addressing the goals that we started out with.

What to do next

Although the money has now been spent, the journey has just begun. Changes in perspective and practice will continue. Most of this will cost nothing but without the grant from the Invergowrie Foundation to get it started we would not have had the substantial external perspectives and inputs that have moved us this far. With a new year beginning I look forward to continuing to develop the teams and the leaders in our school with a focus on collaboration and bringing out the best in us all.