Remembering Whats Important: Priorities of School Leadership

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If you receive feedback from any source that you are adding to staff stress rather than supporting them with the demanding elements of their role, then you need to do some hard thinking about how you can redress this. Continue to be a good classroom practitioner and a positive role model for your team.

First Things First—The Three Elements

Try not to reduce the time you spend on planning and marking or miss deadlines, for example. If they get the right balance of support and challenge from you, this will act as a model for what you need them to do with the individual members of their team. On the other hand, too much challenge and they can feel frustrated, overwhelmed and angry.

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You need to lift, not protect, them. Be sensitive to any indications about how staff are feeling, and actively seek feedback from them to help you to get the balance right.

Be out and about, and a positive presence around the school, reaffirming key messages about behaviour and building relationships with staff and pupils. Always support extra-curricular activities too. Make sure the pupils know you are interested in their experiences and achievements beyond the classroom, and that the staff running such activities see that you value their contribution.

Lesson observations should be an opportunity to reflect, open a dialogue and learn for both the observed and the observer. Encourage others to observe you and be receptive to their criticism and advice to improve your own practice. Reading blogs is also an excellent way of keeping up to speed, and writing blogs — for example, about your leadership journey — will help you to reflect and learn. Follow SLTchat and join the debates each Sunday evening SLTchat where a range of issues especially relevant to senior leaders are thrashed out.

Follow the blogs of some of the inspiring senior leaders out there, such as johntomsett , headguruteacher , leadinglearner and kevbartle. Can such simplicity really be the elusive key to better schools? To get some perspective, let's step outside our own profession for a moment. Consider a football team that loses about half of its games, year after year. This is a bit autobiographical; I coached football for a short time.

Each week, the coaches scour the Internet to find new, complex plays.

The Importance of Simplicity, Clarity, and Priority

This confuses the players, who never mastered the last set of plays. All the while, the coaches never take note of something boring but important: If they paid closer attention to what every coach knows, they would see that their linemen have never mastered the timeless fundamentals of effective blocking, such as footwork and body position.

These fundamentals make a literal "game-changing" difference. Therefore, the solution to this team's mediocre performance is quite simple: The results would be immediate and significant. Now imagine a hospital in which infection rates are high. This is a true story. Internal research reveals this to be the number one cause of illness and mortality at that location.

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All of the staff know the small handful of procedures that inhibit infection. According to one doctor, these "are no-brainers; they have been known and taught for years.

In fact, the hospital like the football coaches seldom acquaints the staff with the ironclad case that these simple, well-known hygienic procedures are directly linked to life, death, and infection rates. The solution to this hospital's problem is simple, not complex: In addition, the use of the checklist is monitored to ensure that all medical staff implement these practices consistently.

In two years, the infection rate plummets from 11 percent to 0 percent. If we educators can't see ourselves in these two examples, I fear for us. They clarify why so many schools fall short of their potential: We don't even share the evidence for why these deserve to be our highest priority. In subsequent chapters, we'll see detailed evidence for why these elements should be our highest priority—implemented before we adopt any other initiative. To ensure this, perhaps we should require a warning label like this one on all notices of upcoming workshops, trainings, conferences, or book studies:.

If you or your staff do not already implement a reasonably sound, common curriculum that 1 is taught with the use of the most essential, well-known elements of effective lessons, and 2 includes ample amounts of meaningful reading and writing, then please don't sign up for this training.

It will have no effect on learning in your classroom or school. Master the above fundamental practices first. Then, if you still need this workshop and you might not , we look forward to seeing you. Have a nice day. Priority is itself a function of simplicity.

It dictates that we select, clarify, and then focus on only a few things at a time: Education has never been so beholden to complexity, the enemy of clarity and priority. Three books can help us to correct this.

Be aware that you may now have different priorities

Jim Collins's book Good to Great a is the best-selling organizational improvement book of the last generation. Collins found that "the essence of profound insight" into organizational improvement "is simplicity" p.

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That's why he reveres the hedgehog of Aesop's fables, who does one thing well rolls into a ball to protect itself , as opposed to the fox, who plans and plots as he "pursues many ends at the same time. That's why they fail. In contrast, hedgehogs focus only on "what is essential and ignore the rest" p. On some level, the educational community knows "what is essential. In addition, it is especially difficult for us to "ignore the rest": An ironclad law is at work here: Collins had schools in mind when he wrote that "social-sector organizations" must overcome their addiction to doing too many things.

To succeed, they must "attain piercing clarity" about what is truly most effective and "then exercise the relentless discipline to say, 'No thank you' to opportunities that fail the hedgehog test" p. Simplicity, clarity, and priority are intimately linked. For an organization to maintain a focus on its highest priorities, it must routinely clarify them so that everyone in the organization knows implicitly what to do and what not to do.

10 top tips for teachers heading into school senior leadership teams

If they aren't regularly clarified, practiced, and refined, they are always at the mercy of our natural forgetfulness, and a failure to protect them from the encroachment of new, but far less effective, practices or programs. The result is stagnation or decline. Worse still, leaders have a bias against "old ideas and simple prescriptions," even though these old, simple ideas are the key to better results p. Many leaders would rather launch new initiatives because it excuses them from the harder work of ensuring that their highest, simplest priorities are implemented—that is, are "actually done" p.

In contrast, the most successful leaders are those who know that "success depends largely on implementing what is already known" p. They know that "simple prescriptions" conveyed with "clarity and simplicity" are the hallmarks of effective action and leadership p. At the successful companies profiled by Pfeffer and Sutton, the primary driver of improvement was "the implementation of simple knowledge" p.

It is critical that schools learn that "best practice" is rarely new practice. Training and Retaining New Teachers: The Fall Semester Chapter 11 Chapter 7: The Spring Semester Chapter 12 Chapter 8: Creating a Positive School Ambience: Respect, Instruction, Welcome Chapter 13 Chapter 9: Dealing with the Larger Context: Politics, Parents and Panaceas Chapter 18 Chapter Auditorium Murals Chapter 23 Acknowledgments.

Priorities of School Leadership, Charles A. Bonnici addresses several issues facing school leaders through strategies supported by real-life examples and anecdotes.

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