Here at Durrington we have understood, for a number of years now, the importance of being explicit about how we teach. Our six principles have been widely documented on this blog and in our book ‘Making Every Lesson Count’. To support this, we spend a great deal of time talking together as a team of teachers about how we enact these principles in lessons – at a whole school level and even more importantly, at a subject level. To quote Professor Jonathan Sharples, ‘It is what you do and, and the way that you do it’.
It has become clear to us that we’ve been less explicit about leadership. We’ve had a list of leadership ‘principles’ for a number of years now. These describe what we think good leadership looks like. However, we’ve been questioning how useful these are, especially for new leaders. For example, telling someone that ‘candour’ is important, doesn’t actually tell them how to have a successful candid conversation. It’s a bit like telling a student they should get an A*, without teaching them! Furthermore, I don’t think you can just teach someone generic leadership skills. Like everything we learn, they have to build up a domain specific knowledge of how to do the things that great leaders do, by having it described to them, modelled to them, trying it out and then receiving feedback on how they did.
We had a bit of a lightbulb moment in the autumn term. As a piece of CPD, we sent all members of our fabulous SLT out to a high performing school for a day, to find out what they were doing. Chris Runeckles visited Thahmina Begum’s fabulous school ‘Forest Gate Community School’. Here he picked up some great ideas, but one that really resonated was their ‘Leadership Playbook’. This playbook explored a number of really important leadership approaches and described in detail how to do each of them. This seemed like a great idea. It didn’t just tell leaders what great leaders should be like, it told them how to do the things that great leaders do really well. There is an assumption that new leaders know how to do these things. Through no fault of their own, they often don’t, because they haven’t had to -or nobody has told them how to.
This got us thinking and we started working on our own version of this – our ‘Leadership: Principles in Practice’ document. We took our existing ‘leadership principles’, broke them down and explored different ‘plays’ that bring these principles to life. Plays are suggested ways of successfully handling situations. They may include a sequence of behaviours and actions.
So for example, when looking at the play for candid conversations, we have broken it down into key steps. Here is a sample of some of these key steps for this play:
- Planning – what is your intended outcome from the conversation? What evidence do you have that things aren’t as they should be? What’s the context e.g. have there been similar issues before and how was the colleague supported? How will you unpick any legitimate issues that are presenting challenges for the colleague?
- During the conversation – be very clear about what needs to be different; support this with evidence; explain why it matters; listen carefully to their perspective; agree what it should look like; discuss what support would be useful for them; agree achievable steps to get there.
- After the conversation – follow up with an email detailing the key points; check on the agreed actions; give very specific feedback.
In total we have about 22 plays – all with the same level of detailed guidance.
The Leadership PiP articulates our expectations around how to be an effective leader. We wanted more than this though. A really important aspect of strong leadership across an organisation is how we as leaders reflect on our strengths and weaknesses and then how we use this to develop our practice. As Senior Leaders it’s important that we are taking the time to develop the middle level leaders that we line manage – through strong and focused conversations around leadership.
This needs to be manageable though, so we are doing this by focusing on one ‘leadership play’ at a time. So during every fortnightly line management meeting that a member of SLT has with a leader they line manage, they share some reflective questions on this one specific leadership play. The leader and their SLT line manager then have a conversation, shaped by these questions. The purpose of this is to encourage them to reflect on their leadership and how they could develop their practice. Essentially, these leadership conversations will support us coaching our leaders – but in a more systematic and consistent way across the school. As an example, here are the reflective questions we used for the leadership conversation around ‘candid conversations’:
- When was the last candid conversation you had?
- Did it bring about the desired behavioural change in the person you talked to? If not, why?
- How could this conversation have gone even better?
- Is there a candid conversation you need to have with someone in your team coming up?
- How will you approach this?
We’ve had some great feedback from leaders on this approach. They really appreciate being able to use the ‘plays’ to give them guidance on how to address particular scenarios that arise with their teams. They also really enjoy talking through and reflecting on their leadership during the leadership conversations – and thinking about how to refine their approach next time..
Investing time in developing leaders really matters. They are the engine room of a school and the people who make things happen. We need to look after them and nurture them. It feels like the ‘Leadership PiP’ and the leadership conversations are supporting us with this.
Co-Headteacher, Durrington High School
Class Teaching 