I felt there was no better time to share some thoughts about how leaders might take a ‘temperature check’ of their school teams. 🌡️

❓ First up- why might a leader want to take a ‘temperature check’ and in what ways is it useful? ✔️ To get a feel for the ‘mood’ of the team. This might be to gauge levels of perceived wellbeing, satisfaction or engagement.
✔️ To ascertain the ‘lived experience’ of colleagues during a change initiative.
✔️ To inform leadership decision making.

Some key points from my presentation yesterday at Creative Education Trust’s annual conference. I had the privilege of being invited to speak about how leaders can cultivate psychological safety in their school teams 🙏 What is psychological safety? I turned to @AmyCEdmondson explanation on this ‘the belief that the environment or the climate you work in is safe for interpersonal risk e.g. speaking up for an idea, asking for help or pointing out someone else’s error...

Some random thoughts on curriculum articulation 🧵

As you may (or may not) know, I’m a bit of a curriculum nerd. I feel wholly privileged to spend so much time having really insightful conversations with school leaders and teachers about all things curriculum. A common point …is curriculum articulation and particularly the value of curriculum handbooks, curriculum principles, subject guides etc. and the value that they hold. Here’s 3 reasons why I think curriculum articulation matters and why investing energy into this, is worth your time:

I’ve been reading, writing and reflecting on the complexities, practicalities and tensions in educational leadership for the past year or so now. Here’s some things that are front and centre for me at the moment 🪡

1. Leadership is HARD. There are obvious and not so obvious …tensions at play as a leader in schools. These tensions can be reconciled to varying degrees but there is no absolute solution and we therefore must be acutely aware of the opportunity- costs involved at each turn in order to offset against the costs and maximise gains.

Oracy in action: a thread. 🧵 Oracy is a tool in my teacher toolkit that I loved utilising in the classroom. In my earlier years of teaching, I felt like it was a race against time to get through the lesson content and couldn’t imagine how I would possible squeeze in MORE talk… V. quickly I realised discussion and dialogue were a powerful vehicle to achieve the same end goal. I slowly began to incorporate more dialogue and discussion into my lessons finding that often, my role as ‘teacher’ became more akin to that of a chairperson in a debate