Reflections on my leadership

For many people (myself included when I was working in the UK) overseas teaching is a bit of a cop out. I used to think it's for teachers who couldn't hack it in the UK or who wanted to make a quick buck in the Middle East. When receiving applications for a vacancy in my department I used to disregard the applications from teachers working at British school overseas as I thought that they didn't have what it takes to be successful in a UK school. Then I decided to leave the UK and work overseas. I made this decision in conjunction with my wife (who's also a teacher) as we couldn't save enough money to get on the property ladder whilst working in the UK and the workload was becoming unbearable (sound familiar?). We decided to apply for jobs in the Middle East, go and save enough money for a deposit on a house in the UK and then come back 2 years later- a fool proof plan, or so we thought! We are now in our third year living and teaching in Thailand! So how di...

I have been teaching outside of the UK for 2 years now, but over the past 2 years I have seen an increasing number of teachers take to Twitter to complain about the unrealistic workload expectations and the effect it is having on them outside of work. I also see multiple blogs outlining how to reduce workload or how to cope with the fall out of increasing workload so I thought I'd write my own blog to see if I can support teachers feeling like this. I was always good at managing workload. I ran a busy PE Department of 6 staff and most of the time I was able to leave shortly after my extra curricular club or fixture and didn't do much work at home. 'But you don't have to mark books' I hear you scream. In my last year in the UK I taught 47 GCSE PE and 18 BTEC Level 3 students. That's enough marking to keep anyone busy! Here are my tips of how to ensure that you keep workload manageable: 1. Write a stop doing list. This will be a familiar topic for any...

Think about the best teacher you've ever seen, maybe when you were at school or someone you've had the privilege to work with. Make a quick list of the skills and qualities they have? I would take an educated guess that you listed some pretty amazing qualities such as passionate, caring, determined (or similar) and not hard skills such as organised, good time management, great subject knowledge etc. When hiring new teachers what do you look for; subject knowledge, experience, track record of delivering results, interview performance, affordability? All of these would be valid reasons for recruiting a specific individual (in an idealistic world maybe not affordable but with recent pressures on budget this is now a reality). I would argue that all of these are the wrong reasons to hire someone. The people we want teaching the students in our school are the teachers similar to the one you identified at the start of this blog. Subject knowledge can be learnt, ex...

What does your school value?  What is their number one value?  How do you know as a member of staff what to prioritise? These are questions that most staff would have asked at some point in their career. The culture of a school is a key component to the success of their students, the wellbeing of their staff and ultimately how effective they are as an organisation. The problem with creating a positive culture in schools is the external pressures placed upon them. For example, a school may value developing all students holistically and will build opportunities into the curriculum and extracurricular programmes for them to push themselves outside their comfort zones through activities such as trips, sports, arts and drama. Most people would agree that this is a valuable culture to have as a school, but what if an inspection then identifies under performance on academics? Does the school stand by their values and risk the leadership team losing their jobs due to poor inspe...

Most teachers get nervous about observation lessons. Whether the school agrees with grading lessons or not, the teacher feels as if they are being judged on a very small snapshot of their working practice. Most senior leaders overseeing teaching and learning (myself included) talk about the need for lesson observations to be ‘non-judgmental’ and ‘supportive’. Lesson observations have been around for decades (or long before my time at least!) and I guarantee that the first time a school completed them it was focused on making sure people were doing their jobs correctly. The process, by its nature, is judgmental. It’s about accountability. The problem is that over the past decade schools have looked to sell the process as one of support. “We are going to help you identify areas for development and then put a CPD programme in place to help you” to most teachers this actually means “We are going to judge you, give you a chance to improve, and then judge you again”. It doesn’t...

How effective and engaging are your Middle Leaders meetings? Are you excited to attend them and have an input into whole school decision making or do they feel like a burden that gets in the way of you making a real impact? In my experience of being either a Middle Leader or Senior Leader in a number of different schools (2 state comprehensives in the UK and now an International School in Thailand) the answer would be 'not very'. The way these meetings normally run is this: Senior Leaders set the agenda and use it as a consultancy process with Middle Leaders, generally guiding them towards a route that has already been discussed in SLT meetings. The Senior Leaders get the outcome they want and the Middle Leaders leave happy in the illusion that they've had an input and have had their voice heard. This may not always be the case, but as I've said previously, this is my experience of these meetings. As a Senior Leader it's important to create a following amo...