The Headteacher as Effective Leader by Bill Boyle Paul Clarke

Author:Bill Boyle, Paul Clarke [Bill Boyle, Paul Clarke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General
ISBN: 9780429797477
Google: 1AGaDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-05-23T04:55:22+00:00

Having established the location of a target, and the approaches that you feel are relevant to take, the process of 'stirring up the setting' becomes the next phase of the activity. In this phase of implementation, we engage in activity to achieve sub-targets. This is a critical part of the process, and one that is often left to happen, because people know what they are to do and how they should proceed and there is a tendency to take the pressure off the initiative and let it loose. This is a critical time because it is a movement from the security of a planned schema, to a real time, real life scenario. Techniques must be developed that will capture the essence of the implementation to identify those aspects that function well and those that need revisiting.

There are many ways to record the process of change. Those which seem to have most success are those which translate into day-to-day school life in such a way that they become routinised, and at the same time capture useful information in sufficient quality and detail to inform staff discussion.

One important aspect of change-related information is to ensure that the interpretation we subsequently make of the information we gather on that change is sufficiently coherent that people can make sense of it, without it being so detailed as to be unmanageable. This is a difficult balancing act. Information that is gathered needs to inform and therefore demands explanation. From our own work we suggest that the explanations will change over time as deeper understanding and knowledge of the change and its connections to other changes and activity within school take place. This implies that an important characteristic of any techniques that are used to support the interpretation of change will be brevity, followed by relevance to the task in hand. That task, for our purposes, is to inform discussion on the progress of change. Schools that do not involve themselves in feedback activity such as monitoring the impact of change remain oblivious to data that could be coming to them and are therefore insensitive and nonresponsive to feedback. This lack of inclination to self-modification leads to situations where they become increasingly externally change-driven because external forces are the only point of reference they have for any monitoring.

It is quite possible to learn to use monitoring techniques, from the simple to complex. They only require a little time and can soon become invaluable tools in a school's repertoire for improvement.

A useful technique we have found records a sense of change of school activity over time. This technique is the timeline (see Figure 2.6).

This technique is simple to adopt and is useful because it imposes a strict linear sequence on significant issues. The timeline identifies change events through a 'label'. For example it might record in the event row that an agreement trial took place. Involvement could be across the whole staff. Comments could address the focus of the activity and the outcomes column could note down the action points to be addressed and decisions that were made for the next meeting.

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