Cashmere Primary School
Jacqui Duncan found that she lead Cashmere Primary School with renewed enthusiasm after attending an in-depth professional development course.
Leadership competencies
My reflective practice recently has involved looking at my style of leadership, and my competencies in leadership. Principals are now reflecting on the things that we are good at, the things that can be further developed, and then we are devising a development plan based on that reflection.
I have devised my plan with my board of trustees, and I'm also sharing it with my leadership team so that they are aware of what I perceive to be my learning needs. My leadership team are part of this process, because we work together collaboratively and they share their learning needs with me.
Last year I went to the PDPC* and was assessed against various competencies. It is an objective way of finding out how you behave in challenging situations. All of the activities that the principals undertake at the centre are designed to put them under pressure, and to be challenging. You are taken out of your comfort zone and you find yourself actually having to think on your feet, and thereby displaying more of yourself, your own work habits, and your own work style.
From that experience, I was able to identify some gaps in the way I lead my school. These gaps are basically around how to distribute leadership and how I can encourage others to participate.
The week at the PDPC was a very positive and affirming experience. I was able to identify my strengths and address my weaknesses. I saw that I could do more to encourage my colleagues to contribute. In the group activities, I did my share of the work, but I wasn't particularly concerned whether the other members of the group were doing their share and whether they were contributing. This made me think about how teams work, and how as a leader you can make sure that everybody contributes in that team.
Critical friend
I came back to school and immediately jumped on the treadmill again, and was working hard on the day-to-day tasks. Although I left the PDPC with a plan, it sat in limbo for a wee while, and it took me another three months to really work out how I was going to do it, and how I would make sense of the feedback that I had received. A big part of implementing my plan was to use a critical friend.
A critical friend is really important because you need someone to sit with and ask the important questions. The critical friend I used was a colleague who had been at the centre with me. We needed to think about the questions that we had to ask each other, and really to make up our own methodology that we would use.
I have now written a development plan under the key competencies set up by the centre, and my critical friend works with me to decide which particular goal I will focus on. For example, one of the dimensions was personal challenges.
Inquiry learning
Inquiry learning allows students to make choices and to take responsibility for their learning. It helps students develop skills in terms of their independence, and teaches them how to manage time.
For the last 18 months, the team leaders have been working with a consultant, upskilling themselves, and using inquiry learning approaches with their own class. By doing this, the teachers in their team could see the commitment from the kids, and the engagement they had with their learning, before we actually introduced this approach school-wide.
Our consultant came in every 3 or 4 months to work with teachers, to talk about problems, go into classrooms, and help them out.
So at the beginning of this year, having had that training for the senior teachers for 18 months, we invited the rest of the staff to join us on this journey. And every single teacher in the school has bought into it and bought into it well, and I think it is because we built up both the academic and the physical environment so it was going to be successful for them.
The practicality of setting up inquiry learning depended on the work that went before, the training, the redesigning of classrooms, and the development of the technology that allowed it to happen.
Challenging questions
One challenge I have been working on is to get the community more involved in the school, in a way that is productive for the school, and in a way that positively enhances the school.
We need parents and volunteers to help us work with children who need to build up their reading mileage. We have a group of very talented parents and community members that say they would like to have more involvement in the school. This initiative is a way to meet both needs.
The critical friend's role is to say to me, "How is this initiative going to improve teaching and learning? What are some of the risks? How will you manage these? How will you ensure that those parents are properly trained, and have the skills required? How will you guarantee that this initiative will be positive for the children?" All of those questions needed to be asked and that's what the critical friend does. They are questions that I may have thought of as well, but when you have to sit there and justify your decisions to someone else, it just makes you think a little more deeply and clearly about those issues.
Building team leadership
My job is to influence and lead everybody that is part of the school community.
At Cashmere Primary, we have a community of learners and a community of leaders. We understand that all teachers are leaders in their classroom, and that they are leading and motivating children towards a love of learning.
Teachers have expertise in different fields and I am trying to use the professional development plans within the school, to allow people to identify their own learning needs, and to become experts in certain areas, and then to share that expertise with their colleagues and with children.
What we are trying to do is to disperse the leadership further around the school, to encourage everyone to see that they can be leaders. This year our leadership focus is in art and in numeracy. The focus teams, made up of teachers from different areas of the school, are working on these particular aspects, and are led by people who have competencies and abilities in these areas. They don't necessarily have to be members of the leadership team.
Fostering diversity
Our leadership team consists of the leaders of all the teams. We've divided our school into four learning areas. Each of those team leaders is part of the leadership team. I also have included my ICT lead teacher and my information literacy teacher in the leadership team. There are seven of us, and when you think that the school has 22 teachers, that's a third who are part of the leadership team. They are there because they lead crucial areas of the school, and I want them to have a voice in the development and leadership of the school. I am trying to move away from a hierarchical model because it's very limiting.
What we are trying to do is have a team with a variety of working styles and thinking styles. There are members of the team who ask the hard questions, there are others who are really good at implementing change, there are others who are just incredibly creative, so they come up with lots of ideas but may not be able to follow them through. It is important that we have a variety of talent, thinking styles, and working styles in our team. We have also got the members who are very people-orientated and see how things will impact on people, and keep reminding us of that.
Sharing leadership
My deputy principal, Linda Taylor, and Rose Lewis, who is the gifted and talented coordinator, are working on a project to apply for funding for our gifted and talented programmes in the school. They are doing it simply because I don't have the time to sit there and do it, but also because they have the skills and the ability to do it.
The provision for gifted and talented students has been quite a big focus of this school in the last two years. We were given a kick-start by our last ERO report, which said, "Come on, Cashmere, get cracking. You've got gifted and talented children. What are you going to do for them?"
That set us off on a train of thought and professional development to determine what we need to do. We are now at the stage where we know how to identify these children and make provision for them. Our big limitation is money and lack of resources. We need to put some time into this, and to really think about creative ways to get some resourcing so we can do the things we need to do.
*Note: PDPC courses finished at the end of 2008. In depth professional development for experienced principals is now regionally based and conducted through the Experience Principals Development Programme.
