Extraordinary Leadership - The Five Practices That Create Great Workplaces - Inspiring a Shared Vision

I believe that I need to develop the capacity to imagine and articulate a clear vision of the future for our habitat. I want to be able to clearly explain where we are going and have a clear sense of direction. I have been recently discussing my vision of the habitat next year and the importance of progress pebbles. I want mentors to commit to this vision so it becomes our vision through shared aspirations. I have been engaging in conversations collectively and individually to create a sense of excitement about the possibilities for next year. By having conversations I have been able to create a positive feeling which has ignited the other mentors to discuss next year. There is a genuine excitement for next year.

Clearly from this reading you have to share this vision regularly and the more you do it, especially if you do it well, the more effective you will be as a leader. The recent work with Tony Burkin based on volume e.g. quantity will create quality ie by constantly talking about it, I will gain clarity and will become better at articulating not just our vision for the habitat but other visions too.

I have to ensure my vision is captivating by ensuring it means something to the mentors.  Unless everyone understands and knows what the vision means to them, they will not fully commit. I have tried to explain the impact of how the progress pebbles with impact on their planning, the students learning and the sense of clarity with everything we do. This clarity will give us a sense of joy and fulfilment that we can head home at the end of the day knowing we have made a significant difference.

I tried to appeal to the heart by saying that we could disconnect from school more easily than we are doing now and ultimately be able to relax in the evenings and find time for ourselves, which has been a common criticism so far. It was met with a mixed reaction and members pushed back by saying this is not 'deep enough learning.' A very good point, and it's an area we need to work on. However, the progress pebbles would give us a huge scaffold and springboard to start with and it would allow us to feel we meeting many needs that they have felt a little lacking this year ie clarity of where students are etc. This led a discussion to another step further into our future - our design for learning.

I certainly feel that this could be something very special, I am beginning already to feel, through our discussions, that my team members are beginning to get that sense of excitement too. This feeling can only go so far and concrete action needs to take place. There already have been discussions around meeting this vision e.g how we would store the books or how will the students regularly access the pebbles, these are possible concrete solutions to help reach this vision.

To help mentors become aligned with the purpose of what the progress pebble are doing, they need to see/experience first hand that it matters. By having the recent conferences and hearing students talk confidently about their learning and hearing positive feedback from parents - cements the why. They also start to feel apart of this 'shared' vision and the buy-in will increase.

My next step is to personalise the vision to the individual, so that they feel they are contributing in a meaningful way. This will require looking at the personalities of the mentors and tapping into the strengths and providing opportunities to utilise those strengths to meet our vision.

Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivaton

There has been a need for some kind of 'motivation' for our younger students. There was period of time where we were seeing big shifts of improvement in both behaviour and learning with our older students. They were particularly motivated by the progress pebbles and feedback, but the younger students were not responding to it.

There was talk of using extrinsic motivation ie stickers, which other experienced members believed would make an impact. However, there was doubts that this approach would not fit in the philosophy of the school. The response from the school was it is dependent on the needs of the students and to justify it to the leadership team.

We ran a trial with stickers, gathered some research and collected student voice and parental feedback. The results were surprising and extremely valuable.

During the trial the students reacted impressively, and we saw an instant reaction of many students behaviour completely reversed and all students reacting a positive way. The biggest find was the amount of positive feedback mentors were giving for the sticker, there was huge increase in feedback. We did not want to control behaviour purely through stickers but a way of reinforcing values and capacities in the habitat. Two hundred stickers in a week, is a lot of feedback!!

The research found clarified that our younger students can not rely on extrinsic motivation, in fact it simply doesn't work at that age. However, there was only a short period of time before it started to have some impact, so stickers would be a short term tool to allow students experience or motivate them to experience extrinsic motivation.

Student voice was the biggest surprise. The students clearly valued them and understood what they were for and a clear reason for the sticker was an expectation because they wanted to give that reason at home. Every student made it clear that they must take the sticker home, otherwise it meant nothing to them. We are now sellotaping them on!

Parent feedback was extremely positive. The parents were appreciating the learning conversations at home discussing what they have learnt and why they got the sticker, particularly boys. The feedback was that boys, when asked about their day, simply replied ok or good and very little else. This was gateway to discussions and fitting in with reward systems at home.

Six Week Review
The stickers have had a huge impact on the habitat, so much so that it all students are learning more in one way or another. There has been a tail off, but it was due to mentors giving out less stickers ie less positive feedback. The parental feedback continues to be extremely positive and please keep it going as they creating so many learning conversations.

To encourage collaboration we have collected scores for stickers and acknowledge the stickers at the end of each day. The students have responded to that too, and are clearly 'trying' hard to gain stickers.

Our next step was to give out stickers will eventually be given out less and less, to see if we still have the motivation to learn without them. But we did that and their motivation did drop off so we are not quite ready for that yet. We will continue till the end of term and review it again.