My goal for leadership this term is about building (learning/professional) relationships with my team, but also to bring purposeful action by having clarity of what our goal is. I started with the 'why' for learning relationships - new team, knowing students (prior knowledge = deeper learning), allowing teachers to enjoy their new class (captured voice from a team member), building trust with the community/whanau. Lots of reasons to make learning relationships a focus.
A new team needs direction on how to make decisions (purposeful action) and having building learning relationships as our purpose, it helped us make lots of decisive and effective decisions such composite classes, altering the timetable to ensure teachers build strong relationships with their class. We altered our meet the teacher meeting from being in the hall to combining it to meeting parents in our own class to ensure we build relationships with our parents, it was more personal. Having our focus for building learning relationships has clearly been an effective tool to help us make decisions.
We have monitored the progress of our students by measuring against feedback from the teachers of last year and the staff of the school. In particular, we agreed that the agreed positive expected behaviours of the school were vital for our students as in the past they had not been meeting those expectations. This has been an on-going approach and we are far from over, but clarifying them and explicitly teaching them how to follow or implement them have been essential. Even in a few weeks, we have had a very positive response from staff, team, students and community about the senior school.
I have ensure we have constantly referred back to our focus of learning relationships and ensuring we keep explicitly referring back to the expected positive behaviours and helping the students to meet those standards.
Also, the reason it was so successful, the entire team had a shared understanding of the purpose and clearly valued it too - it was relevant to everyone in one way or another.
