Categories
Teaching & Learning

Is content king?

Originally posted on August 14, 2016 @ 9:00 am

This post was written in 2016 and does not reflect my current thinking about teaching biology. Please see this post to read about my updated views on teaching the subject.

I have reached a watershed in my thinking about teaching and my philosophy about teaching science.

I trained and begun learning to teach in a school with a very robust academic record. Teachers were considered absolute experts in their field and students were, on the whole, very high achieving but who had high expectations of their teachers academically too.

In this environment I learned that the teacher’s fundamental responsibility was to be an an absolute expert in their field; if you didn’t know everything, and could not answer every question, the community of students would lose faith in you. Or at least that it is what it felt like.

I mentioned in my review of Ritchhart et al of comments made by an ex-colleague of mine which reinforced this sentiment.

In those formative days then learning to teach was about mastering your subject knowledge. Content was King. Delivered in lovely little powerpoint slides where students would simply copy down their notes and then memorise them.

I left that school confidently arrogant that I was an expert in my subject and in the IB. That any school was going to want to employ me after the time that I had spent in that school. And indeed I was partly right. I secured a position as Head of Biology at a prestigious boarding school. The time there was little different. I benefitted from working closely with the chemists and physicists, in a closely knit science department. However the sentiments were the same. Content was King. Our role as science teachers was to deliver the curriculums content. The learner profile was dismissed by the Head of Science as fluff.

Since moving on from that school I have been involved in setting up a school and taking it through its IB authorization process as the only Biology teacher and as one of two or, more recently, three science teachers. I cannot point to any single experience from this time that has been the catalyst but my thinking has begun to change. Perhaps it was being forced to seriously consider the IB’s other bits; the ATLs; the IB Learner profile. Perhaps it was being exposed to and challenged by the MYP. Perhaps it was teaching a new DP Biology syllabus with so much focus on the nature of science. Perhaps it was beginning to teach TOK. Perhaps it was becoming a workshop leader. Perhaps it was working with so many truly excellent IB educators. I don’t know.

But I now question the sentiment that content is king in science teaching.

I am beginning to think, to really think that more important than learning the content, my students need to learn to think. It might sound like an odd thing to write. It certainly feels like an odd thing to write.

I’m sure that many people who aren’t teachers would raise their eyebrows at what I wrote above. Surely, a teachers job is to teach students to think? But it’s not as simple as that. Teaching students to ask strong questions and to develop different thinking dispositions is no simple task. It’s much easier to focus on the curriculum delivery. What are my students supposed to know? Fill the time in with student-centred activities, and group work, debates and presentations and you are doing a good job right?

I’ve moved on from didactic lecture like teaching in my early days to worksheet, activity based teaching but has anything really changed? My students still present as apathetic. School is still something that they just do on the whole. I’m sure most of them forget what they “learn” instead of engaging with the deeper issues.

And this is what I want: I want my students to be engaged, passionate and switched on critically to the world around them and be scientifically literate.

How do I do that when sometimes I question my own scientific literacy?

Perhaps its time to really focus on the thinking and the types of thinking that are needed in science and needed to be developed in students of science. The trouble is I am sometimes not sure that I know what thinking really means…

In Making Thinking Visible Richhart et al (2011) discuss turning the content into a vehicle for teaching and framing certain thinking skills. It is argued that developing thinking skills is important because these skills are the tools that students will take forward into future life when the content is forgotten. They are the tools the future adults will utilize to navigate life.

The thing is, thinking doesn’t just happen. As teachers, we need to be explicit with students about the types of thinking that are useful in certain situations and provide strategies that help students learn to think in these ways. We can’t just leave it up to chance. After all, traditionally, we don’t leave the content up to chance (normally), instead, we are explicit with it. We need to give students the chance to think about their own thinking and what it means to them.

Ritchhart provides a list of “high-leverage thinking moves that serve understanding well”:

  1. Observing closely and describing what is there.
  2. Building explanations and interpretations.
  3. Reasoning with evidence.
  4. Making connections.
  5. Considering different viewpoints and perspectives.
  6. Capturing the heart and forming conclusions
  7. Wondering and asking questions
  8. Uncovering complexity and going below the surface of things

I will be posting these “moves” in my classroom as a start as well as try to relate the activities we are doing to these types of activities.

As science teachers, we need to ask ourselves: What type of thinking is important in science? More specifically what types of thinking do we want to develop in students of science? How is thinking framed in terms of the work that scientists do? What are the essential questions of science?

Clearly, the thinking moves above are addressed by different elements of scientific enquiry. Observing closely is an important part of observational studies and also hypothesis generations so is wondering and asking questions. To generate a hypothesis requires building explanations and reasoning with evidence. When we draw our data out we try to capture the heart of a problem and draw a conclusion,

Once we have a clear idea of this then we can begin to teach the thinking alongside an understanding of the nature of science through well-planned content. The difference is that our learning objective is twinned – we have a thinking objective and a content objective.

Understanding how to teach in this way is important.  Biology teacher Paul Strode has written some articles in this vein. In one he looks at reasoning like a scientist and the other deals with teaching the hypothesis. Although he still focuses on framing the content instead of necessarily framing the questioning, these are good reads. However, I feel that the questioning and thinking strategies needed to become front and centre of the teaching instead of the content.

Thinking relies heavily on questioning. In science we are trying to ask the following questions:

What do I notice?

What does that tell me?

Why does it work like this?

How can I test this idea?

How can I be sure that my findings are valid?

Or, according to strode whose list is below:

Step 1: What claim am I being asked to accept?

Step 2: What evidence supports the claim? Is the evidence valid?

Step 3: Is there another way to interpret the evidence?

Step 4: What other evidence would help me evaluate the alternatives?

Step 5: Is the claim the most reasonable one based on the evidence?

Teaching like this requires teachers to step down as the “font of knowledge” in their classrooms and have the courage to be wrong. I have worked in schools where the culture of the school would simply not allow that to happen.

As Ritchhart points out we need to be able to ask our students authentic questions, meaning that the teacher needs to not know the answer, and if teachers are worried about seemingly not knowing something how can they do this?

This academic year I am going to try and put thinking centre and front in my classroom. I just hope that the crazy timetabling and work-load pressure doesn’t push me back into easy, old habits.

Categories
Resources Teaching & Learning

Practical & Teaching Resource: Genetic Databases

Originally posted on April 3, 2016 @ 9:10 am

Preamble

One of the challenges I have found for teaching the new (2016) IBDP Biology syllabus is getting up to speed with the new content as expressed in the understandings, applications and skills sections of the syllabus. This has been particularly true when this new “content” implies an understanding of new technologies such as the huge rise in bioinformatics databases. To make matters worse, I am the only biology teacher in my school and I have been acutely aware of this when, stumbling across new requirements, I have had no one to bounce ideas off (or steal resources from! :))

So what do you do when you have new content that you have not taught before, that relies on an understanding of bioinformatic technology that wasn’t widely available, or covered on your masters in ecology eight years ago and you have no colleagues to help you? You go back to the drawing board…

When planning my course the year before I had shunned ordering the text book written by the chief examiner for the subject for my students on the grounds that it was too big and heavy. I had opted for a slimmer, light-weight textbook that was written by an old colleague. However, In preparation for times like this, I had purchased a copy for my own reference, not to teach from the textbook, you understand, but to refer to when I was unsure of exactly how much depth a topic needed going into (and therefore how much classtime to devote to it) or what the chief examiner had in mind when he wrote the course as part of the curriculum review committee.

While I applaud the move away from a list of learning statements as we had in the old syllabus, statements from the understandings section, like this one from topic 3.1 Genes:

The entire base sequence of human genes was sequenced in the Human Genome Project”

often leave me wondering how much time needs to be allocated to them. This is where having a copy of the chief examiners textbook comes in handy.

The Practical

Earlier this term I was teaching the IB Biology core topic 3 – Genetics and while planning came across the following statements:

3.1 S1: “Use of a database to determine differences in the base sequence of a gene in two species

3.2 S1 “Use of databases to identify the locus of a human gene and its polypeptide product”

These along with several other “application” statements in 3.1 an 3.2 left me slightly bamboozled as to how to approach teaching this, seeing as I had never used these kinds of databases in this way myself, and whats more I was left asking the question – aren’t the kinds of databases that these statements refer to way too complicated to expect 16-18 students to be able access?

Anyway, the instruction was there so I had to do something with it. In the end I referred to the Allott & Mindorf (2014) textbook along and the inthinking biology teacher resource website and combined and adapted two of their practicals to use in my classroom. The result is below:

  1. I designed a practical protocol worksheet which is available here, which could be printed out and handed to students. There is QR code which, when scanned, links to the following video.

Download (PDF, 70KB)

  1. I made the following video that takes students through the worksheet. They can be used together.

Reflections

The video and the activities together take about an hour or just over to complete and do count towards practical hours on the PSOW. I am hugely indebted to the work of Allott & Mindorff and David Faure at inthinking to be able to produce this. Students are able, if they have a mobile phone and QR scanner to link directly to the film and follow the instructions. Alternatively the video can be played on a projector. Students could also complete this as a homework task but this couldn’t then count as practical.

I think that the video and the activities could be broken up into smaller individual activities as I think this may help students to process exactly and clearly what they are doing. These databases can be complex to navigate and contain a lot of information which can be overwhelming for anybody who is new to this area.

While I personally like this part of the syllabus and think that there are some possible IA ideas here, especially when combined with evolutionary studies, I can’t help but think that this material is a bit too advanced for 16-19 year old students, particularly for SL students. It is fairly niche and I would be interested to know how many universities would cover this type of bioinformatic content in their first or second years.

Categories
Coordination Teaching & Learning

The DP coordinators view: math internal assessment

Originally posted on May 1, 2020 @ 9:35 pm

I am not a maths teacher let alone an IBDP math teacher and I write this blog well aware of this fact.

The continuing COVID-19 enforced school closures are now beginning to impact the teaching and learning of the May 2021 cohort, particularly in those areas where school campuses have been closed since January. Many students in this cohort appear set to have had almost half of their first year delivered online.

In this post I am not concerned with the actual content of IBDP courses and how that will be addressed, but with the planning of our internal assessment calendar for the May 2021 cohort.

One of the impacts on our campus will be, for a variety of reasons, the combining of IBDP maths courses in each year level. When the new maths courses were published this was something I hoped we would do.

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your opinion, that was not to be. I was not able to convince colleagues that the new courses should be combined SL/HL  where possible, with common content for all four courses taught collaboratively.

But now it looks like from next year we will be forced to combine them. I am secretly hopeful that this may open a few minds as we experiment with this paradigm.

The Group 5 project?

Teaching and learning aside, what has this got to do with the IA?

Well, I am currently trying to re-design our coursework calendar for the May 2021 cohort as the picture has shifted now the campus has been closed so long and the calendar designed last October is no longer fit for purpose.

One thing that I especially want to avoid is the concertina of assessment deadlines being squished into the first six months of next academic year. Therefore I am actively looking for solutions to address this, one of which might be fence-posting out the dates the times that all maths classes at all course (AA & AI) & level (SL & HL).

For example, the Math exploration should take 10-15 hours of instructional time. Assuming 15 hours, and with 5 x 1 hour classes per week I could block out three weeks from the middle of October until the middle of November for students to focus purely on their maths IA.

No other subjects can set deadlines for coursework in this time that could distract from students focusing on their maths explorations. All maths classes work on their exploration solely at this time. At the end of this time the first draft of the work would be submitted to their teachers for feedback as per IB rules. Teachers could then have two weeks to turn around their feedback and students a further three weeks to work on their final drafts independently.

To my mind the question is:

  1. Is it feasible to expect all maths classes to work on their explorations in exactly the same weeks?
  2. If so, would this approach allow the collapsing of classes so that students can collaborate, teachers can co-teach and support?
  3. If so, would there be increased opportunities for ATL skill and learner profile attribute development?

IBDP Maths teachers out there, I welcome your views. What is your experience with the new courses and the new IA? Would it be feasible to structure the IA like this?

Categories
EdTech Teaching & Learning

eLearning on a hairpin

Some great advice for managing online learning

Our campus closed on February 3rd 2020, although effectively it was the 24th January when all the students and teachers went on holiday for the Lunar New Year.

In this post I want to outline how I have approached eLearning, the tools I have used and how I have used them, along with my perception of how students have recieved them.

My thoughts cover the period from the 3rd February until the end of March 2020 and are based on needing to get to grips with a new approach, with little to no training, amidst some personal challenges that I will outline in a later post.

Our school closed with almost no warning and we were provided with voluntary training (which I attended during the holiday) on ClassIn which we didn’t use (but looks very good), followed by one day of prep on Monday 3rd February before diving into delivering the full program.

My classes have already become fairly routine driven. I have a method and I stick to it. This is partly because I juggle a lot of different responsibilities and having a repetitive plan takes some of the strain away, which is good for my students because they don’t benefit if I am constantly stressed out.

I found the initial switch quite easy as my routines could transfer quite easily into an online environment and for the first two weeks we were not required to hold live classes.

Quizlet

I have been using Quizlet a lot over the last few years and have completed construction of key terms decks for the entire 2016 IBDP biology course and the current CAIE IGCSE biology course. Links below:

Links to my IGCSE Quizlet decks
Links to my IBDP Quizlet decks

I use Quizlet in a variety of ways. Any activity can be used in class or at home but I focus on the learn activity for students to pre-learn vocabulary before starting new concepts. In my classes, students who complete this task quicker can work through the other learning activities to overlearn the words.

The live activity makes a great team starter to review prior learning and can easily be combined with share screen on Zoom. The gravity and match activities also make good starters that have a competitive edge for individuals. Mostly I use Quizlet to pre-learn vocab and access prior learning. This formative assessment is great for review as well.

All in all Quizlet is hugely versatile and can be used in any sequence. For a vocab heavy subject like biology, I would argue it is essential.

Kognity

One of the best moves I think that we made last year was to move to digital books. There was a variety of reasons for this. Procurement of books in some countries is not always easy for a variety of reasons.

Kognity acts in the same way as a normal textbook and I have always been keen for my IGCSE and IB biology students to develop independent note taking and writing skills. They need to be prepared to be independent adult learners and need the skills to be able to self study. I use the connect-extend-challenge routine regularly in class and so have made sure to give students time during their eLearning to continue with this exercise when encountering new concepts and topics.

But Kognity has two features that make it exceptionally better than a physical textbook: 1) the practice section for students 2) the assignments and statistics sections for teachers.

The inbuilt practice functions of Kognity lend themselves to formative assessment really well. Not only do students have to take questions to mark a section of the textbook as having been read, but they can self assess through strength tests and strength battles. In the strength tests students can pick any section of the textbook and take 5 multiple choice questions on that topic. In the strength battles they can compete against a friend or the “bot” to see who can answer the questions first. Combined with Zoom breakout rooms the strength battle tool is a great way to get kids interacting in small groups. I have found that they are more comfortable talking and socialising in smaller groups than in front of the whole digital class.

I use these as starters to access prior learning and may spend a fair bit of time getting students to review this material together or in groups. Using breakout rooms in Zoom allows students to be grouped into pairs to do strength battles.

Teachers can set assignments in the form of sections of the textbook to be read, multiple choice questions or extended response exam style questions. These assignments can be scheduled, allowing you to plan for weeks at a time.

The statistics pages are very useful in allowing you to see how many questions students have taken for a topic and how many they have got right in total, easily allowing you to spot trends of topics that may need further teaching. In the statistics pages you can also easily see what assignments students have or have not completed and can also even see when students last logged into the textbook.

Zoom

Zoom was the biggest learning challenge for me during this period (and remember my wife and I are both teachers with a 3yo and 4yo at the time and not working from home but from random hotels – so there wasn’t a lot of time for personal CPD). I had used it a couple of times for meetings but now teaching one live lesson a week per class with it felt like quite a lot to learn.

Zoom allows you to share your screen so that you can take kids through a PowerPoint or explain instructions for using Kognity or Quizlet etc. You can also pause the screen share if you need to bring something else up, like emails, that you don’t want your whole class seeing. During screen share you can also add annotations, text and drawings, that you can save.

Combined with sketch pad this becomes a very powerful tool for “chalk and talk” where necessary.

Another feature of Zoom that I really like are the breakout rooms. Here you can assign students to “rooms” within the call so that they can work on individual of group tasks. You are able to enter and exit the rooms as much as you like, as well as broadcast messages to all rooms. Using breakout rooms I have students go head to head in strength battles, design Kahoot quizes for their peers or take the time to meet with students one to one or in small groups.

One of the things that I learned in my first few weeks was that Zoom lessons are not like normal lessons. Students may well have been sitting in quaratine or home isolation for weeks, not leaving the house and certainly not seeing friends. I think it is important to create as many opportunities for our students to chat to one another and play games. I find that breaking them up into smaller groups in Zoom rooms helps them get over some shyness and actually connect with each other.

Seneca

I discovered Seneca while on this learning adventure and has been a fab resource for my IGCSE class, adding something different into the mix.

From the teacher side it allows tracking and setting of assignments like Kognity and is free.

From the student side it encourages recall through self testing and therefore thought to improve retention. I introduced it to students during the eLearning period and they said they prefer Kognity.

Kahoot

Combined with Zoom this is a fun tool. Give students the opportunity to make their own Kahoot quizzes to test each other. These can be made in breakout rooms, by pairs or small groups of students. Or teachers can deliver their own quizzes, like running a Quizlet live session.

Screencasting & Sketchpad

I have one live session a week where I run some of the activities outlined above. I also use the live lesson for checking in with students to find out how they have been getting on with the other asynchronous tasks that I have set.

I find that screencasting is quite difficult to get right without a silent room, good microphone, or space to annotate and draw effectively – my mac track pad with sketchpad is not ideal. Sketchpad is a great tool though when you can get it to work!

A final word of advice

Go easy. Even if you were lucky enough to prep, you and the kids need time to adjust to a new scenario.

Be mindful that the students situations may be very different. Some kids may be looking after siblings. Some kids may have to share a laptop with other siblings. Don’t set so much work and don’t expect it all to get done. Be compassionate and try to understand the issues your students are facing.

This piece of research, although aimed at managers, is useful for teachers, particularly the first point. It is important to understand the students individual situations. I wish I had appreciated this more at the start.

Finally, your students may be isolated away from friends with limited opportunities to socialise. Give them the chance in your live lessons to talk and play. Zoom breakout rooms are great for breaking the class up into smaller groups. Give them a collaborative task to get on with and let them catch up with their friends. This is a scary and stressful situation for all of us.

Categories
Coordination Personal Teaching & Learning

I survived 18-19

This is my last post for the school year 2018-19. I will be back in August/September with some new material.

What have I done this year?

I certainly don’t do things by halves. In the space of one year I have moved house, country, and continent with my family, engaging with a whole new culture, paradigm and language.  This involved huge adjustments in life (just going to the supermarket was one!) and parenting routines as well as overcoming significant cultural adjustments. It’s been a hard year to be a parent and husband.

At the same time I have changed schools and jobs, taking on a new senior role involving acting as the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program Coordinator, HS Diploma Coordinator and the University Guidance Officer. My new school had recently moved from A Levels to the IBDP and this year was to be the final year for the first cohort. It was exciting to be a first time DPC, working with a new program: lots of potential for positive change and influence where necessary.

I have also moved back to teaching IGCSE biology for the first time in six years and picked up a year 13 class which resulted in me having to adapt my normal teaching SOW to fit their needs. It has been quite a challenge; having taught the IB Middle Years Program for four years where I had to adapt the biology curriculum on an ongoing basis, I had to start over in planning and prepping the IGCSE biology course.

I wrote my reflections on my first term in this role up in this post, and throughout this year, as I wrote about previously, I have led training on academic integrity, leading to a new policy, coordinated the IB Extended Essay (which was a unexpected surprise) and implemented a development plan to embed TOK in the whole secondary Yr7-13 curriculum.

On top of all of this I have continued to work as a university guidance officer and managed kids applications to universities in Hong Kong, China and South Korea for the first time, alongside apps to Canada and the US. Korean University applications are far from simple!

Finally, I have undertaken significant professional development, through the UK’s National Professional Qualification for Senior Leadership via UCL’s Leadership Colab’s cluster group at Harrow International in Beijing attending five Saturday sessions. I am now looking to write up my 5000 word project based on my role as IB DPC and implementing change in the Key Stage 5 curriculum. Added to this I have attended the CIS-EARCOS institute on higher education  in Bangkok and the IBO’s global conference in Hong Kong as well as fitted in university visits to four universities in Hong Kong.

Reflections on classroom practice

The teaching has been enjoyable but frustrating when I haven’t been able to deliver a much loved course in the way that I would like, particularly after I have spent so much time reading, thinking and writing about my ideas regarding life science instruction over the last few years. I am looking forward to beginning a new course with year 12 in August, and further developing my ideas surrounding using stimuli material to help link the course to other subject areas and generate big inquiry questions, linked to real world issues. I have enjoyed the IGCSE teaching, mainly because this has been an opportunity to take a course from the start and really think about how my ideas for the IB biology curriculum translate over to the IGCSE curriculum. I am looking forward to continuing the course with a fantastic group of year 10s soon to be year 11s.

The major problem I have been consumed with recently, both for my own classroom practice and from a whole curriculum perspective, is how to make the learning authentic and meaningful for students. By this I mean is how can we help to students to see how what they are learning links to the real world, and real world, current issues – to help them understand the global narrative that they are their curriculum is part of. I also mean how can we inject more meaning into the their performances and the artefacts that they are producing. I summarised my ideas in this post.

Reflections on leadership

As I wrote previously, this was my first year in senior leadership and this year has been a steep learning curve in that regard. Leadership is a proper marathon. You can’t afford to slacken off – there are always relationships to be built, and the wrong smile or word can undo weeks of hard labour on this front. This has come home a lot for me as we wind into the last three weeks of a very long year. Teachers are tired, I am tired, the leadership team is tired…..what is  the learning from this?

One thing I have noticed is that my sleeping thoughts, those just as I am going to sleep and when I wake up are much more preoccuppied with work. Aside from the occasionally sunday night worries, or worries the night before a new term start, this has never happened to me on this scale that I can remember. This year it has been a constant feature of life. Several nights a week, for most weeks of the year I have found myself thinking about things that I am responsible for and have no direct control over. I wish my waking thoughts were preoccupied with my own kids but no mostly these are do with the administration of the Extended Essay or something to do with Academic Honesty.

Since Christmas a huge amount of my time has been taken up with thinking about exams! First it was the mock exams and then the May exams. The amount of behind the scenes work that goes into running an exam session is truly extraordinary. There is the exam secure storage to sort out, so that it meets new and ever changing standards. There is the exam timetable to put together so IB and IGCSE exams are in one calendar, there is the invigilation schedule to plan and organise, and find creative ways to make this easily understood by teachers. In our case there was a re-rooming schedule to organise. Added to this there is making sure that all the correct exam stationary is present and accounted for, that we have received the correct exams, that the examination rooms are set up correctly and in line with regulations, that the invigilators are briefed and know what they can and can’t do, that the students and parents are briefed. This aspect of the job is highly administrative but still requires learning of new procedure and reflection on how to improve the processes that we put in place last year.

The approach to exams this year reminded me of prior learning. Some of the conversations I have had this year with colleagues have surrounded accountability and quality assurance. I refused to make personalised exam timetables for my students in year 12 and 13 this year. Not only is this a MASSIVE opportunity cost for me, but it means that potentially kids miss out on a massive formative opportunity for development. The argument that we should was basically to ensure that they didn’t miss any exams, but so what if they miss a mock exam? Surely that is going to teach that student something valuable. I know it did when it happened to me at university. Secondary leaders and teachers have got to remember that we are in the business of raising adults, we shouldn’t be taking away opportunities for kids to learn, no matter the cost, because better learn it now, the stakes are only going to get higher.

Aside from exams, I have had to guide the teaching team through their first set of IBDP eCoursework procedures. Making sure that teachers knew which items they were uploading and which of these were meant to graded and annotated and which weren’t. We also had to think, as a team, about good marking and moderation procedures and practices as well as what were consistent annotations on student work. Again I think that there is still room for improvement here.

Because the IBDP has such a large volume of coursework that is both externally assessed and internally assessed, externally moderated, student and teacher understandings of academic integrity issues is paramount. Next year, there is still work to be done in this area, particularly in terms of improving our students understandings, but we have made steps in the right direction this year in developing a shared understanding of the policy and procedures surrounding this.

Another aspect of the IBDP curriculum we have been beginning to look at this year is the narrative and coherence of the curriculum both horizontally, within year 12 and 13 and vertically with the rest of the secondary school. The first step in this was to look at how TOK brings the curriculum areas together. This involves developing subject specialists understanding of TOK and what it brings to their subjects and exploring links between the TOK and subject areas. We have begun this process this year with some training on TOK and P4C and will continue with training in this area next year. I have been much inspired by Mary Myatt and Martin Robinson in this area.

I have continued to be mindful of building positive relationships and a positive atmosphere, as I identified this as an area of development for me coming into the role. Teacher issues and resolving them, has been the real stumbling block here. How do you build trusting, respectful and positive relationships but still hold colleagues to account for the actions or lack thereof. Managing challenging personalities remains an area for development for me, as well as maintaining my own positivity and proactive outlook when stress, tiredness, and difficult attitudes can make it even harder to be empathetic and understanding of others at times. How do you be an inspiring leader and get people on board with your vision when, at times, you have to call others out? How do you do this without allowing others to take advantage of your attempts to be understanding and to empathise?

Even if I don’t pass the assessment, the NPQSL course has been really quite valuable to me. I wanted to take this course because I recognised that I had a lack of leadership training, if you will. I wanted some exposure to the theory behind leadership for learning.  I have taken away something from each of the five face to face session and blogged about four of those sessions; here, here, here and here.

Finally, At the start of this year I expressed some frustration to my boss about my lack of line managing anyone. I was new to SLT in my school and with the new leadership position I had expected to be formally part of the appraisal process for staff. I felt that I had a lot to offer in terms of coaching colleagues etc. I have come to learn over this year that leadership isn’t about being anyones boss. Instead it is about relationships. I am pleased to reflect on the fact that several HoDs have sought me out on regular occasions for advice and support. I am pleased to give it to them and pleased that after 8 months in a school I am at a position where despite the lack of official “line management” in the org chart, colleagues have felt that they could approach me with questions and that I am able to support them. Leadership and management is far more than box ticking appraisal and I now reflect that I am happy being an unofficial coach and mentor than having direct reports.

No wonder I have not always felt the best on an emotional and psychological level this year, it has been a ride. Time for a much needed holiday . Looking forward to celebrating my parents 50th wedding anniversary in Otterburn, Northumberland with all my siblings and their families. Oh, and I better get writing that NPQSL project up….