Reflections on the first year

The first term:

Having been a Deputy Headteacher for 5 years, and teaching in the same school since my NQT year, moving schools and stepping down a rung of the leadership ladder to be an Assistant Headteacher was an incredibly daunting decision. 

On the one hand, I loved the commute, an hour each way to 'down tools' in the car and reflect on strategy and to think clearly, or time to listen to some of the incredible education based podcasts or listen to audiobooks. On the other hand, I wasn't present enough at home, with two daughters under 5, I was missing out on too much, and not feeling as so I was around to help out as much as I would like. I was leaving later and later in the morning, with the constant panic of the clock versus traffic. I had to put family first, and luckily I was able to join a school 10 minutes away that I knew staff at, that I also knew would fit my values. 

The first term was one of the toughest terms I have experienced. The students were fantastic, the staff incredibly welcoming, but I felt lonely and definitely had times when I wondered whether I would regret the decision I had made. I had built up so many strong relationships and curated these over such a long time period at my previous school. My former colleagues were friends first and colleagues second, and I felt part of the wider family and community. I went back to feeling like a NQT. No-one knew me, students would walk past me in the corridor and ask who I was and what I taught? Don't underestimate the knowledge and reputation that you build up at a school over time. This doesn't move with you and will take time to feel the sense of belonging I felt previously. Everything that I didn't have to think about I now had to think really hard about. The cognitive overload was real. Alongside this, I was teaching out of subject and two different courses to two year 11 classes. 

I had always taught geography, yet I was now teaching GCSE Food and Nutrition and Hospitality and Catering. Learning the content and how both courses are assessed, with two year 11 groups has been incredibly challenging. Hours were spent checking that I was following the correct assessment guidelines and all the regulations for the NEA work. I couldn't let the students down, it really mattered that I knew my stuff. 

Alongside this, in my role as an AHT, I am the T&L lead. This is a role that I had done before and continued to focus on as a DHT. I knew that if I put all of my strategic thinking into this aspect of the school it would help me to gain a greater knowledge of the school and start to feel more part of the wider team. However, I was fully aware that as a new member of SLT, eyes were definitely on me. Who is he? What is his background? What does he think? Does he have credibility? 

All the wider reading that I have done over the past 15 years or so on leadership and prioritising and implementing change was going through my head, as well as the content from the recent NPQH that I completed in November. The autumn term was spent getting to know the school's vision, it's aims for T&L, the CPD structure and strategy and the systems in place to monitor impact. 

After dropping in on a huge amount of lessons, participating in structured learning walks on subject days and having an Ofsted inspection, it was clear that there were a plethora of strengths across the school. Teaching staff stay at the school for a long period of time, student and staff relationships are a key focus and the respect that students show in lessons is second to none. Staff turnover is incredibly low and we are fully staffed, with the only teacher teaching solely out of subject being myself. Staff are incredibly passionate about their subjects and show enthusiasm consistently. Teachers are incredibly knowledgeable within their subject areas and have a high level of expertise/experience. 

The spring term:

Two areas that came out as foci from lesson drop-ins and learning walks were student passivity and a lack of frequency and strategy with teachers checking for whole-class understanding. Therefore we set about as a QoE team to focus on what the priorities were for whole-school CPD for classroom based practice. What we were looking for was a toolkit of teaching techniques that teachers could use in every lesson, or as frequently as they see fit, to ensure that student participation and thinking was high and that student understanding was checked frequently. We narrowed our toolkit down to four strategies that we are in the process of launching and implementing. We named these the Pedagogical Pillars. 

1. Do Now

2. Question. Pause. Name. (Cold Call & No Opt Out)

3. Show Me Boards

4. Table Talk (Turn & Talk) 

We're working as a staff team to write down some succinct steps to success for each of these strategies.

I realised quite quickly that sharing success criteria without any dialogue was not going to lead to successful implementation, so after doing this for Do Now tasks, we have started to make this a far more collaborative process. 

We reviewed the agreed criteria as a staff body and removed an aspect that wasn't working for us, meaning that teachers were far more in control of how long the Do Now tasks would last for, adapting to the needs of their classes. 

Since January, whole-school CPD (fortnightly) has solely focused on these four strategies, with dedicated time being spent on the rationale for each strategy, clarifying purpose, whilst then watching video clips of our teachers trialling the strategies. Our teachers then have to write down everything that they have seen that was effective and one tweak to be even more effective from the video on their own MWB. This then leads to table wide reflection on all the effective practice seen and a table-wide agreement on the one thing to tweak that would have the highest impact on students. This reflection of effective practice and tweaks to be even more effective, mirrors our drop-ins that have been a focus from SLT and HoDs through using Steplab. The idea is to shift the culture around teachers providing feedback on each other from one of judgement to collaborative reflection. We're all in this together at the end of the day. It is important that we work together to get even more effective and row in the same direction. 

At the same time, the new guidance document for effective implementation has been released by the EEF, which is a hugely powerful reflection tool. To truly implement change, the report talks about the need for highly engaged staff, a unity or togetherness of what is trying to be achieved and constant reflection as to whether implementation is being enacted in the desired manner. We are still very much in the engage and unite stage. There are still some staff that would like bespoke individual CPD that reflects their own needs, and in an ideal world, this would be something that we'd like to offer, but how we go about this needs further thinking.

The summer term:

Right now, the challenge is to engage and unite all staff as to why we are focusing on the four pedagogical strategies, which we've called our pedagogical pillars. I know that creating any behavioural change is going to be challenging, especially as we have a very knowledgeable and experienced teaching staff. However, for our students, all teaching staff need to know that in their classrooms they all play a small part in the greater goal. We can't let students go through the curriculum without accessing it, engaging with it and having their understanding of it checked consistently. These four strategies will support us to achieve this. At this point, it would be prevalent to say that there is an ongoing curriculum review, specifically on content, sequencing, curriculum end points and progression looks like in different subjects that is running alongside this pedagogical focus.

It is always a challenge to engage every member of teaching staff with whole school CPD. Mostly, this can come from a point of view that we've done this before or through a lens of wanting more bespoke CPD. I believe perhaps there is still a bit of a lingering feeling that things are done to, rather than done with, something that from a cultural viewpoint, we need to adapt to. It will take time to see an enactment of the vision of constantly striving to be even more effective, not because we are not good enough, but because we can be even better. I liken it to the high press in football. You can have an exceptional player that is superb at pressing high up the pitch, but if they do it by themselves, the other team will easily pass the ball around them and there will be little success for the team as a whole. If all players focussed on pressing more effectively, learning from the best practice within the team, the whole team would make it more difficult for the other team to play and therefore would have far more success in what they are trying to achieve together. 

The other challenge is embedding implementation. Too often something is launched and then it is assumed and there is a lack of strategy as to how implementation will be embedded with fidelity. Therefore our CPD sessions focus roughly 80% of the time on previously covered material, with 20% of the time put aside for the next steps in the implementation process. For example, lots of time has been spent watching the strategies in action and reviewing. For that reason, after almost 6 months, we have only just got to the third pedagogical strategy. 

However, for anyone that has led implementation successfully will know the need to take time and embed. Implementation is not an event, it is a process after all. The next stage of the implementation process, after the mechanics of what these strategies look like in the classroom and agreeing on the steps to success with each strategy, will be to focus on how teachers use these strategies to get the most out of them. For example, just simply being able to use show me boards really effectively in terms of routines, doesn't mean that the questions being asked are the right ones, at the right time, in the right way and getting the right data from the students. This is where the subject specific CPD (every other week) will come into play with the deeper thinking around how we use these strategies in different subjects and how we can use them most effectively to ensure all students are thinking hard, participating frequently and having their understanding checked as much as is appropriate. This will dovetail nicely with the work being done on reviewing curriculum progression and end points. 

It has been a really exciting journey so far, and we are just 9 months into a journey that will last at least another two years before we are where I envision we can get to. If all teaching staff can become even more effective in the four strategies in our toolkit, then I know that as a minimum we will know more about what our students know and our students will be more cognitively active in lessons. This is one of the key steps forward to becoming an even more effective teaching staff team.

Person reflection:

In other news, I know that most of my timetable next year will be geography, which I am thrilled about. You teach most authentically when you are genuinely passionate about your subject. We forget that we are performing or going live 5 times a day, and knowing that I will be doing that in a subject that I love brings great excitement for the year ahead. I will certainly miss the practical food lessons. Teaching a practical subject has certainly been helpful in working out the contextual difference in how different subjects lend themselves to use the different strategies above at differing frequencies.

If you are about to leave a school that you have been with for a considerable amount of time, prepare yourself, it is a rocky ride, but definitely one that has made me a more reflective leader, and one that would be far more ready to lead a school than I thought I was. I remember a former DHT saying in a staff meeting back in 2009, we have two ears and one mouth. I have definitely focused on actively listening more. Listening to all the points being made, instead of hearing something and then thinking about a response that I am going to come back with, instead of listening intently to all the points raised.  

I've found being less involved in the top level strategic leadership of the school both refreshing from a workload/stress/sleepless nights point of view, but also frustrating from the level of responsibility and accountability that I used to have. Moving schools and having to test my leadership credentials and knowledge in another setting has definitely made me realise that I am keen to go for Headship when the time is right for my family.