So here we have the challenge at the beginning of the morning of the changing
world and the new skills needed and we have a challenge of dependent teachers
and I saw that as a leadership challenge what we need therefore is to try and
help create conditions where teachers who already have been working on
developing the professional learning community where there may be inquiry and
good professional learning and you've got some trusting relationships but how
can you get people to step up a little bit more and be more proactive
when we think about creativity people think it's either aha moments or it's
whimsical it's not it's extremely purposeful it's in the service of where
you're trying to go how you're going to get there but out of it comes something
new something original but it's in value it's all value so it may not be that
original thing may not be higher examination results or test scores or
whatever you need to know what it is that you've decided you want to bring
about a change to it may be that children and young people are more
environmentally aware or that their resilience is stronger or you're making
some other change and the outcomes have to be of value to that
we carried out about 300-400 interviews with people in the different schools and
I've subsequently looked at the research from different companies are there any
there that surprise you keep referring back to core values remembering that you
have a purpose that you know what you're doing you know what's important so not
not just going off on a whimsy
they chose a a bibliography with a research base they chose an aspect with
no leadership role they chose a skeptic a convertible skeptic now there is a
powerful way of getting someone involved good words nice words that you don't
often put together a convertible skeptic and they involved pupils they started on
the basis of the fact that they hadn't really been thinking about learning and
what was their learning policy what did they understand about learning and they
got their whole large staff together and decided that they were going to develop
their own policy of learning their own understanding about learning and their
own vision and they got them all drawing pictures they came up with a whole range
of pictures which they then posted around the corridors of the school for
two or three weeks and people would go past and they would add ideas change
them and they came up with their learning wheel they found remarkable
shifts in attitudes of teachers in practices of teachers and certainly for
some of those students in changes in learning
we had to ask them how do you judge where the creative leadership has been
successful and these were some of the ways that the school's talked about
creative leadership being successful what is it if you were trying to do
those things to open up ideas what is it that you would want to see as an outcome
what would you want to see as an outcome for your leadership team what would you
want to see as an outcome for teachers what difference would you want to see
for students starting with the end in mind and what will it look like when
staff are more creative in their practice what will it mean increased
confidence perhaps to be able to try something new and different we we know
that a lot of teachers are very risk-averse so the final reflection for
you is if we go back and we say if we track transfer and remember we talked
about that in a previous session and I kept on referring to Lorna Earl's
starting with the end in mind this flips the transfer around the other way it
says if we start with the end in mind we always say what difference are we going
to make for the children and we will make the difference for children if we
change practices and structures in school and structure architecture ritual
cultures and our leadership that includes teaching practice and
leadership practice we need to have our learning conversations and we need to do
things like lesson study japanese lesson study observing collecting evidence
inquiry that helps us to create that knowledge sharing it around through the
learning conversations through our remembering remembering those social
networks knowing who our influential people are maybe having vertical teams
and we need to be developing our schools professional learning community
t and the learning communities between schools and getting a good relationship
between them