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* Are any additional resources needed to support learning and participation? If so how can these be mobilised and deployed? | * Are any additional resources needed to support learning and participation? If so how can these be mobilised and deployed? | ||
(Adapted from Index for inclusion, p. 40, Figure 12) | (Adapted from Index for inclusion, p. 40, Figure 12) | ||
= Leadership for Learning activities = | |||
== The five principles with questions == | |||
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== Focus on Learning == | |||
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The first principle is ‘a focus on learning’. The two key words are ‘focus’ and ‘learning’. To focus means to pay close attention to, to select what is important and to keep it in the foreground. Those who exercise leadership have at times to pay attention to things other than learning. Managing a school requires attention to a host of priorities and it is easy to be distracted by constant demands and other peoples’ urgencies. However, while a focus on learning always remains in the background of thinking, whenever possible it has to be brought into the foreground. It comes into the foreground when leadership is able to discriminate between the important and the urgent and knows where the priorities lie. | |||
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== Conditions for Learning == | |||
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How can you focus on learning when conditions are so bad that simply getting children, and teachers to school is both urgent and important? How can you focus on learning when the priority is to find and manage accommodation, space, resources and contingencies of food, health, weather, and respond to unexpected crises? How can you focus on learning when you have a hundred or more children in a class? How can you focus on learning when many teaching staff have little background knowledge of pedagogy? | |||
The physical conditions for learning vary widely in Ghanaian schools, in cities suburbs, villages and rural areas. Demands, expectations and resourcing also vary widely. The principle, however, remains the same. Leadership in every circumstance has to try to optimise the physical, social and emotional conditions which hinder | |||
learning, and has to try and seek out the ‘wiggle room’ for creating a greater learning focus. In this respect the force field tool can be used to analyse what helps and hinders and what may be possible. | |||
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== Learning Dialogue == | |||
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The force field can be used by any individual to think through the forces acting against you and the assets you have, or the potential assets still unexploited. Even in the most dire of circumstances the best resources are likely to be people. The force field comes into its own as a tool, a ‘tin opener’ for opening up the dialogue, for extending and challenging the status quo, for trying to think ‘outside the box’. It may reveal the hidden resources of staff or of children which have remained untapped and uncelebrated. | |||
"Your school is a place for children to learn. If they do not learn much, you have not fulfilled your first priority. How can you, as headteacher, make sure that the children in your school are learning something new every day?" (Headteachers’ Handbook, Ghana Education Service) | |||
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== Shared Leadership == | |||
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When there is a dialogue around the need to ensure that children are learning something new every day learning can become the first priority. When there is dialogue around securing resources and managing change, the capacity for hidden leadership can come to the fore. ‘This thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to perform it thyself alone’. It is said that a burden shared is a burden halved. It is also said that 1 and 1 can make 3, that is, my idea and your idea when put together can produce a third idea which neither of us had thought of. Another popular saying which strikes the same note - ‘All of us is better than one of us’ – is a more folksy way of describing the technical term ‘synergy’ which means ‘energy with’. Ghanaian leaders expend a lot of energy sometimes just to stand still but can replenish and even gain energy through working collaboratively with trusted others. | |||
Here is a pie. It can be divided into three quadrants to represent the balance of three decision-making processes in your school, district office or circuit supervision. What percentage of those decisions are Command, Consultation, or Consensus? | |||
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== Mutual Accountability == | |||
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When leadership is shared so is accountability. Those in leadership positions (‘where the buck stops’ as Harry Truman said) are, in some sense, accountable for every action taken, every decision made. Nine times out of ten decisions are never explained or accounted for as that would paralyse initiatives whether in the headteacher’s office, the teacher’s classroom, the regional headquarters or the Ministry. But where there is an ongoing dialogue and when there is shared leadership, decisions can be reviewed in retrospect and discussed in prospect, so that what one is accountable for, and to whom, and in what way is open to discussion. This strengthens a sense of ownership of staff, creates a feeling of reciprocity and is in itself an important source of professional development. | |||
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= Activities and techniques for teacher meetings = | = Activities and techniques for teacher meetings = | ||
