: Improving School Leadership by Engaging Luca Owenbridge blogs about the importance of community interaction and why it really matters to implementation in schools.
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Improving School Leadership by Engaging
Luca Owenbridge blogs about the importance of community interaction and why it really matters to implementation in schools.
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by Cornwall Research School
on the
Luca Owenbridge
Deputy Director of Cornwall Research School
Luca Owenbridge is a History and Maths teacher based in Penzance, Cornwall. He came to teaching after working as a Policy Analyst for the Department for Education in London.
As the new EEF guidance report “A School’s Guide to Implementation” shows, one of the most effective ways school leaders can improve implementation initiatives and the implementation climate, is to ensure the behaviours that drive effective implementation are embedded throughout all stages of the change process.
The behaviours listed are:
Engage people so they can shape what happens while also providing overall direction.
Unite people around what is being implemented, how it will be implemented, and why it matters.
Reflect, monitor, and adapt to improve implementation.1
The guidance report highlights that these behaviours will be the heart of effective implementation and should feature across a schools’ implementation actions and interactions. They recognise that whilst these behaviours may be familiar to schools and feel like ‘common sense’ they can be very difficult to get right.
The way in which people are involved in implementation and the quality of their interactions really matters. This is where school leaders have a distinct ability to leverage significant change.
Potential to influence change
A community that feels listened to, that feels as though their input matters when decisions which affect them are taken, is a community with improved implementation outcomes. Leaders should ensure that staff are given structured and meaningful opportunities to share their perspectives, ideas and concerns.
This should also be extended to students and parents as well as staff.
For school leaders the tension becomes, how to balance providing stakeholders with this structured opportunity and the trust that they will be listened to with the need to maintain strategic direction.
Collaborative processes
Collaboration allows the organic growth of ideas. When we solve problems together and are able to bounce ideas of one another we often reach solutions more effectively.
One way schools can do this is to include a variety of stakeholders and actors in their implementation teams. These mixed teams should meet regularly and be listened to whilst they plan, manage and review the implementation of interventions.
Leaders should be making it clear what each persons’ role in the team is and what impact they can expect to have in a given implementation. This includes managing expectations on what individual impact stakeholders can have on behaviour change.
Clear communication and active guidance
This is the tightrope a leader must walk. Whilst implementation must include these participatory ways of working and whilst leaders must be genuinely open to new ideas, the implementation process must also include actively guiding and steering staff and setting strategic direction.
“This involves leaders communicating the direction of travel, explaining decisions, motivating staff, corralling efforts, and preventing implementation being dragged off track.”
This is an essential aspect of the implementation process and is difficult to get right. Leaders must strive to get this right to ensure energy is channelled in the right direction and that implementation has the greatest chance of success.
This was the first blog in our series of Improving School Leadership
