so what is leadership?

I had a great chat with a colleague today about what we mean by the term leadership. Well, lots of erudite writing exists about transactional, transformational, buffered, distributed leadership ..... and much much more. She asked me what I see is the key aspects of leadership and I trotted out some of the usual trite stuff about shared vision and so on. I also remembered something a colleague once said to me about delegating responsibility rather than just delegating tasks. Does that make you a leader ... or the person to whom you are delegating? Does helping to build leadership in others make you a leader?


I started to wonder if we need a new word. So much has been written about the differences between management and leadership. Are we entering a phase where we need to acknowledge that there are overlaps and ermm outerlaps?

Later in the day, she asked me if I had planned my career and I had to admit that I had not. I talked her through my life story (well she did ask) and was struck by her response: "so you've never said no to an opportunity?" I admitted there was one major opportunity I had turned down but broadly agreed with her assessment.

I believe that I've been lucky, blessed even.

Is leadership 'letting go' of management? I think it is certainly letting go of micro-management. Leadership from within a team is an interesting concept that is currently exercising my sociological imagination.

My colleague came up with the idea of chats recorded on video and saved on our VLE. Perhaps we should start some panel chats .... has anyone done this? I'd love to hear about it ...

this also appears on reflog

PD evolution - it's a matrix!

In house Professional Development for teachers and other professionals working in schools.

This year, small project groups are forming at my school, they will focus on:

• effective classrooms (including links with attendance)
• effective leadership and teams
• innovative use of technology
• career development - personal professional development

Each week, as we have done for some years, there will be a one hour session presented by or facilitated by a Leading Practitioner (teaching and non-teaching). This year these will be in a sort of carousel so that participants can choose to follow one strand, or select across strands. there will be Between Session Activities such as reading, blogging, trialling ideas. Each 'strand' will include a mid-term and final review and will also link to the choice of activities provided at whole staff meetings and whole staff PD.

If they choose to apply, both participants and Leading Practitioners may gain qualifications from the College of Teachers.

What else should we consider? Comments please :-)

Public Critique

I really liked this short video clip from John Seely Brown (courtesy Steve Wheeler via Twitter @timbuckteeth John Seely-Brown: Tinkering as a mode of knowledge production http://bit.ly/oJl8er )

It obviously has applications for all kinds of education but it started me (yet again, sorry) thinking about teachers' professional development. Next year, at my school, we will be employing four strands for the in-house programme (effective leadership, effective classrooms, innovation and technology, career development) but they will be arranged so that anyone who wants to mainly follow one strand but dip into others will still be able to. Each strand will be led by two or three leading practitioners and everyone involved will be eligible for accreditation. We will be using our VLE to record group developments.

So how does this link with John Seely Brown's talk? I was really struck by the notion of public critique. In my last post I mentioned how lucky I am to be able to observe many teachers in many areas of the curriculum and to share these ideas. Surely, we can take this a step further by sharing our critiques on the VLE so that, having developed trust within a small group, we can begin to share these ideas together.

I would hope that the trust will build to be whole school and then phew! who knows?