As part of my plan to become a headteacher, I have been reading books which offer some great advice. I recently read Brilliant Head Teacher by Iain Erskine. This book is certainly a helpful read - it's full of practical, honest advice for anyone who wants to be a brilliant headteacher.
Modern Leadership
In the past there were some Heads that ruled through fear and would divide staff in an attempt to rule effectively. Traditionally everyone turned to the Head as the person who made all the decisions and had all the answers: there was little evidence of delegation or distributed leadership strategies. That old style of leadership has gradually disappeared so that it now hardly exists. Since those days research has taken place examining effective leadership qualities and successful leaders nowadays trust and build trust through credibility, positive behaviour and confidence.
Managing the school is an essential part of the job but we all recognise the danger of it becoming all-consuming. In many schools the term 'management' has been replaced by the word 'leadership', clearly articulating the role of the senior team in leading the school to greater and greater success. The structure of senior, middle and curriculum leaders that share the school vision and are truly accountable to the Head and the Governing Body.
The knowledge accumulated through distributed leadership enables Heads to confidently look into the future and make decisions on action needed to take the school forward. One of our most valuable strategies as Heads is the ability to listen and to ask pertinent, challenging and relevant questions that hold people accountable and help to progress the school; the Head as an enabler and with the ability to make successful appointments. It is said that Barack Obama deliberately appointed his challengers so that he was questioned on all of his decisions. Heads must appoint people that complement each other, and not simply people in their own likeness.
Heads must realise that they are in a powerful position and can make significant decisions about what initiatives their school will adopt as there are very few educational reforms that are enshrined in law.
Successful Heads have a strong moral purpose, they put others first and have a strong set of personal values that are shared with and responsive to the school community. In addition to this, as Heads, we must have passion and a strong desire to achieve excellence whilst creating a community that has a strong sense of unity and trust. As Heads we aspire to get the best out of others, we are enables, we nurture and develop, we allow others to take credit whilst strategically taking the blame on our shoulders when things do not go well so that our schools move ever forward.
The future
"In a 21st century world where jobs can be shipped wherever there's an internet connection, where a child born in Dallas is now competing with a child in New Delhi, where your best job qualification is not what you do, but what you know - education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success, it's a prerequisite for success... I'm calling on our nation's governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity."(President Barack Obama at the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, 10 March 2009)
Children nowadays will watch television or listen to music whilst doing their homework and at the same time be having a social networking conversation and playing a computer game and yet the most common way of teaching children is still a basic chalk and talk, albeit pen and whiteboard, approach. Children multi-task out of choice and we teach them one thing at a time, often in silence.
The question is whether traditional subjects that go back to the 19th century are the right subjects for the 21st century. In how many other walks of life are we still following a system that was introduced over a hundred years ago?
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