For my third blog about professional development I will continue with my theme on difficult conversations. In the second blog, I discussed the first part of the training via Education Scotland’s CML programme and I quickly followed on with the second session which explored how difficult some conversations can be and strategies that can be used to help. All participants agreed that it will never make these conversations easy, but it does give you a bit of confidence to consider simple strategies that may help. Someone once said to me ‘What you permit, you promote’ and that obviously means that if we want our schools to improve then it is necessary to have these conversations in a way that you try to maintain relationships while at the same time encourage improvement.

Next term, I plan to run my next middle leadership session and the focus of this will be agreed by staff. At the start of each year, I like to review the areas that we have covered and ask staff for their priorities for the next year. I feel that this does help to encourage participation on a voluntary basis by the vast majority of my middle leadership team. As a group we agreed that the best time for us was for an early start (8.15am) and a finish ten minutes before the start of the school today to allow people to pick up any vital tasks before the school bell.

We have also finished our course on Agile Leadership and it has been interesting to see ways in which some of the approaches have been used in the school. My primary literacy group has been looking to develop a research based plan that will help direct literacy for the next three years. They produced the Kanban below and this will help direct our focus for the next few years.

As the term draws to a close we have stopped the leadership sessions for the year but I have been really pleased to see staff organising more educational outings and continuing to make links to other schools.

As we move back to a normal school year, I look forward to implementing some of the suggestions that have come out of this year’s CPD.

Wishing everyone has a good summer.