For my second blog about continued professional development I wanted to return to some of the same themes as my first blog. I am going to look at some of the work I have been doing with Education Scotland, our school Middle Leadership Academy and an Australian Leadership programme called Agile Leadership.

I have been working with Rona Grant (Professional Learning and Leadership, Education Scotland) on our Middle Leadership Academy. The focus for our latest sessions has been on challenging conversations and how to get the most out of these discussions which take place on a daily, weekly, termly and yearly basis. Rona gave me a fantastic start by providing me with a presentation on this theme and I was then able to adapt this to suit my own school’s circumstances. As I am the Head Teacher of an all through school, it was important to ensure it covered aspects of the ELC, the primary and the secondary. After reviewing the materials, I decided to add a few additional quotes, some extra tasks including a role play, a timer to help me get a firmer grasp of the length of activities required, activities that required people to respond using the chat function on Teams and, following positive feedback from the last session, I also wanted to give more time to develop further our understanding of challenging conversations.

The first part of this presentation took place on Tuesday 15th March 2022 and the second part of this presentation is due to take place on Tuesday 10th May 2022. These sessions are all voluntary and any member of staff can take part, not just those who are in a middle leadership position.
I have received some informal feedback and it has been positive so far. They particularly enjoyed the pre-activity reading on having difficult conversations at work. I think this allows people to think about the issues before the session starts and consider their own feelings around holding these challenging conversations.

Our Senior Leadership Team across the 2-18 school has also taken part in the second presentation by Dr Simon Breakspear on Agile Leadership. This presentation lasted 3-hours and looked at responsive action. As a team we worked on

• Rapid cycles of implementation
• Rapid action plans
• Kanban approaches

Please see the picture of a Kanban I have put together for our whole school self-evaluation questionnaires – pink is for the ELC, blue is for the primary and yellow is for the secondary.

We all enjoyed the ‘running stand-ups’ activity which encouraged us to answer three key questions:

1. DONE – What progress have we made?
2. STUCK – What challenges are we facing?
3. NEXT – What concrete action should we take next?

Dr Breakspear would argue that running regular ‘stand ups’ allows us to nudge our team forward, provide time to reflect on progress so far and make this progress visible, and an opportunity to collectively focus on the most important next steps.

All leadership tools have their strengths and weaknesses and both programmes have given us the opportunity to reflect on a wide variety of options and agree on the best ones for Wallace Hall at this point in time.