weather CPD CORNER
Make your own
Being stressed and agitated can cloud your thinking. Helen Burge looks at how you can stay clear-headed in the eye of the storm
Banishing dark clouds I used to work at a dual-campus primary school. One day – when I got out of bed on the wrong side and failed to pick up my sense of humour as I left the house – my headteacher declared it would be a good idea if I went off to the (quieter) second site to work. Having tried in vain to cajole,
persuade and muster a smile or good word from me, she wasn’t prepared to put up with my sullen mood any longer. We still laugh about that day – how I sabotaged every effort she made to fi nd the right buttons to reset me to ‘standard Helen’. My headteacher was right
to banish me to that campus. At the time, it had only one class, and there was a sympathetic receptionist who offered the right combination of chocolate and tea I needed in order to recover my normal factory settings. She was also right because she understood the
impact school leaders have on the school community – and my impact that day wasn’t positive!
Clear and calm Ben Solly, headteacher at Uppingham Community College, Rutland, defi nes tension-free leadership as ‘leading from a position of calm objectivity’. In a recent issue of SecEd, he said it was ‘a way of being’ that enabled better decisions to be made, not a ‘temporary state that leaders should switch on and off’. Indeed, he suggested that
viewing the unpredictability of school environments as the norm would help leaders (and, I’d add, all staff, for that matter) stay tension-free when challenging situations arise. I studied A-level English, but it was only when my son was taking his GCSEs that I found out about pathetic fallacy – the idea of giving emotions to something non-human, often used with the weather to refl ect the mood of a character or to create a tone. For example, ‘the weather is miserable outside’ or ‘the fl owers danced in the morning sunshine’. Pathetic fallacy makes me
think again of my headteacher, who regularly used to talk about
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‘making your own weather’. If you walk into school as if the sun is warming your back then you will project brightness and warmth to others. Walk into school as if you’re avoiding an imminent rainstorm, and this gloom and tension is what you’ll share with your colleagues. You could end up sabotaging
your work just by walking around with a grey cloud over your head. The day my headteacher suggested I switch campuses, she recognised I was tense, I wasn’t calm and I wasn’t being objective. She was hoping for a rainbow – and she got one!
Blue skies Telling someone to calm down invariably has the opposite effect, so it should be accepted that being a tension-free school business professional isn’t as easy as telling yourself to remove all tension and calm down. But we can work towards maintaining a calm and objective approach. The summer holidays – or ‘Term 7’ – comes to mind. If we can be relatively tension-free for six weeks when all the building work is going on and the school is physically in a state of fl ux, how can we incorporate that feeling into our year-round practice?
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