BESA CORNER
This month, in our ongoing feature highlighting the work of members of the UK education suppliers’ trade body BESA, we hear from LEADERSHIP MATTERS about their leadership development programme; and we learn more about SENSATIONS ENGLISH learning materials.
What makes great leadership development?
As we start to move through the new school year, our thoughts are on how we can provide maximum support to our staff and students following the recent challenges of teaching and learning throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. School leaders this year face a budgetary meltdown with energy price
rises and a significantly unfunded pay rise for all staff. Coupled with a challenging year for recruitment of both teachers and leaders, it is going to take strong leadership to carry schools, students and staff through the next academic year. The Leadership Matters team have been thinking hard about these
challenges over the summer and have returned to the subject of leadership development as a keystone for keeping everyone on track as we move through this year. This model for leadership development looks at 10 areas that require
thought before embarking upon any sort of leadership development. It’s an aide memoire when planning INSET, twilight sessions or investigating leadership programmes available from providers both internal and external. The model The Leadership Matters Development Model comprises 10 areas for consideration by leaders. Each area is a characteristic of good leadership development that is supported by evidence (see number 2!) that you should ensure is included in any leadership development programme you carry out with your staff. The model has been created over many years of delivering leadership
development in schools, MATs and LAs and is highly practical. The Leadership Development Model – Key Areas • The approach distinguishes between learning and development, with both included as part of a clear pedagogical framework. • It offers evidence-based leadership knowledge within a carefully constructed curriculum that leaders can then apply within their context. • This leadership knowledge sits within a coherent leadership framework. • Learning with and from peers is a key feature of the approach. • There is an implicit understanding that leadership habits and skills take time to develop, and the programme length reflects this. • An appropriate blend of teaching, mentoring, coaching, personal reflection and goal setting are integral parts of the approach. • Tools that support self-awareness such as personality predisposition and 360 feedback are available towards the start of the process. • There is an opportunity through carefully curated publications and online resources for participants to personalise their learning. • There is a focus on the evaluation of impact throughout the process. • The overall approach should stretch, support and challenge leaders, leaving them feeling empowered and positive about the future. How to use the model • Familiarise yourself with the model. This will allow you to recognise what makes for good professional development for leaders. • Create a checklist for reviewing new leadership development. This will help you to ensure that all of your training (internal and external) will meet the needs of your leaders in school. • Review each session you run, or is run for you in the context of these ten principles. This will allow you to evaluate all professional development and plan sessions in the future. • Finally, return to the model termly and look at how best to improve your leadership development. If you have any comments or thoughts about this model, we would love to hear them, please write to
info@leadershipmatters.org.uk and tell us.
uwww.leadershipmatters.org.uk
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www.education-today.co.uk
Sensations English: promoting life skills and a global outlook to empower all developing speakers of English.
“I got to see my learners as more colourful thinkers - I felt that I had given them a blank sheet to colour with their opinions (as a break from their typical English classes).” These are the words of a teacher involved in a classroom-based study of Sensations English learning materials. These news-based resources are always created at five different levels of difficulty to provide learners with content that activates higher-order thinking, whatever their level of English. Bringing life skills, soft skills, critical thinking skills, or 21st century
competencies into learning has enormous benefits in preparing our learners for the knowledge economy and their roles as responsible citizens. However, it can require significant amounts of preparation and energy to develop and engage students’ higher order thinking skills and ensure resources scaffold inclusive behaviours while offering learners a diversity of perspectives. News has always had benefits in raising interest, heightening learners’
awareness of global and local issues and bringing the real world into the classroom. As such, it has great potential as a foundation for work on critical thinking skills. However, there’s also a need to avoid one-sided accounts, fake news, reliance on hearsay and learners depending on existing, less considered opinions when dealing with current affairs. We founded Sensations English to provide reliable news-based resources which present balanced, objective and accessible content on a wide range of current issues. Multimodal resources succeed in reaching, motivating and encouraging
learners who are visually inspired and those who are aurally inspired, as well as students who prefer engaging with ideas through reading. But combining these inclusive resources with balanced, level and age appropriate news-based content brings further benefits. This accessible material establishes a two-way route to inspiration for students. News brings into students’ learning novel perspectives and contexts on
topics and issues, helping learners to be inspired by the world around them. It also gives students new insights into their own worlds through seeing, hearing and reading about people to whom they can directly relate, or can aspire to be like. Furthermore, by looking at situations or issues outside their immediate experience, it allows them to tackle familiar subjects such as disasters, grief, war, unemployment, and health crises – gathering information and perspectives from which to form opinions, test lines of reasoning and work together on finding potential solutions or coping strategies. This positive, critical engagement with news can also uncover weaker
thinking, lead to gentle questioning of beliefs and allow the teacher to scaffold a sense of collaborative exploration within the classroom, including: “encouraging them to think more colourfully, i.e., to recognise and avoid stereotyping.” And since news reports are based on person-centred accounts of situations, they also open a space to help students discuss their own feelings about common situations. News can also help learners explore common challenges such as talking
about themselves, as people often do in news reports; and consider difficult but important life decisions, frequently covered by news. These activities could emerge, for example, from seeing an artist talking about their work on climate action, or a doctor weighing up whether to continue working in a disaster zone. For learners who use English as an additional language, hearing people speaking in their own words and in their own authentic accents helps establish near-peer role models who can represent motivating, achievable goals for learners’ own development. Taking sensitive approaches to bringing news into learning has earned
Sensations English British Council ELTons awards for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, and for Environmental Sustainability and Climate Action.
uwww.sensationsenglish.com
October 2022
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