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Scottish International Summer School, Day 4: Leadership Support and Challenge

Alan and Ian have both commented that I hadn’t ever got round to finishing my series of posts about the Scottish Leadership Summer School – slave drivers!. So tonight I dragged out my lap top to see how far I had got writing up day 4 and 5 of the conference. Day 4 was complete (I just obviously had never got round to posting it!) and Day 5 is half finished. I’ll post Day 5 ASAP, but below you will find a duplication of my summary of Day 4 that I have just posted over on the CPD Team Blog.

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Scottish International Summer School, Day 4: Leadership Support and Challenge

Judith McClure was the forth person to take up the position as Chair at the International Summer School. Judith is the current Convenor of the Scottish Educational Leadership Management and Administration Society (SELMAS). In her opening address Judith picked up on some of the emerging key themes of the conference including the importance of building relationships, emotional intelligence and allowing time to think. She even managed to slot in a quick advertisement for the forthcoming SELMAS Conference in September.

The morning was taken up by an activity led by Graeme Finnie around the theme of coaching. We were asked to use group coaching to see if we could think of ways to develop leadership capacity through coaching and mentoring. I have written about coaching before and do believe that it is a powerful way to support leadership at all levels. However from the various conversations that emerged from the morning discussions it seemed that there was still a bit confusion in terminology as to what the differences were between coaching, mentoring, life coaching and counselling. Although we may never reach a true consensus or exact definition of what each of these things are for. I do believe that there is some work to be done in really helping Scottish teachers and leaders understand what we mean by ‘coaching’ in an educational sense.

Here’s what I think:

Mentoring is normally provided by to another person or group of people who have an expertise in the subject that the person is being mentored in. As well as reflection mentoring is also about giving advice based on the experience of the mentor.

Coaching does not have to be provided by a subject expert. Instead the coach has been training in questioning techniques. They are skilled in getting the participant to come up with their own answers by providing structured questioning to allow the person to have some really focused thinking time.

With this definition in mind and one of the recurring themes of the conference being that all leaders need more time to think. I think that coaching could be one way to push forward this aspect of the leadership agenda.

I also think that it is important that we differentiate between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ coaching if there are such terms? School leaders may already be using informal coaching in schools because it is really just structured questioning. However, I think formal coaching is different. During a formal coaching session a coach will guide the participant in order for them to find their own solution to a particular problem or obstacle. The coach will also help the participant set their own goals to help them overcome or review the problem. Coaching is powerful and important to school leaders because most of the time our minds are filled with more than one task and sometimes it is difficult to prioritise or tackle these tasks in any sensible order. I also believe that coaching can be immensely valuable when helping school leaders plan strategically. All to often school leaders get tied down with the day to day running of the school / authority and do not give enough time to strategic ‘blue sky’ thinking or a clear vision for the school. Working with a skilled coach can provide a way to give some quality time to both of these issues.

One final point, I believe that coaching is here to stay and I hope that there are some plans to engage the ITE Universities in the coaching process. To me this seems a useful way to push forward and develop a coaching model. 3580 students will enter ITE next year and I think that if they all new what coaching was (a clear definition) and if they had all had an opportunity to be coached and perhaps even benefited from being a peer coach then this would be a huge step forward and 3580 less people to convince about the merits of coaching when they enter the profession full time.

After Lunch the conference received a presentation from Graham Donaldson, Senior Chief Inspector, HMIe and Eamon Stack, Chief Inspector, Department of Education and Science, Eire. It was interesting to hear a little bit about the inspection model in Eire and to hear Graham Donaldson’s speak about school leadership. One big difference between the Scottish and Eire systems is that there is no Local Authority Education structure in Eire. Schools report directly back to the centre. After their presentations both Graham and Eamon received a number of questions from the delegation about the advantages and disadvantages of both systems and the inspection process in general.

The final presentation of the day was from Norman Drummond on the Columba 1400 experience. After a motivational introduction from Norman staff and students from Lossiemouth High School and Cumnock Academy took the lead and spoke to the conference about their own Columba 1400 experience. I have always been enthusiastic about outdoor learning and the power of the outdoors to develop leaders, aid reflection and empower people. The presentation provided me with even more evidence to support my theory. The audience listened to two groups of young adults explain to them how the Columba experience had changed their lives. The audience also had an opportunity to take part in some Columba activities and to find out how the schools had gone on to develop their own sustainable leadership programmes. This presentation was an excellent end to the day and for many the highlight of the week.

East Lothian Coaching Up-date

I took part in the original coach training programme offered by East Lothian Council and today we were recalled for our follow up meeting at John Muir House. It was nice to meet with members of the original group and swap stories on how our coaching was going. We are all at different stages in the new East Lothian coaching accreditation process, but I was pleased to be able to contribute to the development of the pilot programme.

I have taken a lot from my coach training, in particular the questioning techniques that it has taught me. In my new role at Musselburgh Grammar School

I can feel myself falling back on my coach training when dealing with pupils, staff and parents. I have found it particularly useful when using it in applying a restorative practice philosophy to help resolve conflict.

Since my original training I have dabbled with coaching groups of friends (mainly for practice), but if I am going to become a fully fledged coach I will need to have the opportunity to coach someone over a longer period of time. The suggested time period is about six hours (one hour a week). I did put out an open invite asking if there was anyone out there wanting to be coach – but I had very little interest.

I feel there is a place for coaching within education but I also feel that we have a lot of work to do in helping people understand what exactly it is. It has come up on the agenda few times at out management meetings and the perception is that it is life coaching or careers advice. In reality the coaching that were are trying to offer in East Lothian comes for an American driven model which is more about trying to get people to reflect on their own practice and make positive decisions about themselves to improve their efficiency. My role as a coach is to ask the right questions to allow the person being coached to come up with their own answers. 

This afternoon during our recall session. I had an opportunity to be coached about how I might go about introducing a coaching model into our school. After my 15 minute slot I came up with the following three point, progressive, action plan.

1. Take an opportunity to explain to staff what coaching is.

2. Ask interested staff to attend a 30 – 45 minute coaching session with a coach during a CPD afternoon. The key here, I feel, is to engage all East Lothian Coaches in this process. This way we may be able to get 12 staff being coached at the same time. Then we would get these 12 people together after their experience to reflect on their coaching experience.

3. For those staff who had had a positive experience or who could see the value in the model there would be an opportunity to sight up for a longer programme of 6 – 8 coaching sessions.

The next stage will be to find an opportunity for how to bring these ideas into practice. Once again if there is a member of the school community (including student teachers, NQT’s, teachers, support staff and managers) looking to develop their reflective practise or for some structure in working through a work related issue. Then I am still looking for volunteers to be coached. I am particularly interested in finding a volunteer who would like to use skype as a medium of communication. Email me or leave a comment if you are interested.

Teachers as Lifeguards

Picture by: Doug Belshaw

This is a great post (and picture) from Doug Belshaw on his blog teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk. For me his post sums up what we are trying to achieve with our exc-el Extreme Learning project as another metaphor. I have invited Doug to contribute to our discussion over on the wiki.

Coaching

Coaching is on the school management team meeting agenda tomorrow so I have been refreshing my memory. I was given this book when I went on a coaching course just before the summer holidays. There are some interesting ideas here and I think an opt in coaching programme could be useful to some staff. In many ways it is could be a lot more constructive and target focused than the current Staff Development and Review. Anyone want to be coached for six weeks? or does anyone want to coach me?

Blogged with Flock

S6 Pupils become CPR Instructors

Resusitation Training
Originally uploaded by OllieBray.

I have blogged about first aid training in school before and how I think it should be incorporated into the curriculum. I have also talked about HEARTSTART UK and some of the wonderful practice that goes on in other schools both north and south of the border. This was reinforced to me a couple of weeks ago when I read this article from the BBC which said,

‘All children should learn basic first aid - such as dealing with choking, bleeding and shock - at school, the British Red Cross says.

Its survey of 1,960 adults suggests that 90% of the population believe the subject should be compulsory.’

As a first aid, lifesaving and lifeguard trainer perhaps I am a little bit bias, but I have to agree with the Red Cross in their statement. According to the British Heart Foundation,

‘Coronary Heart Disease is Britain’s single biggest killer. Every two minutes, someone in the UK has a heart attack.’

Coronary Heart Disease is a particular problem in parts of East Lothian (including Musselburgh), this combined with the statistic from the Royal Lifesaving Society UK which suggests that 70% of people requiring CPR require it in their own home (50% during the day and 20% at night) means that if any of our young people are faced with the choice of doing CPR it is likely to be a member of their family or a close friend.

Given these statistics and after chatting to some of our pupils today I am convinced that even through carrying out CPR may appear like a daunting prospect at least it should be a ‘well trained’ daunting prospect.

Today some of our S6 pupils were trained by the HEARTSTART UK team to be resuscitation instructors. We hope that they will now be involved in training some of out S3 and S4 pupils as part of the PE programme. Lorna McAvoy (our PT Health Education) and Rob Woodhead (our Sports Co-ordinator) have done a great job of organising the programme. If you have not seen it check out Rob’s blog at MGS Sports On-Line.

I am keen to look at ways of taking this idea further as a Curriculum for Excellence Project. The Curriculum for Excellence outlines four principles:

- Successful Learners: Learning lifesaving skills

- Confident Individuals: The confidence to act in an emergency or to training others (including adults and peers)

- Responsible Citizens: Knowing the responsible way to act in an emergency.

- Effective Contributors: What could be a more effective contribution than saving or knowing how to save another persons life?

Many current Curriculum for Excellence Projects have a high technology focus. Although I think a lot of these projects are good (or excellent!) I do think that we are missing some basic building blocks from our curriculum and I think this is one of them.

I am going to put together a paper outlining how we might take this forward as a school. It will include ideas for transition between primary and secondary and also progression. The training of trainers (Pupils) and commitment from the British Heart Foundation and Heartstart UK will help ensure that the project will be sustainable.

See you on the River!

Euthanasia Falls, Upper Dart.
Originally uploaded by camp_bellab.

No DIY this weekend - I start work at Glenmore Lodge at 8pm tonight, so I need to get away from my desk and up the A9. A quick post before I leave - I'm starting to get back into this!

I am working on a Scottish Canoe Association (SCA) level 3 Inland Kayak assessment course. this is a two day assessment course for people that want to lead groups on white water (up-to grade II). Although i don't really enjoy running assessments (I much prefer running the training courses) I am looking forward to this weekend and meeting few new people.

We will be assessing candidates on personal skills, knowledge, group leadership, coaching, safety and rescue techniques. There is a lot to fit in and think about over the weekend. One of the days will involve a 'real' group of students that the candidates will have to lead down a section of river. This part of the course can sometimes be quite stressful, particularly if the person being assessed isn't really up to the standard. I remember once having to step in and take over the party management of a group during the assessment of an person who seemed to have no group awareness or control at all. He was a fantastic paddler (A lot better than I will ever be) but wasn't really interested in improving the performance and ensuring the safety of others. He just wanted to turn his hobby into a way of earning money.

in the past there were a lot of be canoe and kayak coaches in the system. One way that most were fleshed was when the British Canoe Union introduced a compulsory up-date course at all coaches had to attend every three years. If you didn't attend you coaching certificate became invalid until to attended an up-date. In some ways this is like the 35 hours of CPD that we have to do as teachers - but do many school actually check to make sure that this CPD has been carried out? What if you had your GTC registration suspended if you didn't complete your CPD?