5 ways to boost your teams this January

The mammoth 15-week autumn term ended with a triumphant spree of nativities, carol services, assemblies, events, sickness bugs, and, yes, for some reason, Ofsted inspections. Chances are, whether your spirits were sky-high, or dragging along the floor, you finished the term in a hurried flurry of getting everything done, or at least trying desperately to do so.

In November, I wrote about how we could focus on certain things to help the team flourish in that difficult 6-7 weeks till Christmas. So, now that we have rested up and are ready to do brilliant work once more,  how do we make sure that all our teams, and our staff, begin the Spring Term with clarity, purpose, and a sense of optimism about where we are heading?

Check out 5 actions we could take in our teams to hit the ground running in 2025:

1. Recapping who we are (purpose, goals, values, behaviours)

We know that teams succeed when they keep their core purpose, values, vision, and mission at the forefront of what they do, discussing them regularly and ensuring that they are part of the ‘way we do things around here’. You could begin the spring term by recapping: who are we as a team? What are we trying to accomplish? You could explore your agreed-upon values and behaviours, and narrate how those were apparent in the way the team worked last term.

For example, if you are part of a pastoral team, I imagine you had a busy and challenging autumn term. You could begin the spring term by exploring the purposeful work you achieved, how it impacted children, staff, and families, and what the legacy of that work will be. You could go back to your agreed upon vision for the year and celebrate the progress being made on this. You could discuss the team’s values and how this translated into tangible behaviours; remember when Catherine fought so hard for that struggling child to ensure they got the intervention they needed? Her tenacity to do the best for the children, one of our team mantras, was demonstrated in the way she handled that situation by putting the child first over and over again.

Your team also created goals in the summer / autumn term. How are those going? What needs to shift – have they evolved, been achieved, or need to be tweaked? Clarity over team goals is essential for purposeful work.

How could you recap the core essence of your team so that everyone coalesces around what it means to be part of this group?

2. What worked well, and what did we find challenging?

We should review the effectiveness of our work and processes, so that we are focused on improvement and moving things forward. Give the team a chance to reflect on the successes of the previous term; we started collaborating in our planning of KS3 assessments and KS5 revision sessions, which has lead to…. etc. By reflecting on successes, we remind ourselves that the team does good work together, and also that hard work pays off.

I think we often share the good moments and results with our teams, and quite rightly. We nailed this. We succeeded in that. So and so is doing great work in this. Recognition is vital. But do we discuss the ‘bad’? Do we share pain and learn from it?

In Owen Eastwood’s Belonging, he quotes social anthropologist, Harvey Whitehouse, who says that sharing difficulties or pain can create ‘identify fusion’, and have two tangible benefits for the group. Firstly, the group creates more intense togetherness through the sharing or a mistake or a difficult moment; secondly, reflecting on the painful moments often creates practical lessons for the future.

A maori spiritual adviser adds that in older civilisations, healthy culture would take a moment of pain, and then ‘carve the story into our walls’ (literally, like a cave drawing!), so that the current group, and future descendants, can learn from our experiences.

If we reflect on what we found challenging, we can get it out in the open, discuss how we solved similar problems before, and then focus on a path forward.

3. What should we do less of (subtract)?

Teams are always victim to doing more and more, both because they have their own ideas of things they want to do, review, or create, and because whole-school agendas may add items to their jobs list.

Teams should explore what they could do less of, or ‘fewer things in greater depth’ as Mary Myatt says.

I can’t explain it any better than Adam Boxer in his brilliant blog post ‘Subtract’, which begins by discussing Carmy in The Bear, and somehow maintains that quality throughout! Adam says that ‘If you try to do everything, you end up doing nothing’. Quite right.

Check it out: https://achemicalorthodoxy.co.uk/2024/10/20/subtract/

4. How purposeful are our plans for 2025?

The spring term is short and fast paced, often packed with events and assessment weeks. It’s easy to let it sail by and never lift your head above the operational.

Thriving teams tend to map our their meetings and CPD in advance (leaving some room for operational issues, of course), so that the team can anticipate what’s to come. For example, you might have mapped out team meetings with certain processes you will evaluate (e.g. in June we will cover marking systems, in July it’ll be retrieval practice in our lessons), learning and CPD you will undertake, and other things that happen at certain points in the year, e.g. we moderate work on this date, following this assessment.

Go through your plans for 2025 so that the team knows and understands what’s coming up and can prepare for things in advance. In a recent interview on my podcast, Jennifer Webb discussed how she creates a live document for her teams which maps out everything that ‘s going on in terms of what the team is working on, deadlines, live links to resources, meeting plans, etc. If you are regularly sharing expertise across the team in meetings, this could all be added to the plan so others can see what’s going on and when.

5. Take a longer view

Building on number 4, it’s worth looking ahead a little further. As a leader, I’ve been caught out before when June rolls around and the school year feels like it shifts into planning mode for September. Except, June and July, when there are hundreds of other things to do, aren’t brilliant opportunities to conceive, agree, plan, and implement new things for September. In early parts of my career, I’ve gone into this period with good intentions, but then simply run out of time to both create something good, but also to get buy in and to launch it with enough time to implement it in a meaningful way. Staff cotton onto this hurried cycle, too, and brace themselves for a quick turn around.

If you have a ‘snagging list’, as Adam Robbins calls it (he has a brilliant new book out soon…), or any method of documenting what you want to improve for next year, you can start thinking about plans earlier in the year, and narrate this as a group, so that you can anticipate what the ‘main things’ will be next year, and start working on them.

Even when day-to-day work feels tough in schools, teams benefit from having longer-term ideas and plans for improvement. With one of our teams, I wanted to improve our pastoral curriculum so that we could spend the summer term evaluating the provision and designing better resources for the following year. The problem was, that I usually waited until June to also review our processes, behaviour policies, assemblies, attendance protocols, etc. There was never enough time. So, in order to use the summer term for our developmental work on the pastoral curriculum, we mapped out how we would evaluate our core processes at different occasions throughout the year, rather than leaving it till the end. It’s not rocket science, we’d just fallen into the ‘gained time’ routine and annually repeated the process, always running out of time to review and improve everything!

Whatever you spend your first few weeks of the spring term doing in your teams, I wish you a productive 2025!

Thanks for reading

Sam