School teams are preparing for, or currently beginning, an exciting academic year. Lots is going on in education and teams are the key to schools doing brilliant work and taking steps forward with their various goals.
With lots to do, read, and digest for all educators at this time of year, I won’t write a cumbersome post, but it might be useful to outline 5 areas where I think every team could make a small gain. A slight adjustment, incremental improvements, not adding to workload.
Let’s go!
- Create Clarity
Most staff will sit in an INSET presentation and hear various priorities and updates from leaders. Fair enough, there’s lots to communicate. The odds are that staff won’t actually remember many of those things as the year unfolds. Research shows that leaders suffer from the ‘transmission illusion’, where we overestimate how much our staff know or remember, assuming they know more because we’ve communicated it once or twice.
That places the other teams within the school in a bind – how do we ensure that staff know what’s important to us, when they are members of multiple teams?
Well, we have to focus on just a couple of key goals for the year, and then make those an ongoing part of the team’s work. Return to them. Evaluate them. Do collaborative work in pursuit of them. People will only remember what they are regularly thinking about.
Create clarity through clear goals that are part of your team’s day-to-day work. What are they? Are they clear to you – they must be if your team are going to live them and be incentivised to complete them.
Keep it slimmed down. Assume they will forget. Overcommunicate!
Questions for reflection:
Do you team know your key goals / priorities for the year?
Which teaming activities contribute to the shared understanding and fulfilment of these goals?
2. Reduce friction
In digital marketing, the aim is to reduce your customer’s ‘clicks to purchase’. That is, when they land on your website, there needs to be as few clicks as possible between that and you submitting your credit card details.
Our team members want to do great work for our team, but with busy schedules and a heavy workload, they can be forgiven for being deterred by barriers.
This could be poor communication methods – perhaps too many emails, perhaps not being able to find information or resources in a maze of folders.
It could be multiple processes that could be condensed, like where you input data.
The aim is to identify where you are adding unnecessarily to people’s workload. Your time with them, and time you can expect of them, is limited, so ideally they will have as high a proportion of that time thinking, contributing, and learning.
Remove friction, even just from one or two places, and increase thinking about the things that matter. What are your clicks to purchase like?
Questions for reflection
Which things in your team create friction?
Which things can you remove or streamline?
3. Master your systems
The best teams regularly review their processes and systems so that the shared mental models that they hold are aligned, but also so that they can improve them. Debrief research suggests that we shouldn’t wait until a big outcome to review something, but chop things up into chunks and review processes little and often. For example, if we have launched a new reading scheme – don’t wait 3 months until a data drop, but review different aspects of it as you go along in small, focused debriefs. Research shows a focused debrief can take just 18 minutes!
One of my favourite ways to master systems is to use scenarios. Simply talking about systems or processes doesn’t really work, because typical levels of groupthink or lack of psychological safety means that not everyone contributes freely. Also it’s easy to stay within a superficial level of understanding when we talk about a process without examples.
But scenarios are fun and interesting! Imagine we are a Senior Leadership Team and we are currently a bit worried about lesson truancy and also children being removed from lessons. Before you dig into the policy itself, discuss a scenario about a child being sent out of lesson and then wandering the corridor. Give each person some thinking time, then do some pair chat, then grow it out from there. How did you all respond? Where was the variance? Usually there will be loads. No worries, that can be solved through doing this very process. But did you know there would be this much variance?
Now that you know that, how will it impact the way you review the policy?
Regularly do scenario work to stress-test your systems and keep mastering them!
Reflective questions:
Do you strategically build in debriefs for different areas of your team’s work?
When you evaluate a system or process, do you use scenarios to help understand how aligned the team’s understanding is?
4. Actually work together
Teams need a compelling vision for where they are now and where they want to go. People like to be involved in a journey of improvement with a shared purpose. They want to achieve the team’s goals and they want the narrative behind this. What story are we telling together?
But it’s hard to maintain that enthusiasm when you sit in meetings that involve little team work.
The best teams coalesce around a shared challenge and work on those actively together. Let’s imagine we’ve just had a brilliant debrief – how can we convert the enthusiastic talk into something tangible that improves the team’s work?
Well we need to work together on it. This could be whole team, depending on the size, or in groups. Let’s say we are an English department and we’ve reflected that at A-Level, our pre-19th century units are not delivering the right grades for the students, so we need to increase our expertise and also learn more from the exam board. We could divide into 3 groups (poetry, prose, exam tips / exemplars) and spend part of a few meetings working together, to then bring back our findings to the whole team. Work together in groups, share ideas, quesiton each other, create something better than you could on your own, then feed back.
Whatever you do, it’s important that teams get a chance to actually do some work together, whether that’s inside or outside of a meeting. Not only will this forge greater links and unity on the team, but it should mena that, with collective expertise working on tasks, the team’s output will improve and everyone will learn more.
Reflective questions:
Consider your team and its meetings last year: how much time was spent going through items on an agenda, versus actually working together on something?
Which opportunities can be created this year to increase team work?
5. Prioritise learning and growth
Whole-staff CPD is great, and I think we’ve made strides forward in this area. But its impact will always be limited. The best learning happens in teams, focusing on subject or context-specific development that will aid the team’s growth and future work.
When I was a Head of Year, I ran every operational meetings with my tutors, and asked them to do various tasks. But I didn’t prioritise how they could get better through learning things. I’ve asked you all to reach out to 3 families who are struggling with attendance, but have I increased your expertise in belonging, EBSA, or national/local attendance protocols?
Every team is suitable for learning and development.
Start with what your team’s goals are this year, and then reverse engineer to work out which steps you’ll need to take to reach them. That might help you identify gaps in knowledge or expertise that are currently barriers to the team fulfilling these aims.
Then map out your team’s learning. Delegate some meeting time to others in the team who hold expertise in certain areas, so they can lead it. Enjoy learning – have fun! Discuss, debate, and then feed this learning into your processes and systems.
Reflective questions:
What will my team learn this year? Not, what will we ‘do’ or ‘make’. What will we learn and why?
How will the team do this? How will meetings or CPD time be used to prioritise learning?
So there you have it, hopefully nothing flashy or ‘extra’, just a few ways to adjust and reflect on your teams this year. And this is applicable for ALL Teams in all schools.
Would love to hear your ideas and thoughts
Sam
Sam Crome 