Creating Tomorrow
Newsletter July 2016
This month our newsletter looks at how to achieve more than a cosy chat from a critical friend. It offers a way of selecting a peer who is really going to help you as well as a tool to use with a group when you want to widen that group's perspective. I recently attended the launch of a new book by my friend, Professor John West Burnham and his colleague Libby Nicholas and think it will be of interest to many of you.
Once the tennis is over at Wimbledon, it will be time to plan our next trip to Australia in August and September.
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Pat Collarbone
Choosing a critical friend
The model below offers some alternatives; for example, someone with different experience and a different personality can stretch you and provide plenty of potential for learning.
I find this helps people make a more informed choice of partner.
This month we are offering a 25% discount on Peer2 our package for Principals who are facing major change in their schools and are looking for support and challenge from another leader. Click here to take a look.
Understanding Leadership
- Are current leadership roles and relationships appropriate in a rapidly changing world?
- Do we need to rethink key assumptions about leaders and leadership?
- Are you confident about the appropriateness and effectiveness of your chosen leadership styles and behaviours?
Applying research from within and outside education, they challenge prevailing orthodoxies. As always I found their ideas both fascinating and challenging.
Multiple perspectives
This is a technique used to elicit the points of view from which the group members regard a topic. It is a good warm up exercise before starting to discuss key questions.
Rotating between roles encourages people to see an important issue from as many vantage points as possible. It is useful to get children thinking from the parents’ and teachers’ perspectives before looking at the questions.
Create a cardboard wheel as below with team members’ names and issue/problem in the centre and also create cards for the stakeholders who have an interest in the topic.
Have a flipchart available for each stakeholder group.
Make sure that each team member is lined up with a stakeholder.
Each member must now act from the perspective of the stakeholder they are lined up with by adding their understanding of that viewpoint. In the example above, Sharon has lined up with ‘Governor’ and she must add what she thinks the governor’s perspective might be to the governor ipchart.
Likewise, Bill comes from a ‘Student’ perspective and adds to the student ipchart, Ahmed from a ‘Parent’ perspective and so on.
When the wheel is turned clockwise one space, Ahmed will be line up with ‘Governor’ and must then add his ‘governor’ perspective and so on around the group.
More techniques can be found in Consult2 our new tool kit for engaging the wider community.