August 2020

Top Tips for Middle Leaders

28 August 2020/in Learning, Leadership/by ECIS

Steve Garnett, Senior Education Consultant, Dragonfly Training.

As a newly appointed or existing middle leader starting this new academic year, there is no question you will be entering unchartered waters in terms of knowing what to expect as the world attempts to navigate its way through the Covid19 pandemic.

These ‘Top Five Tips’ for middle leaders are designed not just for this period but hopefully will serve you well at any time too.

Some of them may have a slightly irreverent feel to them (and intentionally so!) but nonetheless will still support you in being entirely effective in the role. So here they are:

1. Top Tip: Always ask the same question: ‘Will it make the bike go faster?’

This seems an odd question for middle leaders of course but it relates to the notion of marginal gains. Briefly, David Brailsford revolutionised the success of the British Cycling Team with an approach known as the ‘aggregation of marginal gains’. Essentially improvements were driven by continually asking how any small adjustment or innovation made would ultimately result in faster cyclists. We can take this principle to middle leadership too. For every new initiative, process, resource, and strategy that is suggested or promoted, then the middle leader needs to know and also show how it will ultimately improve outcomes for pupils from where they currently are. Otherwise, why do it?

2. Top Tip: Remember the 3 Ps of: Personalities, Politics, and Performance

Try to always remember it is the last one you and your department are judged on and not the first two! What I try to promote is the idea is that way too much of your emotional energy and time can be taken up with dealing with the politics and personalities within your department. This can then lead to a reduction in energy and motivation on you to focus on things that are related to improving processes and outcomes. Keep asking yourself whether you are getting side-tracked by the first two Ps and not focussing enough on the last one! So remember the 3 Ps!

3. Top Tip: ‘Keep Sharpening the saw’

I’ve adapted this phrase a little from the best-selling book by Steven Covey ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ which has sold in excess of 25 million copies worldwide. His seven habits allude to behaviours very effective people adopt and many of them can be applied to middle leadership. The habit described as ‘sharpen the saw’ relates to a continuous search for new knowledge that will enrich, improve, and build on existing knowledge. The effective middle leader sees the importance of professional growth. This could be anything from keeping up to date with educational reading to seeking guidance from an ‘expert’ within a school in order to learn something new such as for example ‘timetabling’.

4, Top Tip: Model what you want

The effective middle leader realises that their team is always watching them! This means that they have to ‘walk the walk’ and ‘talk the talk’! Whether it’s meeting deadlines, approaches to teaching, and learning to the use of professional language with colleagues, you have to be the type of teacher you wish your team to be. We must of course recognise the differences we all have and indeed these should be celebrated. However, the effective middle leader recognises that for anything they expect from others they should be able to produce themselves. So always model what it is you want from others.

5. Top Tip: Smile for no good reason

This doesn’t mean appearing to have lost your marbles by having a continuous and unbroken smile on your face whatever the circumstances or situation! Instead, this tip alludes to the importance of managing your own emotional self. There are many psychological, physiological, and biological benefits to a smile! It’s a great stress buster for you but also potentially a great way to disarm a slightly stressed colleague or pupil! This tip really relates to the importance of you maintaining some kind of emotional sanity. Ask yourself: What strategies do you have for managing the emotional side of the role? Naturally, we would want those with zero negative health effects. So different people might draw on different approaches for example anything from mindfulness techniques to bouts of strenuous exercise or something in between. I would say however that the smile is one of the easiest ones and one that everyone can do!. So what technique do you have?

So, whilst this ‘Top Tips’ list may have a slightly irreverent feel, I do offer a more rigorous and detailed analysis of what is involved in becoming a highly effective middle leader when delivering my CPD courses.

I am delighted to be teaming up with ECIS to deliver the following 6 module course across this autumn term. It will lead to an accredited certificate in Middle Leadership called: ECIS/Dragonfly Middle Leader Award in Teacher Quality Improvement. Learn more and register here.

Module 1: The culture of leadership

Module 2: Designing learning

Module 3: Assessment and leadership

Module 4: Building and leading teams

Module 5: Developing your leadership style

Module 6: Leadership of learning

I will also be delivering a free webinar outlining what’s involved in being a highly effective middle leader and it will follow this 6 module outline. Joining details can be found here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steve Garnett is a Senior Educational Consultant at Dragonfly Training, an international speaker, and an award-nominated author and teacher. He has delivered INSET to over 8000 teachers in the last ten years across the British Isles as well as Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East. His book ‘The Subject Leader’ was shortlisted for the prestigious Education Resources Award 2013 (Best Secondary Resource).

Collaboration and outdoor learning in Düsseldorf.

19 August 2020/in Outdoor education, Learning/by ECIS

Kate Hookham, International Educational Consultant, Do Learn.

A long-term collaborative project with the International School of Düsseldorf to develop an Outdoor Learning Environment programme (2010-2020).

The key to any successful project for a consultant is a committed, collaborative staff team to work with who are willing to take a chance on new approaches, with backing and financial support of management and the wider community (parents and carers). I have been fortunate that ISD has been all of this and more.

The reason I promote outdoor learning is, for me, it can provide the best ‘classroom’. For visual learners, artificial lighting versus natural, ever-evolving light conditions wins outright. Auditory learners thrive as noise does not bounce back off surfaces given there are no walls, and natural materials disperse or absorb noise created. Finally, for our kinaesthetic learners, there is more space to move and learn in context.

Equally, children of today will see so much change and evolution in our technologies, cultural integration and indoor/urban design that the outdoor environment may be the only constant in their lives. There will always be a sky above their heads, vegetation, and animals around us (we hope). If we instill respect for nature and a connectedness, these children will be the guardians of the future. Learning outdoors promotes skills we will use our whole lives: emotional resilience, self-regulation, social skills, and higher-order thinking.

About the International School of Dusseldorf.

Founded in 1968, it is an International Baccalaureate World School with a current role of 1100 students. The campus sits on 19 acres in Kaiserswerth, Düsseldorf, in which the children and staff have built 6 outdoor learning centres/classrooms over the course of the ten-year project. The photo is an aerial view of 3 of these classrooms.

I first visited the International School of Düsseldorf in January 2010. During this initial visit we discussed how we could use the outdoors to support the Primary Years Programme and IB World School. I suggested we should start in Kindergarten (where outdoor learning already occurred) and build up from there. This would mean the children would carry their outdoor learning skills with them up through the school (self-awareness, regulation and care through Benefit-Risk Assessment, dressing correctly and identifying learning opportunities and developing higher-order thinking skills). From the start, children were involved in building the learning environment.

I returned every year, by September 2012 to move my focus to PYP unit delivery in the outdoors. Year 3 had a focus on matter. In the six month gap Year 1 had started to create and build their outdoor classroom in the central quadrant with the children. We used props and photographs to initiate a discussion about the unit. Children were fascinated by how matter changed form and they realised heat can affect matter. The children tested this by designing experiments heating with fire. This was the first time many staff had worked with children outdoors.. I modelled a Benefit-Risk Assessment and the children created a plan, which included health and safety considerations

The OLE programme progressed into year 1, I delivered a parents’ evening, which was written up as a blog by the director to explain the value of using an outdoor context and how parents can build on this at home, strengthening the home/school link. At the close of the session, a parent approached me and said, “You were lighting fires with my son yesterday”. “Yes”, I replied, a little concerned she may be about to raise a Health and Safety issue. She continued“I have never seen my child so excited about learning … he started telling me things about matter, what heat does, what we need to make a fire, how we have to be safe around a fire and how we cook on a fire. I asked him after each fact he shared with me, ‘and when did you learn that and he just kept saying ‘today’. Thank you, he has learnt so much.” I was moved by how emotional this parent clearly was about the power of outdoor learning.

During my February 2013 visit, Year 5 was undertaking an inquiry into traditional crafts. I supported staff (who were anxious about participating in this new learning experience) and 80 children, to either use fixed blade knives to carve or use fire to create ember bowls.

This experience was extended by staff back in class. They finished completed the creation (sanding/varnishing and decorating). The children involved wrote up their experiences, reflecting on the time it takes and perseverance required. .

By September 2014, OLE was operating well from Kindergarten through to year 5. I had a growing concern that repeated activity was taking place and we needed to spiral and progress learning. I, therefore, initiated the development of the OLE programme of overall expectations, scope, and sequence which are integrated with trans-disciplinary skills, learner profile, and the curriculum scopes and sequences. Following a discussion with the OLE team, we identified 3 key inquiry areas: participants, tools, and learning. In recent times, a skills Rubik has also been created.

By September 2015, OLE had become embedded and staff were skilled at linking indoor and outdoor learning.

Over the years ISD had been travelling to a range of conferences to celebrate how they use the outdoors as a learning tool. This culminated in the staff organising their own international conference at ISD in 2017. I was privileged to be invited as the keynote speaker, talking about the value of outdoors as a medium for learning. We had a wide range of visiting staff from the length and breadth of Europe.

In 2017 I commenced a focused project with the Senior school (middle programme). We used an interdisciplinary approach with volunteer staff from the geography, arts, English, and biology departments. During the year grade 6 identified species in their outdoor classroom, mapped the space, and started to explore how it could be used. This continued in 2018 with children creating path networks, a ‘green gym’ and mindfulness space, diversifying habitats and growing crops.

In 2019 we used the outdoors to ease transition from elementary to senior school, as year 5 used the senior schools outdoor learning classroom for some of their sessions. This allowed the children to become familiar with the new campus and some of the staff. I hope this project and the use of the outdoors will continue with my input for many years to come.

In summary, key aspects that have run throughout the project are:

The children are involved in designing, creating, and building their outdoor classrooms, ensuring the key aspects of boundaries (that we can be on either side of), some gradients, different surfaces, organised signposted storage, and shelter are evident. These spaces are non-permanent so that each year the new influx of children can adapt and change the space. Children ensure use is sustainable, managing the erosion and habitats within the site.
An ever adjusting and evolving programme of delivery, in which over the years, we have tried varied timetabling, staffing arrangements, integration with various aspects of the PYP, and duration/time blocks.

The project has succeeded because:

Children have appropriate clothing, that is stored and dried (boots and waterproofs)
There is good peer support and co-operative working
Management, staff, and parents are supportive and motivated by OLE
We start with the youngest children and progress spiraling up through the years to senior school
And finally, Outdoors in is not treated as separate but integrated into units of inquiry, phonics, mathematics, and trans-disciplinary skills

The last word I will leave with Fernanda, an English as an Additional Language teacher:

“When I first started teaching in the outdoors, I was not sure what my expectations were. I did not see myself as an outdoor person. Astonishingly my students taught me what I did not know. I learned from my students that their learning was not only a classroom lesson. I learned from them to love the outdoors. They showed me that they could retrieve new concepts every time we went to the outdoor environment. My students learned routines quickly. They learned first-hand to describe the weather, their feelings, what to wear to stay warm and/or dry. I was surprised that my role was more of a guide than of a teacher. My students were eager to go outside every day. The outdoors turned out to be a friendly, non-threatening environment where children were not afraid to make mistakes, felt free to explore and make new discoveries. Their imagination and creativity was truly stimulated. Photo: Reflection a previous Outdoor Learning Environment experience and the order in which it occurred.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

For the past 15 years as an Education Consultant, Kate has taught in nature kindergartens, schools, and early years settings, through her coaching and project work. In tandem, she delivers and designs Continuous Professional Development training courses (face to face, online and webinars) and keynotes speeches. Her work takes her throughout the UK, into Europe and beyond (namely, USA, Canada, India, and Australia). Her passion is to cascade this learning and empower others to deliver fantastic outdoor learning programmes.

Kate mainly does this through coaching in context, continuous professional development training, and creating written materials. She delivers, assesses and internally verifies qualifications in Forest School and Learning Beyond the Classroom. Contact may be face to face or remote (online). These sessions last a half a day, evening, full-day, or an extended time block for a project. Common delivery themes include: Adult role & interaction, Benefit-Risk Assessment, curriculum coverage outside, and child interpersonal skills development. To read more about Kate, please click here.

www.linkedin.com/in/kate-hookham-dolearn

www.facebook.com/dolearn.co.uk

k8dolearn@gmail.com

The key to attracting and retaining students

11 August 2020/in Admissions/by ECIS

Esther Clark, Director of Marketing, Wey Education plc.

Attracting and retaining students and of course teachers, is the natural goal of all schools. However, for international schools the fluid nature of their audience means that achieving this can be a constant challenge. So, what are some schools doing to make their offering more attractive to new families and convert their student population from fluid to solid? Esther Clark, Director of Marketing at Wey Education, provider of the online school InterHigh, explains how Wey Education works in partnership with schools to help them achieve their goals.

Mobility, rather than stability, is often the norm for students in international schools. Generally linked to their parents’ careers, a proportion of the school population does not remain long enough to benefit from an uninterrupted educational experience. Naturally most schools believe this is beyond their control but for the schools we work with, this doesn’t have to be the case.

InterHigh is the UK’s leading online school. Since it opened in 2005, we have taught more than 10,000 pupils, currently with around 3,000 pupils in the school community. Between 40-60 per cent of pupils are ‘international’ whether that means they study outside of UK or are non-UK citizens resident in the UK.

Lessons are delivered in live, interactive classrooms by professionally qualified British teachers. We offer a full British curriculum; as pupils move through the school, they can study a full range of IGCSE and A Level courses. In 2018, our fully qualified, subject specialist teachers helped our learners achieve a 98 per cent pass rate at English GCSE and 73% achieving levels 9-4 across all subjects.

Flexibility

What makes us different from traditional schools is that our teaching is flexible, accessible and online. Some students are full time while others are only with us for a few months or join us just to study one specific subject – which brings me to the explanation of how working with us benefits international schools.

Attracting new students

By their very nature, families looking for the best school for their children come with certain criteria: a British curriculum delivered by British teachers, with the highest quality standards and pass marks in a broad range of subjects.

It is this last requirement, namely the broad range of subjects, that many international schools may struggle to support. Children coming from overseas to a new school often come with an expectation to continue to study subjects from their previous school. This could include IGCSE curriculum areas such as accounting or any number of languages from Arabic to Malay. The flexibility of InterHigh means that if an international school doesn’t have a teacher in place to offer any area of the curriculum, the students may be able to ‘attend’ InterHigh remotely, just for this subject. Offering this flexibility and breadth of subjects is a highly attractive option to many families. By working with us it enables the school to show that it can off a broader range of subjects. InterHigh, in essence, becomes a powerful extension to a school and their learning offer.

The other issue that international schools face is the natural flow of students arriving and leaving each year, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

Let’s take student and table tennis champion Anna Hursey as an example. As the youngest athlete in the history of any sport to compete in the Commonwealth Games, Anna’s training schedule makes her education increasingly complex. Anna used to study at Cardiff High School in Wales, a mixed comprehensive school in the UK. It was a brilliant school and she did well, but as the pressure of her training impacted on her schooling, this started to impact her academically. She therefore left her school to join InterHigh which allowed her to continue with her education whilst developing her table tennis career. Wherever she was in the world, she was able to progress with her education alongside her training. However, this didn’t have to be a permanent shift. An alternative option for Anna would have been to stay at Cardiff High School when she was in the UK and simply continue her GCSE studies with InterHigh when she was training overseas and needed that level of flexibility.

“I graduated InterHigh this past summer, getting A-levels in German, French, Literature and English. I am so amazed with how everything has turned out, but I am also very, very happy. My 14-year-old self would not recognise me today. I am incredibly grateful to my parents for home-schooling me and to InterHigh, for showing me what a gift education is and believing in me. Thank you InterHigh for changing my life.” Amy Lally, alumni, InterHigh

Another example is year 10 French student Adrien. Because of his father’s business, and his mother working between Australia and France, Adrien constantly moves between the two countries. Despite being happy with the education he could receive in Sydney the same couldn’t be said when he returned to spend time in France. Living right near the French Swiss border, the best teachers often get jobs in the Swiss schools which pay two to three times higher salaries. Therefore, the schools near Adrien didn’t offer the standard of education his family expected, and they also wanted Adrien to maintain his education in English.

So, during his time in France InterHigh became Adrien’s favoured option. “I love the freedom that InterHigh offers where you can balance lesson time with self-study. I have four, 40-minute lessons a day with plenty of homework that I can do at any time that suits me. With international flights likely to be limited for the foreseeable future, I feel lucky to have a constant stable education that I love.”

When asked if he finds learning at home lonely, Adrien explains, “No! It gives me the freedom to work around going out and seeing my friends, attending boxing classes and the theatre.”

Whether families need that flexibility because their child is a young actor, model, athlete or entrepreneur or if they want to study a subject not offered by their local school, InterHigh welcomes working with international schools to fill long or short-term requirements. We can support schools with a blended alternative or find the right resource to fill the needs of a future looking school especially as schools seek out and re-evaluate their online offering and teaching solution.

Covid-19

If we can find an upside amongst all the outcomes of Covid, it is the fact that there has been a huge swell of appreciation of the benefits of online learning and remote work. With Covid likely to disrupt schooling for some time to come, our teachers who are highly experienced at teaching virtually and delivering the highest quality, stable education, are an attractive option for schools, families, students and teachers.

To discuss a partnership with Wey Education in more detail, please visit:

https://interhigh.co.uk/education-partnerships/schools/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Esther Clark is Marketing Director at Wey Education Plc. She is also an author and contributor to Forbes, America Economia and the World Economic Forum (WEF). Esther is a Peter Drucker Global Challenge winner and executive leader who promotes and practices human centered management and integrated thinking.

Creating Authentic Marketing Messages and a Value Proposition to Build School Enrolment.

3 August 2020/in Marketing, Admissions/by ECIS

Dr Stephen Holmes B Ed, MBA, M Ed Admin, PhD (School Marketing and Reputation)

Creating Authentic Marketing Messages and a Value Proposition to Build School Enrolment.

For so many international schools, the economic reverberations of the world health crisis have rapidly translated to a confronting enrolment and marketing challenge for Boards, owners and leadership teams.

In many ways, it has put centre stage something that was already a building problem for so many schools – weaknesses in the authenticity and impact of their marketing and marketing messages. While there has been increased recognition of the potential importance of marketing in schools, they still find it difficult to define and communicate points of difference in compelling and cogent ways to audiences. A precondition to build enrolment is an authentic, cogent and compelling identity driven by marketing messaging that impacts.

A quick search of international school websites continues to suggest that creating authentic, differentiated marketing messages is beyond most schools. Straplines and slogans on websites (i.e. integrated into brand schemes), have become commonplace to try and convey a distinctive school identity. In general, they are illusionary, and expensive. Despite improvements in the public ‘look and feel’ of schools, a systemic weakness in schools is the continued lack of influence and impact of marketing messages on parent choice and the authenticity (originality) of marketing messages. Hence so many schools have weak value propositions (USPs). We live in a world of fake news, rejection of logic, illusion and instantaneous sharing. Marketing messaging of reputable institutions like schools surely has to take all of that into account and do better!

And it’s not just problems with the actual marketing messages, schools typically have far too many messages – they tend to be too inclusive and say something about almost everything in the hope that something will connect.

A narrow and deep set of messages explained in terms of actual benefit to the student/parent, why they are valuable and matter both in the short and long term, and proof that they are a reality across the student/parent journey is a far more compelling narrative for school audiences. In this regard, we can learn one lesson from the corporate world – top brands are usually associated with a very small (not more than 2-3) set of attributes in achieving penetrative and attractive identities.

To impact on public perception and enrolment, school marketing must be more than ‘lots of activity’ pushing out similar messages that aim to connect with increasingly diverse audience preferences and expectations.

Marketing Messaging: Pitfalls to Avoid and the ‘To Do’ List

For the foreseeable future, we think that the quality of marketing messaging in schools will be a tipping point and catalyst for market success or failure.

How can schools effectively address the challenges they face in the search for the ‘right’ marketing messaging in a time of enrolment pressure?

Our work with schools on marketing over 3 decades manifests in 6 crucial guidelines for action to review and enhance marketing messaging.

1. MESSAGING PITFALLS

Schools struggle to distinguish or differentiate themselves, nor explain compelling and cogent reasons to choose them (enrol) over other alternate schools.