Part 3: Leadership learnings from opening a new school

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Recap

Part 1 introduced this series of articles about my leadership learnings from opening a new school.

Part 2 ended with a summary of the process that we found ourselves going through to “win our school community” as a new school:

Wooing

Capture the mind

 Begin to engage the heart

 Be faithful over time

 Capture the heart

 Keep being faithful

In this part I will describe some actions that we took to “capture the mind” and then to begin to “engage the hearts” of our school community.

“Capturing the mind”

Many parents commented that the information sessions we held at Thyme Café prior to the school opening were significant in positively shifting their thinking about the new school. At the first information session, I showed the RSA Animates Changing Educational Paradigms YouTube clip with Sir Ken Robinson speaking. This provided the big picture rationale for developing Amesbury School as a 21st century learning environment. It resonated and people got it. Many commented that through that brief presentation, they had made quite big cognitive shifts in their thinking and the need for 21st century learning now made sense to them. Through a very simple but effective presentation that connected the dots for them, their minds had been “captured” – at least initially.

As the parent said (Parent Story, Part 2), the second information session was much more interactive, and was much more centred around what this 21st century learning would look like in practice. What does homework in a 21st century learning environment look like, for example? Once again, our responses connected positively with the ideas of the parents who attended and made sense to them. Many of them enrolled their children as a direct result of these Thyme Café sessions.

My feeling is that “capturing” the minds of the community was not a difficult matter because what we were proposing resonated and made sense to them. Our presentations connected with where their thinking was at and gave them the words to articulate it, both to themselves and others. 21st century learning went from being a bit of a way out, wacky philosophy, to making sense to them and gaining some reputability.

 “Beginning to engage the heart” 

Showing, not just telling

The information presented at these sessions was significant in engaging the minds of our community, however, the sessions were also significant in the process of beginning to engage their hearts. These were opportunities to send some significant messages through the ways that we did things about what would be important at Amesbury School. We thought carefully about the messages we wanted to communicate through these sessions, and we were very deliberate in our planning to achieve them. We focused on creating a rich, positive experience, rather than just “doing” a meeting.

To illustrate, one of the things we had been told by people in the Churton Park community was that they generally got low turnouts to school or ECE events. I asked about the format of these meetings and was told that they happened in the evening and that children were not invited. I wondered whether, perhaps, people did not attend these meetings because children were not a part of them. We were to be a “family” school, so we planned our sessions for early evening and children were invited and catered for. Urs and Angela provided activities for the children so that parents could then focus on the more formal part of the sessions with me. We chose a café setting so that it would have a warmer atmosphere and encourage participation. People arrived and we provided good coffee, tasty food and a convivial atmosphere. At the second meeting, we asked parents to talk together and record their thoughts on the kind of school culture they wanted and what was important to them about such issues as behaviour management.

At these meetings we were deliberate about sending a number of messages, both through what we said and through the format, organisation, context as well as content of these meetings. These messages included:

  • 21st century learning was underpinned by a strong body of research and rationales

  • We demonstrated positive relationships between school staff, Establishment Board of Trustee members and the Ministry of Education

  • We would be a strongly family-oriented school

  • Hospitality and generosity would be an important aspect of our school culture and traditions

  • We would listen to parents and parents would have a strong voice in the ongoing development of the school

  • We believed that parents had important contributions to make to the ongoing dialogue of education at Amesbury School

  • As staff, we were committed to being accessible, friendly and available to parents – we would get in close

  • That relationships are important, and openness, transparency and respect would characterise our relationships at Amesbury School

Another message we demonstrated was that student voice and agency would be important at Amesbury School. At these meetings, students had the opportunity to provide feedback on such matters as uniforms and school furniture. We carried out surveys and students tested the comfort of particular pieces of furniture, and we honoured their voices by taking on board their perspectives in our decision-making.

We deliberately planned for there to be strong alignment between what we believed about teaching and learning and the format and content of our initial information sessions. This was a hugely impactful strategy, and I think our focus on ensuring alignment from day one, stands the school in good stead even today – ten or so years later.

Getting in close, self-disclosing, realising I was IT

Further, these were opportunities to “get in close” and disclose for potential community members, who we were as people. My increasing preference as a leader is to lead more from the wings rather than from centre stage. I don’t want the story to be about me. I have tended to think that because I am wooed and won by educational philosophy and theory that resonates and makes sense to me, that other people are the same. However, as much as I preferred to put the educational philosophy and vision for the new school at the forefront and position myself in the shadows behind it, intuitively I realised that this could not happen and that, as principal of a new school (actually, I suspect this is true for all leaders), people had their eyes on me as a person. They were not, first and foremost, entrusting their children to a philosophy or ideas, although as I have shown this was important; but they were entrusting their precious children to a person.

Bolander (1995), when exploring new schools, said, “The effectiveness of the school and its resulting image, rested heavily on the shoulders of the principal…The leader was seen as the model and facilitator of success. Parents and teachers, although willing to do their part, nevertheless looked to the principal to blaze and light the trail” (p. 18). In the absence of any history, traditions, achievement data etc., people looked to me, as the Parent Story in Part 2 showed. Though the introvert in me would have preferred to remain much more anonymous, I quickly realised that, at this point in the new school journey, I was IT. Even now, ten years later, when I make the mistake of thinking that I can sidle into the wings where I am much more comfortable (though I definitely want my ideas at the centre!) I am quickly made aware that I am still a central figure in the narrative that is playing out.

At times this felt like a huge burden. After all, who was I to be the central figure in such a narrative? As a very human human, I am aware that I will never be able to live up to others’ expectations in the long term and I know with absolute certainty that somewhere along the way (and probably frequently) I WILL let people down. However, in spite of my feelings about how fraught this situation was, I have discovered over time that the adage that, “People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care” (John C. Maxwell) is true and so I intentionally got in close, realising that, in the absence of anything else, for the community at this time, it was about me. If they found me genuine and believable, they were more likely to find the school believable. I quickly realised that this was even more important given that I would be viewed as a little “different”.

So, I used networks of people I knew from my family’s many years involved in athletics and running to organise coffee mornings in the suburb at the homes of possible parents and as discussed above, we organised information sessions at a local café in the evenings. We held lunches or sessions (always with food) at the house that we were renting as the school office (and that my family also lived in). I have a very clear memory of a woman attending one of our luncheons who was just about due to have a baby. They joined the school, and her husband became a trustee in our first board elections and has been the Board Chair for some years now. It is hard to believe that the baby boy who was born shortly after that session has now been through Amesbury school and is due to leave at the end of 2022 to attend intermediate school!

We did one-on-one visits to people’s homes when they preferred it. I took as many opportunities as possible to meet people one-on-one. I purposefully included bits and pieces about myself and my family in the regular newsletters we delivered to all the homes in the zone and sometimes more broadly. As a family, we lived within the school zone, although for quite some time it felt like we were living in a fishbowl. I spent time walking around the community, choosing to deliver pamphlets myself, and getting to know its streets and trying to get a feel for the community. I always noticed that the community was much quieter than the one I had come from where raucous games and often very physical play happened out on the streets. Here, children were all inside the large houses and to me it was eerily quiet (other than the time it snowed, and people could be seen on the streets throwing snowballs and skiing down Amesbury Drive). I remember delivering pamphlets one day and being surprised by a lot of screaming, and through a large window I could see a brother and sister engaged in a physical altercation. I could feel my shoulders drop and my whole body relax, because this felt more like home!

The workload of setting up a new school from scratch was huge and we were often drowning in detail; for example, making decisions about minute things like the height of hand basins or toilets or deciding on the placement of power outlets.  It would have been easy to get stuck at the office, swamped in the detail of school buildings, but with the encouragement and support of the Establishment Board, I made meeting and being available to the community in formal and informal ways, a priority. I very deliberately tried to be as open and transparent in every meeting as possible, letting those present see who I am - my passion for education and for family, my sense of social justice and care for people. I told stories about myself and my family so the community could get to know me, and, when the right moment arose, I would talk about home schooling our children, providing my perspective rather than allowing other critical voices to go unchallenged. Actually, I have always argued that my willingness to home school our children illustrates my belief that there are many pathways to successful learning and that it is about what is best for each person in their particular contexts. It was interesting to me that shortly after our school’s opening, several parents at Amesbury School commented to me that the personalisation of education at Amesbury School felt like home schooling within an institutional context.

When Urs Cunningham and Angela Johnston joined the team as associate principals, we continued with our deliberate strategy of getting close to our community. As students were enrolled, with parental permission, Urs and Angela visited them at their early childhood centres or schools (where schools allowed this) and spoke with their teachers. In November and December 2011, we ran a series of transition sessions for students who had enrolled (or were looking to enrol) so that they would have some knowledge of us before they began on day one. At these sessions, we trialled students calling us by our first names to see how parents and students reacted. A few parents asked us about it, but, in general, it appeared to be a non-issue and so it has continued as school policy to this day.

These transition sessions were really hard! The school was not yet available, so we held them in the Johnsonville Community Centre Hall. It was not our space. They were not our children yet. Of course, parents stayed so we felt less able to insist on the kind of behaviour we would have expected at school. The sessions took place after the children had had a full day of school, and it wasn’t school, so we did not want to act too much like school teachers; and, because we did not know the children, we did not know how to pitch the sessions. I think we did this better as the sessions progressed. We were not particularly happy with our performance at these sessions, but we certainly got to know the children who would be our students a little better, and it enabled us, once again, to show that we would, as a school, value children and their families. These sessions were also a great opportunity, particularly for me, to mix and mingle and talk one-on-one with parents. In spite of our slightly mixed feelings about these sessions, we did model some clear messages about who we would be as a school and what we would stand for. We let them know that we cared for our students and wanted to support a smooth transition for them into our school.

Conclusion

Telling a coherent story through alignment of actions and words, modelling - showing and not just telling, getting in close and (selectively) disclosing who you are as a leader to build trust and connection were, in our experience, important in the process of winning our new school community. However, I also believe that these are relevant for all leaders as we engage in the never-ending process of continually “winning” our school communities or our customers or constituents. In Part 4 and Part 5 I will explore some ways we tried to be faithful to our community.