Yesterday, Friday 22nd May, would been the final day of IB exams for the Class of 2020, bringing to a close a big chunk of the work of the DPC, in my first year in the role.  Instead, we are looking forward to our first online graduation this evening, and looking back on a period that has brought our whole school community a good deal of confusion, disappointment, and grief.  Still in the midst of so many unknowns, it feels almost like tempting fate to pause for a moment to reflect on my own learning up to this point.  If one thing’s for sure it’s that we ain’t done yet, and who knows what the rest of this year might look like.  But, egotism aside, I want to quickly capture moments that have given rise to important learning for me, if only as a reminder of what I still need to work on!

Constants vs change

One of the few constants of our “new normal” (surely 2020’s most overused phrase?) has been the ever-presence of change and ambiguity.  There have been reversals and revisions at so many points, as the situation in Singapore has evolved, and our guidance from government and examinations bodies has changed.  For me, that has involved revisiting our approach to predicted grades, revising the EE timeline, and redrafting the IB assessment calendar all the time.  Sometimes, this has felt surprisingly ok: as someone new in the role, I didn’t have a ‘normal’ to compare it to, and so perhaps didn’t feel the same cognitive dissonance of someone used to things happening in a certain way year on year.  It was all new to me!  I’ve noticed, however, that when this has been harder when either 1) my ego steps in, and/or 2) the message is a hard one to deliver.  Meanwhile finding constants or commonalities has helped in particularly challenging moments.

• I’ve become conscious of an ‘ego-led’ response when I’ve felt uncomfortable at having to backtrack on something I’d previously said.  A good example of this was with the predicted grades, and what felt like a ‘climb down’ from having insisted that the IB would not use them to calculate final results (as was at this time the message).  It was a line I stuck by, even as colleagues started to question if this would change.  So when it did, I felt naive – but more than that, concerned that I had somehow disadvantaged students.  My ego – feeling like a wally – wanted to defensively explain everything, justify and exonerate myself.  But that was what my ego needed, not what people needed to hear in that moment, which was just honest and open communication based on the information we now had.
  • Knowing what I know now, I would have made my language in those earlier communications more tentative, or at least more explicitly contingent upon guidance from the IB.  I thought this was a ‘definite’, but it was one of the many ways we learned that they don’t really exist!

• Changes have been harder to weather when we’ve had to make a judgement, and that decision has not been easy to deliver.  Early on, this was around mock exams for G12s, knowing that any change would be unpopular with a number of teachers, students, and parents.  Even knowing this, it was hard to read the critical emails coming in, feeling our values and professionalism brought into question, with the implication that we hadn’t considered fairly common sense factors.  Questions around predicted grades, coursework timelines, and school re-opening have followed.  Each of these moments has brought up the ‘likeability’ problem: no one wants to piss-off the people they work with, and being liked as a woman in any kind of leadership position is a particular kind of challenge.
  • Knowing what I know now, I won’t be so quick to see disagreement as a problem that needs to be resolved or avoided.  A line I’ve found powerful is “I’m sorry we disagree on this.”  Sometimes a more respectful response is to allow people their view, without needing to persuade them of yours.  In each of these situations, there has been no clear right answer, only judgements – just being open about this, rather than staking out camps, has been useful.  It has also been important in allowing people their dignity in disagreement, and allowing space for this – rather than already painting them as wrong, or not sharing the same values.

• Once upon a time, I had the vague idea that school leaders possessed a perfect set of crystal clear principles – more than 2, fewer than 5 – that guided all decision-making.  And that you’d always know, as a leader, what to do, because your principles would show the way.  Ha!  Well, the last few weeks have shown both the truth and the nonsense of that.  It has far more often been the case that a situation has involved a (maybe irresolvable) tension between different – and worthy – values and concerns.  Rather than syllogistically applying pre-decided principles, it’s been far more valuable to instead think about sitting in amongst these tensions, asking a whole bunch of questions about our discomfort there, until our thinking converges on a narrative persuasive enough, kind enough, to show a way through.  This is far messier, and I’ve found myself being made aware of my tendency to want neatness in thinking; sometimes I’ve been reluctant to consider a contrary viewpoint or ‘inconvenient truth’, because I’d already got myself to a point which felt neat and final.  Knowing what I know now, this is something I need to guard against, and watch out for when ego is resistant to keeping thinking open: “when you know better, do better.”

• At other times, particularly with so many unknowns, it’s been important to find the hard lines or solid ground.  An example of this was when we were instructed by the IB to upload of all our IAs.  There was no way we could miss or mess around with deadlines here, and for most teachers it represented a considerable amount of work.  We didn’t really know at that point – and still don’t, really – how teachers’ comments and marks would be used, how grades would be awarded.  I was pleased with how I framed this as needing to let go some parts of this complex picture, and find the solid ground in the bigger picture: in this case, doing this final task for our students as best we knew how, regardless of other pressures and questions.  I was conscious of drawing on advice to try to move away from being only task-focused, and to motivate people by finding the ‘why’.

The Bigger Picture

Another thing I’ve learnt over the last few months has been to consider a much wider set of factors in any decision, beyond the educational.  Again, I think I had imagined that all decisions would pretty much come down to learning for our students, and in many ways they do, in the end.  By in conversations such as that we had across campuses with Dover showed me the importance of thinking beyond this: of the school, not just as a provider of education for its students, but as a community, as an employer, as a service, and party to an important contract with our families.  Quite unexpectedly, this has been a side of things that has fascinated and excited me – I have loved being a part of this kind of thinking, and learning about all the mechanics of a school community.  I know now that I can have the confidence to ask to be a part of these kinds of conversations, and am grateful to be surrounded by people I can learn  from:

• I liked how Rebecca started one of our meetings by acknowledging that it was an emotive topic; naming this made the conversation easier, and legitimised those feelings.
• I like how Nick always resists the neatness of binary thinking, and always makes this messy – in a good way!  I can be easily seduced by rhetoric and a nicely crafted argument, but Nick never is.
• From Ted I’ve learned the importance of detail, and know now that any issue or question I bring needs to be ready with the answers to: “but which classes?”  “how many students exactly?” “for how long?” “what does it say on CIMS?”  It made me realise that I am too often affected by impressions and opinions.

Targets

1. One part of the ‘bigger picture’ I’d to learn more about is being able to look for and narratives from data, eg around AGs and results.  I’m not really sure of the right questions to ask of the numbers to find interesting relationships, or to be able to spot what’s missing.  I’m also not sure how I get better at doing this!?
2. Being able to look ahead and anticipate has been a challenge this year, and sometimes impossible!  I’d like to look at how I can make things smoother next year by getting better at this, and we’ve started to do this in our conversations with scholars.
3. After the craziness of this year, I’d like to make sure I focus more next year on supporting the coordinators for the Core: Katie in particular, being new to the role, but also looking again at the TOK Arts days with Paul, and working with Uzay on EE comms and making best use of Managebac.
4. I have been blundering my way through with budgets, and I need to just sit down with someone in finance and ask them to explain everything to me.
5. CBTL – I’m want to be clearer on this process with departments, and how/ where I can add value.

Looking back at the start of this year,  I was totally preoccupied with how much I didn’t know, and the idea that people were questioning why I had been appointed.  Ironically, the events of the last few months – where nobody has had all the answers – have been freeing in this regard; there hasn’t really been time to worry so much about other people’s opinions of me!  I know that there are people – Kate, Nick, Ted – who will be honest with me when I need it, and so many others have gone out of their way to be supportive.  I hope I have been able to build a degree of trust with, for example, HODs; and recognise that I also need to presume positive intent more often in my colleagues…  Next year I want to focus on building those relationships so that I can work more effectively with people, rather than feeling all the time as though I have something to prove.