At the beginning of July this year I finished up as Principal of Hobsonville Point Secondary School after being the Foundation Principal for 10 years. For the 10 years prior to that I was Principal of Opotiki College and its Deputy Principal for 10 years before that. That's a lot of time in senior school leadership in 2 quite different contexts.
On the last day of the term (my last day at work with students and staff) I experienced a whole school send-off like nothing I had experienced or been part of before. This short video clip captures the culmination of that event.
The school had never performed a whole-school haka before and I discovered that they had spent Term 2 secretly practising it!
I have not shared this in this post because I think I'm anything special and I know others in similar situations have experienced similar to this. What this event did for me, though, was to make me stop and think, at the end of my school leadership career, what was the impact I did have and how did that come about. These are quite complex questions and will take some time to process and come to some conclusions.
I have decided that I still have more to contribute in the area of school leadership and am going to see if I can find ways to work alongside school leaders and aspiring school leaders (in secondary and primary schools) to support them to be the very best transformational leaders that they can be. I will be looking to work with those who want to move beyond being great managers of the status quo to being transformational, to lead with student and staff wellbeing at the centre, to address inequity, and to empower staff and students to be active engagers in the teaching and learning process so that they thrive in a rapidly changing and disrupted world.
To support this aspiration I will be launching my company HMWLead (How Might We Lead) in a couple of weeks, including a website with information which may help leaders decide if it would be of value to work together. While we could co-construct support for any aspect of school leadership, a summary of the areas where we could work together is as follows:
Leadership - How might we develop a personal model of leadership that gives us the confidence to lead others on a journey of transformation?
Reflective Practice - How might we support leaders to explore and implement a critical
reflective culture within their school?
Growth - How might we support leaders to implement a powerful 'growth cycle' in their school?
Visioning and Strategic Action- How might we support leaders to support the why and how of designing a powerful learning
vision for their school?
Team Development - How might we support leaders to understand the thinking preferences of their staff/teams and
grow capacity so that distributed leadership can effectively support the drive for transformation?
Restorative Practice - How might we support leaders to support the implementation of behaviour
management processes that are driven by the principles of restorative practice?
Connected Curriculum - How might we help leaders to support the why and how of designing a connected curriculum
model for their school?
Dispositional Curriculum - How might we support leaders to explore the opportunities to develop a dispositional curriculum
and related graduate profile?
Any way, there'll be more to come. Reach out to me on maurie@hmwlead.co.nz
if you can't wait for the launch and want to start talking!
