Advancing Teaching and Learning in the Era of Overwhelm

You’re a school leader committed to advancing teaching and learning across your school. When you look around your school, you’re not in crisis and likely know that good work is taking place, but you believe it can go to the next level of success. Your school already has teaching strategies that teachers know about or use and an established curriculum. Even if your school is getting positive data results (however measured), you can see that your school is ripe for advancement. In fact, you don’t want the kind of teaching and learning that’s just focused on students getting through exams or completing assignments. Instead, you want the kind of teaching and learning that helps students across your entire school go on to live bigger and better lives. You believe this is possible for your school.

By advancing teaching and learning school wide, I’m guessing what you want is to:
•    Move good teaching to great teaching (or if it’s great, move it to an advanced level) - across your school
•    Ensure teaching and learning are your school’s number-one  priority
•    Ensure long-term learning is sticking for all students, rather than focusing on task completion
•    Support teachers across your school in optimising what they do
•    Help your school be an innovative place for teaching and learning rather than a place of compliance.

But you might be feeling overwhelmed and stressed due to:
•    Constantly trying to ‘keep up’ with the latest new thing
•    Feeling like you’re working harder but are not sure if you’re getting lasting outcomes
•    Getting conflicting advice around the best way to advance teaching and learning
•    Sometimes being buried in compliance measures that simply add to your team’s overwhelm.

If you can relate to any of these aims and feelings, you’re not alone. I see it wherever I go.  And that because we’re now in a new era. I call it the era of overwhelm.

What’s the era of overwhelm?  It looks and feels something like this.

More and more is being asked of you and your school. You’re buried in information, new ideas and new ways of doing things. You might find yourself trying to ‘keep up’ with the latest strategies, initiatives, frameworks and requirements. This environment can increase your stress and mental load as you try to keep up and, because of all the constant changes and shifts of direction, leave you questioning whether you and your team are truly creating an impact that lasts. There may be a temptation to think that if the team works hard enough or finds a way to cut the ‘right things’ back, it can stay on top of things, hoping that the time of overload will eventually pass.

But from my vantage point, this era is here to stay, and it’s probably going to get worse. So how can innovative school leaders advance teaching and learning in this new era?  By leading a new way forward.

That new way forward happens not about ‘chasing’ the latest teaching strategies or working to create compliance measures across your school.  It happens by embedding a teaching and learning structure around your school that will help you bring everything you’re doing together, align new and experienced teachers and your leadership team and help you bring new information into your school with ease.

How do you do this?  By embedding:
•    An ambitious teaching and learning mission - that stays the same, even when things don’t.
•    A simply but powerful teaching and learning system - that empowers teachers and school leaders to reach that mission and optimise everything they do.
•    A clear definition of great teaching and learning - that gets to the crux of your school’s thinking around high quality teaching and learning.

Embedding this structure across your school will take leadership focus and time.  And time in the era of overwhelm is a precious commodity. But once in place, it can help lower collective stress, boost impact and create the kind of teaching and learning that helps make learning stick for everyone.

For good.