Leadership

Building strong, purposeful relationships with staff, students and school communities is a trait of highly effective principals – but what happens to that relationship dynamic when expected ways of working suddenly change?

In Principled, Dr Paul Browning draws on his own research and more than 20 years of school leadership experience to offer advice on ‘the 10 key practices that can help executives build and develop skills to become more trustworthy leaders’. This extract for Teacher readers is taken from the chapter titled ‘Offering trust’.

All Australian schools and school leaders are currently managing change in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even under ‘normal’ circumstances, change is a difficult process to lead. How can schools implement effectively and efficiently, to support student learning in such unprecedented times?

Melanie Macmillan, Principal of Warwick Farm Public School, shares how her experience in The Principals’ Centre in Australia: Leadership for School Excellence program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education strengthened her professionally as a school leader, but it also helped her to understand how she could better support the needs of families at her school.

Fostering a sense of school pride and meeting the individual needs of every student are just two priorities for Melanie Macmillan, Principal of Warwick Farm Public School. In today’s article she shares how she focuses on community partnerships, visible leadership and student engagement to achieve those goals.

Teachers and school leaders spend considerable effort and time writing and checking student reports, but how effective are they in communicating student learning? We speak to principal Anthony Hockey about what he found when considering this question in his school context.

Assumption College in Kilmore has been implementing a curriculum reform initiative called ‘myMAP’ for the beginning of the 2020 school year. In today’s Q&A, Vaughan Cleary, Deputy Principal of Learning and Teaching, explains how it works in practice and supports students on their individual learning journeys.

Can student voice offer insights into how schools can improve reading achievement? A new Australian study examining the link between secondary students’ attitudes towards school and reading performance has found that experiencing bullying has a strong relationship with how students perform on the NAPLAN reading assessment.

Today’s article takes a look at some of the resources to help school communities and educators support students, parents and colleagues affected by the bushfire crisis, practical advice for the classroom and things to look out for.

Teacher takes a sneak peek at the new book from Helen Timperley, Fiona Ell, Deidre Le Fevre and Kaye Twyford. In this extract from Leading Professional Learning: Practical strategies for impact in schools, the authors discuss how leaders can support others to take risks.