ELN 2024 Programme dates and venue

Focus for Year

Leadership capabilities to ensure the implementation and sustaining of school practice to positively impact learning and teaching

Schedule of Professional Learning 2024

Term 1

14 February
28 February
13 March

Term 2

8 May
29 May
19 June

Term 3

31 July
21 August
11 September

Term 4

16 October
6 November

Venue

Elim Botany Campus

159 Botany Road, Botany Downs, Auckland 2010

Date
Time
Venue
Wednesday 14 February
7:00 am – 8:20 am
Elim Christian College, Botany Campus

Title:

Deeper Change Part 1: Revisiting implementation gaps

Nugget of Learning: A school from our network shares a key insight into a collaborative leadership practice they find impactful.

With a focus on starting well with the new school year, planning has taken priority both collectively and individually. Within days once students are back, the familiar patterns kick in, and our focus (rightly) turns to the present situation, the following day, and the rest of the week. Sometimes, our interventions regarding patterns may drift into the background. At the end of last year, we focused on deeper patterns and how they may contribute to implementation gaps over time. Some of these deeper patterns may be associated with:

  • Too many other initiatives;
  • (Un)intentional siloes;
  • Problem framing;
  • Hesitancy around having challenging conversations with colleagues;
  • Staff capacity and well-being;
  • Relying on untested assumptions;
  • Insufficient data – e.g. student voice, and so on.

The three workshops of this term are shaped to be interventions that help you address repeated deeper patterns of practice that have hindered implementation of plans in the past. This is a form of school improvement that sits beneath the surface and can get a bit lost in the busyness of each week. In this first workshop your school group will need to come prepared knowing what your change initiatives for 2024 are. We will introduce a framework for deeper dialogue that you will be invited to use in each workshop. The main focus of this first workshop will be to have time identifying together what some actual, assumed, and possible hindrances will be.

Listening Deck: At the end of each session this term you pair with someone from another school to share impactful practices and to develop closer across school connections.

ELN Team for this session: Howard Youngs, Maggie Ogram

Wednesday 28 February
7:00 am – 8:20 am
Elim Christian College, Botany Campus

Title:

Deeper Change Part 2: Navigating beneath the surface of habitual practices

Nugget of Learning: Implementing and Sustaining: We hear from one of our network schools in relation to their leadership practices to support the implementing and sustaining of strategies to progress identified school strategic goals for 2024.

Habitual practices stay in play for numerous reasons. Some contribute to learning, development and trust. Some reflect who we are and in the words of Parker Palmer, “we teach who we are for better or for worse”, perhaps it is the same for leading, “we lead who we are ...”. Other habits leak out in certain situations. For example, avoidance, control, cliques, untested assumptions, independence, rigidity, fatalism, driveness, and corridor gossip. This is the realm of going beneath the surface. When organisations intentionally navigate at this level and address challenges amidst day-to-day practices, new habits are formed. Habits that may lead to a lessening of workload and anxiety and contribute to further improving implementation of plans as well as staff well-being. In a way these may be considered as a series of ‘one percent gains’. In this second workshop we guide you towards developing coherent and focused leadership inquiries and goals that help you stay engaged at this deeper level as you go about implementing change initiatives during 2024. These are leadership inquiries that help disable habitual practices that may hinder implementation.

Listening Deck: At the end of each session this term you pair with someone from another school to share impactful practices and to develop closer across school connections.

ELN Team for this session: Howard Youngs, Maggie Ogram

Wednesday 13 March
7:00 am – 8:20 am
Elim Christian College, Botany Campus

Title:

Deeper Change Part 3: Nurturing ongoing collaborative leadership inquiry

Nugget of Learning: Implementing and Sustaining: We hear from one of our network schools in relation to their leadership practices to support the implementing and sustaining of strategies to progress identified school strategic goals for 2024.

A key practice that enables us address deeper and unproductive habitual practices is engaging in dialogue. During this workshop we will offer some tools and guidelines that help shift conversations into a deeper level where assumptions may be safely surfaced and tested. Howard and Maggie will role-play before inviting you to put into practice dialogue tools. Central to this workshop is your group identifying where across your school dialogue is required to help address deeper patterns that may be hindering implementation. We hope this will provide some additional means for you to lessen implementation gaps this year, so that any unproductive patterns contributing to gaps in the past start to be transformed for the greater good through 2024.

Listening Deck: At the end of each session this term you pair with someone from another school to share impactful practices and to develop closer across school connections.

ELN Team for this session: Howard Youngs, Maggie Ogram

 

If you have any queries regarding these forthcoming sessions please contact:

maggie@ospreyconsulting.co.nz