Name and Title: Tim McNevin; Deputy Executive Director
School or Organization Name: Association of Independent Schools of the ACT
Area of the World from Which I Will Present: Australia
Language in Which I Will Present: English
Target Audience(s): School leaders, system leaders, school teachers, policy makers
Short Session Description (one line):
Leadership and Innovation in Education - a reflection following my international study tour in September and October 2016
Full Session Description:
My name is Tim McNevin and I am the Deputy Executive Director of the Association of Independent Schools of the ACT in Australia and the Owner and Managing Director of Milestone Life Coaching and Consultancy.
I was awarded a scholarship to undertake an international study tour to explore the relationship between leadership and innovation in a variety of educational contexts around the world.
My journey encompassed 18 schools in 4 countries across 3 continents: US, England, Scotland and Netherlands.
My investigations considered what can be learned about visionary educational leadership in other countries, and how that learning can be applied to schools in the ACT and more broadly across Australia, and indeed, internationally. My study tour experience enabled me to look at examples internationally to observe highly effective leadership in practice, innovative practice across the school, and speak to leaders in those contexts that would be able to share with me wisdom and experience about what works and what doesn’t work with regard to leading and fostering high levels of innovation, learner engagement and educational progress.
My activity to date and ongoing is to take in as many high quality sites as possible to capture the various experiences and document them and identify the common elements, and perhaps the not so common elements, present in each.
The dates when I travelled for this initial Chapter of investigations was 19 September to 16 October 2016.
My study tour and my engagement with leaders in each school and system allowed me to explore and answer range of questions such as:
- What management structures best suit innovation?
- What are the attributes of leadership necessary to promote and foster effective innovation and to lead meaningful change?
- What are three key things your school has done to be so effective in creating great change?
- What curriculum reforms have been necessary to enable effective innovation?
- What are the most effective ways to engage with the community of your school to enable change and to address and overcome any barriers to change?
- What’s the single biggest barrier you have had to overcome with your community?
- How do you lead and guide a whole school community through significant change?
- What are the most effective scaling and diffusion strategies that can be applied to ensure that change and benefit are shared between schools?
- What policy challenges have the various journeys of success overcome and what were the best strategies for overcoming these policy barriers?
- What accelerators have been seen to advance the journey toward innovation?
- How did you define success when you began your journey of change?
- How would you describe success now?
- What measures of success have been applied in different contexts and how have these been measured?
My session will summarise many of my experiences, synthesise these into meaningful reflections and highlight some potential ongoing investigative strands.
Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session:
Replies