Strategic Schools
Get simple and practical ideas to enhance your educational leadership in under 20 minutes. Join educational researcher and author Dr Simon Breakspear as he shares key insights and practical tools that can help you to find greater focus, flow and impact in an increasingly overwhelming educational landscape.
Each year Simon Breakspear works with hundreds of schools and thousands of educational leaders. He received a degree in Psychology from The University of NSW, a Master of Science from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Education from The University of Cambridge.
Strategic Schools
Ep. 28: Focus on the Next 5-8 Weeks
In this episode, Simon shares why school improvement is more like night driving than building a bridge - you can’t see the whole road, but you can still make the journey. He unpacks how working in 5 to 8 week action cycles can help teams stay focused, reduce overload, and make consistent progress. Instead of overplanning years in advance, learn to make realistic, intentional decisions for the term ahead - and build momentum, one stretch at a time.
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I'm Simon Breakspear and this is Strategic Schools, the show that shares practical ideas and tools to enhance your educational leadership. There's a quote I love that actually originally all about the challenge of writing a novel. El Doctorow, as quoted in Writers at Work in the Paris Review interviews in 1988, says this Writing a novel is like driving a car at night you can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. It's a brilliant image, isn't it? We've all had an experience, I'm sure, of driving at night, of losing visibility in front of you, maybe even putting on the high beams making sure no car's coming in the other direction, and suddenly, okay, I can see that far. I can see there's a turn coming up, or I, I can see that need to be a little bit aware of that. And and then just driving that section. Then, of course, just driving the next section that lights up, and driving the next section that lights up.
Speaker 1:Well, I've adapted this quote in the last couple of years in a lot of my workshops on implementation and I executing improvement or leading school improvement is like driving a car at night you can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. This is a powerful kind of analogy when we think about school improvement. Of course, when you want to make a trip, you don't just start driving, you actually have a destination in mind. And so too, in school improvement it's really important to have yearly and three and four yearly destinations in mind. I often call these sort of low resolution destinations comes. Learn a behavior, teach a practice, teach a collaboration, engagement with parental, parents and community and caregivers. There's things we want to shift in learning and teaching and well-being behavior. I could go on.
Speaker 1:But sometimes it's kind of crazy to think that when you're making a plan for three or four years or making a plan for the next one year, that somehow you could milestone exactly what you're going to be doing. You know two or three terms from now or, even worse, two or three years from now. I call this milestone madness. I see many states over time have asked their school leaders to get together and to map out what will you be doing in year two, and then what will you be doing in year three and what will you be doing in year four, and how will that all add up to the movement and the literacy outcome? It's like I get the intensity and the kind of intentionality behind it. I respect that.
Speaker 1:But has anyone ever worked with a school team that's improved literacy, numeracy, attendance, behavior, well-being? It never works out like that. It's not like building a bridge where you have some perfect view of what it's going to look like at the end and we can map out in some sort of perfect Gantt chart exactly. You know each step along the way we work with humans in complex, messy work. So I've learned one of the most important things to get in the habit of as we start to lead improvement is to have a clear line of sight in the directionality we're going, but be okay with just traveling as far as we can see in our current headlights, which for me is about five to eight weeks, about five to eight weeks Maybe when your headlights are on you can see 50 to 80 meters, maybe a little bit longer in really bright lights, but I think in school improvement really bright lights, but I think in school improvement you can see about five to eight weeks in front. Then I help school teams of course have their longer term directionality of travel, but then ask as we move into this term and we think about the next five to eight weeks of our improvement cycle.
Speaker 1:What specifically are we going to work on and what specifically are we going to get done? Let's just look and make some decisions here about what are the highest priorities and let's break it down. Chunk it down and prioritize, that is, to choose. What will we get done on the next five to eight weeks of school improvement? Let's not overwhelm ourselves with the constant backlog of things we can do. We're welcome to kind of list all those things out, but then we should be kind to ourselves and choose, not taking on too much over a given period and not overextending the extent that we can kind of somehow know how all things are going to play out. Instead, just carefully choose and prioritize a few things we'll focus on in the next five to eight weeks. Be really clear about explicitly limiting the amount of work in progress, setting that work in progress limit to reduce that sense of overload and sustain momentum. Take on those realistic things and then work through and complete that cycle of five to eight weeks. Work as you come up. Out of the end of that you can learn some lessons, see what's happening now and then take the next five to eight weeks of work.
Speaker 1:I find this approach interesting Of working in rapid action cycles of five to eight weeks is one of the most simple and powerful ways to get unlocked, to not overload ourselves and instead to make consistent progress.
Speaker 1:If you've got big aspirations for what you want to do over the next two to three to four years, if you've got some sharp intentions about where you want to move in the coming year, that's great. But school improvement is a lot like driving a car at night you can only see as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. Once you've got clarity about that long-term destination, focus now on just the next five to eight weeks. Make clear and conscious and intentional and realistic decisions about what you as an improvement team will get done. Deliver against those and then bring your head up and say what's the context now that we're managing and how can we take our next steps forward. Well, thanks for tuning in today. I hope you're getting a huge amount of value out of these practical ideas. One last request before you go I'd genuinely appreciate it if you could subscribe, rate and review this show. It's the easiest way for us to get these ideas into the hands of even more educational leaders.