Exploring Learning

In the evolving landscape of education, schools must respond to the growing complexity of factors, including rapid technological changes, shifting pedagogical expectations, and diverse student needs. These demands call for increasingly adaptive leadership models. Distributed leadership is a compelling approach, shifting leadership from hierarchical structures to a shared responsibility that leverages the expertise of multiple stakeholders. International schools offer a vibrant context for this, as their structural and pedagogical complexity, paired with diverse student populations, requires consistently agile and inclusive leadership. Middle leaders, in particular, are well-positioned to enact this vision by fostering collaboration in curriculum and assessment planning, as they straddle leadership while remaining firmly rooted at the chalkface.  This review examines how middle leaders in international schools can enact distributed leadership as a foundation for collaborative practi...

Reflections on the First Week of Classroom Observations This year, classroom visits are framed by a Looking for Learning approach. The premise is simple: rather than focusing on what the teacher is doing, a small set of questions is used to gain a deeper understanding of the students' learning experience. Over the course of the year, the lens is through these four guiding questions: What are you learning today? Why do you think you are learning this, and how does it connect to what you have done before? How is your thinking shifting? How will you know you have been successful in your learning? These questions are deceptively simple, but they open windows into clarity, purpose, metacognition , and self-assessment. For this first phase, however, I deliberately chose to begin with just one: What are you learning today? At the start of a new academic year, it did not feel appropriate to press students yet about how their thinking was shifting or how they would evalua...

  Educational leaders and managers consider their school’s goals as paramount, though the definition and scope of these roles differ slightly; managers are more concerned with maintenance, whilst leaders are more about initiating change (Cuban, 1988, p. 20). A leadership stance that carefully challenges the status quo whilst also finding balance by using existing practices and cultures to reach the new assessment goals will be most effective in navigating this change in assessment practice. Whilst school leaders play a role in creating and sustaining the school culture, it is not only down to those with leadership responsibilities but “as a dynamic between individuals within an organisation” (Harris, 2002). Engaging staff in the process is critical. Many teachers are long-standing and heavily embedded in current processes meaning the change will require a considerable cultural shift in the understanding of assessment if I am to help them “dismantle and emotionally let go of old way...