Building Efficacy and Coherence
Over the past two years, our work in Halton has been intentionally committed to building coherence across all levels of our organization. This work involves deepening our shared depth of understanding in implementing the goals identified in our multi-year plan. Through a focus on staff, students and system, we have leveraged the power of “Mentoring for All” as a structure to increase our collective efficacy in utilizing the leadership actions which will influence all organizational members and stakeholders and in turn lead to improved professional collaboration and increased student achievement.
De-privatizing Practice
As co-leaders bringing together the education and corporate perspectives, we initiated two steering teams. The first was our District level “Mentoring for All” steering committee with a group of interested principals, vice principals, teachers and corporate staff. Our work started with professional development opportunities for all interested members. Using the resource “Mentoring for All”, created by Jim Strachan, the opportunity to facilitate conversations about the importance of relationships, communication, and trust became the foundation of our sessions.
With positive impact feedback to motivate our next steps, we began to re-examine the existing mentoring structures within the District. The team decided to model “Mentoring Sites of Leading” after our existing “Sites of Learning” which was already in place for NTIP teachers. Our first effort to provide opportunities for experienced teachers, principals, vice principals, and secretarial staff was encouragingly successful. Half day experiences at a willing host site provided an entry point that was new and powerful in de-privatizing practice and promoting collaboration. What resulted was requests for more opportunities in the wider context of the Board. As members shared the value of the conversations they had with others in various roles within the District, the Mentoring Steering Team began to field inquiries and receive support for the continuation of this offering.
From Ideas to Actions
Our team conversations led us to consider how to better support the corporate members of our District. Although we were offering professional development sessions, there was still a gap. As a result, a dedicated Corporate Mentoring Steering Team was established to begin building a new structure specifically for this group. We have since established the following four goals that will guide our work this year.
First, we set out to define the differences between onboarding and mentoring both as a steering team and also by inviting input from across the Corporate Branch. Establishing small achievable steps has proven to be a successful way of creating new mechanisms for building positive mentor / mentee relationships. We decided that mentors would provide newly hired members with two things; a tour of the work facility and a communication plan to ensure a sense of inclusion and connection to the team. By organizing a contact plan, we wanted to ensure every new employee started with their first strand in the mentoring web.
Second we have designed what we are calling “corporate pods” through which we are offering an invitation to principals and vice principals to attend learning opportunities about various aspects of our roles that are directly related to school processes. These include areas such as IT, budget, health and safety and so on. The pod refers to a grouping of corporate members who will share information at an organized time and place. A great benefit of this goal is the connection that is made through face to face interaction between school based administrators and those based in the corporate field. This mentoring web serves to connect us across departments and the result is greater alignment of understanding which leads to a coherent systemness.
Our next two goals are visionary in that we expect to achieve these plans over the next year or so. As a third goal, we are working on connecting corporate employees within their own context so that more intentional succession planning and aspirations for growth will be transparent and supported. We believe that providing the opportunity to understand various roles within each department and offering formalized conversation time will result in greater overall professional collaboration.
Finally, working across our two steering teams, we hope to establish opportunities for our corporate members to spend time working in schools to better understand the processes that are currently in place. Through these focused experiences our goal is to work together to build efficiencies into everyday practice that will result in increased productivity. As a District, we believe that innovation is a result of communication. Our end goal is to build lateral capacity across all employee groups in order to continue our focus on increasing student achievement.
Through positive relational trust and continued commitment to mentoring structures and webs, we have been effectively promoting and deepening our professional collaborative culture. As we plan for the remainder of the 2018 school year, we look forward to co-leading our continued “Mentoring for All” Steering Team work across both the corporate and district teams. We will continue to evaluate the impact of our work through the examination of ongoing survey data, site experiences, innovative networked webs, workshop participation and collaborative professional connections.
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