Leadership Roles

My leadership positions have been as diverse as the contexts I have worked in. International schools frequently require staff to take on a more fluid role, and my career has certain seen a lot of this!

I am seen generally as a problem solver, as this has led to me being placed in positions where a school identifies a need or a want, and requires someone willing to find a way to make it happen.

The most significant of my leadership roles to date, was Head of Middle School. This school was a bilingual school, and I reported directly to the Principal and Deputy Principals. Both of these senior leaders held their positions for a two year contract, meaning that in my nearly 5 years I worked with several, each of whom had their own style and vision for the school. Nevertheless, each relationship was successful and I worked hard to ensure that the needs of my team were being met, whilst also being able to implement any changes in direction.

One of the more exciting opportunities I had in this role was to introduce a new Project-Based Learning course to the school. This presented many challenges, as it had to be created fully from scratch. It was also a course quite unlike any that the school had run before. Culturally, classes for other subjects were very traditionally run, whereas PBL presents a significant departure in terms of the role of student and teacher.

As Department Head for Design, Drama, Visual Art, Music and PE in the MYP, it was my responsibility to ensure that each separate department was equipped and supported by SLT to be able to provide engaging and effective classes in each discipline. This required that the relationship between each member of these small teams was extremely close. While I am an experienced teacher in multiple areas, I have not directly taught all of these subjects across the full range of MYP 1-5 (KS3 & KS4). To ensure nothing was missed from the administration and support of this multidisciplinary department took great effort, though I will admit that I was also very fortunate to have been able to work with such a wonderful group of open, experienced and capable educators.

As coordinator of both Primary Maths and ICT, I have also worked with my team on the introduction of new programmes of study. Working with a fellow coordinator of assessment, a need was identified in one of my schools to focus on mathematics in the primary school. This was predominantly in response to an increase in maths anxiety noted during the COVID pandemic. As a response, my team and I decided that the additional rigour from introducing an appropriate maths programme plus staff training in how to support our younger maths learners would provide a effective solution. White Rose Maths was chosen, due to simplicity of its introduction along with the guided and curated resources that are a part of it. I then supplied training on the Concrete Pictorial Abstract (CPA) approach to ensure that educators across KS1 and KS2 had the tools necessary to provide for their students.

I include a rough script of the presentation below:

“I was asked to speak about personal growth because I have 16 years of international teaching experience. I have worked in several countries and cultural contexts. And I am also a bit of a Jack of all trades - a person who has many different skills because they have worked in a very wide range of distinct roles. This means I have spent a lot of time outside my comfort zone.

Many international schools have unusual needs, and when teachers work in these schools, they are often expected to work beyond their teaching responsibilities. This can present challenges, but they can also be opportunities for growth.

There are four sources of personal growth. We will look at the role of teacher, but we will start by looking at the role of a parent. The four sources of growth are doing the role, new skills, new experiences and academic opportunities. As a parent, you of course take on a new role. Part of that new role also includes new skills like changing diapers. You will also have to learn how to balance your time between your own responsibilities and the requirements of your child. There is an academic route too - you could take up prenatal or post-natal classes that will help you understand what to expect when you become a parent. When you take on a teaching role, there are also new experiences that you will face. You will have new skills through professional development. You may be work in new curriculums which will give you new insights. And again, you can explore an academic route such as higher education. It is important to remember that these sources of growth are for personal and professional growth.

I will now talk about my own experiences to show you how I have grown personally. I will start by talking about what I call my passive growth phase, which I will explain later. My first role was in a PYP school in Indonesia, where I was extremely fortunate to get inquiry experience, and I worked very closely with a mentor. I was also surrounded by very, very eager and capable peers. At this school I was asked to take on the role of Cambridge Exams Officer in the secondary school. This is one example of an international teaching role being a little bit more than the usual expected teaching role. I was working in the primary school, but the school ran Cambridge exams in secondary only so was trying to balance two things at once.

After this, I taught at a Korean bilingual school in Indonesia. This gave me a lot of bilingual experience. However, about six months after starting the role, I was asked to take over as head of middle school. I started to have problems with my confidence because I had taken on something which was much more than I was ready for. I began looking at ways to improve my self-confidence.

This brings me to the main point of my Ted talk, which is self-efficacy. Self-efficacy was put forward by a psychologist called Albert Bandura in 1977. Simply, it is a person's belief that they can control how they function and that they can also control the events that can impact their lives. It is their self-belief in what they can do and achieve. Research shows that efficacy is connected very strongly with improved performance, so it is an important concept. For me, in my new leadership role at the Korean school, I was concerned because my self-belief was suffering by taking on more than I was ready for.

There are four sources to self-efficacy. These are mastery experiences, which is when you take on the role or responsibility that you are hoping to excel at. This is the most impactful, but it is also the one that carries the most risk of failure. Then you have vicarious experiences where you can learn from others. This is particularly useful if you have an expert that you can follow and learn from by watching to scaffold your understanding of something that you are not yet experienced in. There is social persuasion, which is when you get positive feedback from people who are important to you, including positive critical feedback. Finally, you have your emotional state. This is how you feel at the time that you are trying to build your self-efficacy. It cannot be built if you are not in the right headspace.

If we now return to my passive growth phase, you can see how I was still boosting my self-efficacy through various experiences. At my PYP school, I said I had a mentor from whom I was able to get vicarious experience. I was also surrounded by peers who I could get vicarious experience from. I had social support because we were all very like-minded, and because we were all very happy and like-minded I also had a strong emotional state. This allowed me to achieve mastery in what I was looking to do work on. Within the Korean school, I had chosen to take on a master’s degree. The master’s degree is an academic route to personal growth of course, but it gave me the confidence to pursue more mastery experiences by improving my self-efficacy.

It was at this point that I realised the most vital aspect of working on my personal growth and my self-efficacy. This is that you must be proactive rather than passive. Moving forward into my next role, I worked in Romania. This school was a “teach to the test” curriculum which I found gave me no opportunity to further explore mastery. Everything was prescribed and so I had no teacher autonomy. I quickly realised there was no room for growth for me, so I moved to another school – this time in Italy. Here, I was able to return to primary and to use what I had learned in my master’s degree to work on more mastery experiences. However, COVID happened, and I began to feel that I was stagnating because role became fully online and my growth had stopped. Fortunately, COVID also brought with it an opportunity for me to move into the secondary school where I worked as the design teacher. This allowed me to broaden both experiences and skills, and so growth renewed.

And now I find myself in China. So, what is next for me? I hope that I will have it more mastery experiences, such as this TedTalk. With my experiences and qualifications, I now have far more resilience to take on roles and opportunities that are more uncertain. There is the opportunity for vicarious experience through the many exceptionally talented and capable peers I have seen in both the CML and EML departments. And finally, we have social persuasion again. The fact that I was asked to do a TedTalk hopefully indicates that the school recognises what I may be able to bring to it and this is a great confidence boost.

My summary returns to self-efficacy. I believe that it is important you recognise that you are more than just teachers. Self-efficacy can be improved in many different areas, not just professionally. If you can find personal growth in any area, it will impact the other areas as well. There are multiple benefits. You will have improved resilience, you will build more healthy habits and of course, you will also have your improved performance.

A final note is that self-efficacy for a teacher is when you have the belief in your ability to help student engagement and learning even when students are difficult or unmotivated. I do think that it is important to remember that it works in both directions. If you feel that you are not having success, then that will impact your self-efficacy. For me, a solution is to always keep working towards what you are hoping to achieve but it can only go so far.

I am going to end with a quote. “If tomorrow is the same as today, you are not growing – you are stagnating”. That quote is from me, Mr. John.

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.“