My mind is often full of thoughts whirring around as they fully form and link together. Sometimes the links happen quickly and sometimes it takes a while, it depends what I’ve read, what that has sparked and what knowledge I already have to filter the new thoughts through. After ResearchEd Birmingham yesterday my mind has slotted some key bits together, further proving to me the value of Saturday CPD; the talks were like the missing bits of the puzzle!
My dissertation on how middle and senior leaders make sense of change has dictated my reading and my thinking for months now. I have done my research, I have done my analysis and my results seem to be really interesting – my initial interpretation of the data appears to show that sensemaking by both groups is centred round interactions and communication; for example, intended message versus received message. It is fascinating and it is making me reflect an awful lot on my own role as a Faculty Leader as well as school systems as a whole.
However, all this thinking can become very internalised and isolating; when you’re researching and writing, you are largely on your own and you have no one to tell you if what you’re doing is right or wrong. That gets hard and the self-doubt starts to creep in. So when the ResearchEd Birmingham programme was published last week, I quickly spied the sessions that linked to my research and made a bee-line for those.
I felt a wave of reassurance listening to Kathryn Morgan talking about the power of conversation; I suddenly realised that my research findings are onto something because I’m clearly not the only person discovering this or thinking this way. I had been inspired by the theory in journals such as by ‘Reconceptualising and redefining educational leadership practice’ by James et al (2019); their work on different forms of interaction coupled with my fascination with sensemaking sparked my initial decision to study this area. However, to then go and listen to someone else speak about communication, conversations and interactions made me feel my choice to look at this was valid. It effectively pressed pause on the internal thinking and tethered my thinking back in the real world which was very reassuring indeed!
I’ve also been giving a great amount of thought to the role of middle leaders within organisations. Balogun and Hailey (2008) describe their position as Janus-like; they see up and they see down. They are change agents. As a middle leader this made complete sense to me. Then I read Beck and Plowman’s journal article ‘The Role of Middle Managers in Animating and Guiding Organisational Interpretations’ and they cited Floyd and Lane (2000, pp.164-165) who say that “The complexity of information and the number of potential interactions, therefore, are greater for middle managers than for top or operating level managers”. This also made sense and set off a lightbulb in my mind; when you are juggling the needs, expectations and pressures of both senior leaders and teachers that is hard, it is complex.
Schools are complex systems and complexity theory tells us there are no simple answers; it is often a case of finding the best fit or at least a way of dealing with a situation that does no harm. These ideas make sense to me; I see it in action, I enact them in my middle leader role and I have studied it through my Masters work. But there isn’t much written about complexity, at least not from a school point of view so hearing Matthew Evans talk yesterday was a delight. Here was someone else thinking about leadership and complexity. He talked about schools as complex places, he acknowledged wicked problems and he is a real life school leader! It was great; again I realised my thinking has a place in reality, I’m not just looking at a theory, it is real and it has value.
So therefore, for me, getting out of bed early on a Saturday and going to ResearchEd was 100% worth it. I realised that I am not alone in wanting to think and develop as a teacher; there were 749 other people who felt the same way. But even more important for me, the work I’m doing for my dissertation doesn’t feel so lonely or theoretical now, it has a grounding in reality and there is scope for it to impact practice. As I draw to the end of my studies, I need to figure how to still engage in this kind of thinking but in a different and sustained way. I feel after yesterday that I might have found a way and that is a very powerful takeaway from an amazing day.
References
Balogun, J. and Hailey, V.H. (2008). Exploring Strategic Change (3rd edition). Essex: Pearson Education Ltd.
Beck, T. and Plowman, D. (2009). ‘Experiencing Rare and Unusual Events Richly: The Role of Middle Managers in Animating and Guiding Organization Interpretation.’ Organization Science. Vol.20, No.5.
James, C., Connolly, M. and Hawkins, M. (2019). ‘Reconceptualising and Redefining Educational Leadership.’ International Journal of Leadership (20190507).
Creating Cognitive Classrooms 