Instructional Leadership

Instructional Leadership (IL) is the alignment of all your processes, systems, and tools to an intense focus on teaching, learning and assessment to significantly improve learner outcomes.

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What is Instructional Leadership from Osiris?

Instructional Leadership from Osiris causes leaders to stop and focus on the key aspects that underpin a fertile environment for teacher and leader learning. Through the lenses of existing people, processes, systems, and tools, participants learn to prioritise their activity to bring cohesion, function, and form to their actions.

Instructional Leadership is a way of thinking and acting. Stage by stage you will unlock the advanced practices that bring instructional leadership to life across your organisation.

The course is designed for cohorts of up to 40 Head Teachers, Deputy/Assistant Heads and Lead Teachers with executive coaching available throughout the programme to help with clarification and application of Instructional Leadership.

There is a gap of 4 to 6 weeks between each session for activities and reflection.

Training days consist of a balance of input, deep discussion, practical activities, solution focused challenges and surveys.

Participants will focus on:

· How to grow a sustainable and impactful learning culture within the staffroom

· How to reduce the variance between the most and least effective teaching within our teams

· How to develop a collaborative learning culture that nurtures excellence and agency

Why Instructional Leadership?

Instructional Leadership is the most effective type of leadership practice for improving student learning outcomes.

Professor Deidre Le Fevre

Research shows that leaders struggle with 5 key blocks to change:

Limited
time

Multiple and
conflicting demands

'Activity Traps’
and school busyness

Urgent response situations

Pressured decision making

Instructional Leadership explores the beauty of learning and captures the hearts and minds of the learner, transferring trust and motivation to the learning process and charting a clear pathway to outstanding. Instructional leadership will transform your leadership practice.

You will learn to:

Evaluate your existing people, processes, systems, and tools through a lens of Instructional Leadership
Reflect deeply on your existing practice guided by one of the UKs leading experts
Develop advanced practices to bring cohesion and clarity to your actions

Instructional Leadership shows the way to thrive, enhancing outcomes, enjoyment, and beauty.

The Key Outcomes of Instructional Leadership

Higher teacher efficacy
Improved learning culture
Greater clarity and coherence across communications, systems and processes
Reduced teacher Isolation (better well-being and mental health)
Increased teacher retention
Shared focus on student goals
Richer evaluative thinking and whole school impact

Programme Structure

Baseline Assessment — Pre-test survey on key concepts

Session One — Introduction to Instructional Leadership — One Day

Defining Instructional Leadership from focus to form and function.

Review the key tenets of Instructional Leadership; People, Processes, Systems and Tools already in place.
Understand why Instructional Leadership is crucial (Research to impact).
Key questions to drive improvement.

Session Two — Openness to Learning — One Day

What does it mean to demonstrate ‘openness to learning’ as a leader and how do we ensure we make the time to focus on learning and performance development? In particular, the session will challenge participants to:

Know the starting points of their team(s) and being clear on what development would be.
Pinpoint any barriers that might inhibit performance development within their team.
Examine ways to ensure they and their team have the processing capacity to move beyond ‘busy’ to focus on developing performance.
Explore the importance of process-output thinking in isolating the causes of ‘problem work’. ‘Problem work’ represents the work that leaders have to undertake due to processes not being designed with optimal outputs in mind.

Session Three — Attaining a Shared Clarity — One Day

What makes beautiful? This session will explore the challenges, huge potential benefits and strategies to ensure shared clarity about what make beautiful in all aspects of our schools. It will examine:

The reasons why shared clarity is so challenging to achieve.
The three key barriers to building shared clarity within teams.
The importance of dialogue, not monologue, in creating shared clarity.
Frameworks for deeper dialogue about teaching excellence. This includes building shared strategies and tools for impactful teaching.

Session Four — Investing in Trust — One Day

Trust – the motivational glue of a learning team – is key to effective learning. This session will explore how to develop high trust within teams that participants lead. It will also examine strategies to re-build trust where it has decayed, and how to develop greater team cohesion. Time and again, research has shown how important working in high trust environment is for recruiting and retaining staff. Ensuring that:

Within teams, all feel valued and respected as individuals.
Within teams, all feel valued and respected as professionals.
Leaders model in such a way that inspires confidence and trust in others.

Session Five — The Perception-Reality Gap — One Day

Why do gaps between perception and reality about performance grow? This session will explore:

The causes and effects of these perception gaps on learning cultures in schools.
Strategies to ensure perception gaps are less likely to grow.
How to build effective feedback protocols and processes to ensure feedback from others is accurate and impactful.
Strategies to productively address any perception gaps that exist including truthful conversations.

Session Six — Professional Learning — One Day

Key to developing teacher/leader performance, is to ensure schools have impactful professional learning programmes. This session will explore:

The common pitfalls that limit the effectiveness of many CPD programmes.
The research base about effective professional learning.
A learning design framework to develop and facilitate impactful in-house CPD that supports development for all.