White Rose CPD Blog - Aspiring Leaders HT6 Update

The White Rose Academies Trust ‘Aspiring Leaders’ Programme has been an incredibly successful strand in our CPD offer, enabling a wide variety of staff members to explore leadership styles and develop their self-awareness. Katie Broadbent provides a final roundup for the 2020/21 academic year.

During this half-term, colleagues from across the White Rose Academies Trust (WRAT) joined me for the final session of the Trust’s Aspiring Leaders’ programme.

In this collaborative and reflective workshop, participants built on skills covered in the previous sessions, exploring how to ‘sustain’ and ‘scale-up’ the leadership projects they have implemented this year, using the Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF) ‘Guide to Implementation’ as a tool to support next steps.

Alongside the EEF model, we have continued to explore Kotter’s 8-step ‘Model of Change’ with participants through celebrating quick-wins and removing barriers by taking steps outside their comfort zones.

Participants also continued to explore their own leadership styles through ‘True Colors’, building on existing knowledge of their primary ‘color’ identified in the first and second workshops.

They were asked in what ways they could balance their ‘colors’ to support their leadership development; this provided some interesting discoveries and revelations as some shared where they have approached a particular situation in a ‘color’ that is not their brightest.

Outside all workshops, I have held one-to-one coaching sessions with colleagues in all three secondary academies to introduce extended leadership materials (including the Trust’s ‘Leadership Matters’ subscription) and to provide a forum for participants to receive guidance on their progress to date.

Our colleagues are dedicated and committed to their own development, and they have made remarkable progress with their individual leadership projects. I’m really looking forward to continuing this programme next year and helping more of our colleagues to develop their leadership skills.

White Rose CPD Blog – Lessons in Leadership