Over the past year I have been developing my own leadership skills and practise by completing Nord Anglia’s ‘Middle Leader Program’. This is a 12-month course especially designed for Middle Leaders (Heads of Department, Key Stage Coordinators, Phase Leaders etc), aimed at increasing their leadership and management skills, and therefore benefitting the school as a whole. Each year they select 14 people from each region, and I was lucky enough to be one of them.
Over the past year I have been developing my own leadership skills and practise by completing Nord Anglia’s ‘Middle Leader Program’. This is a 12-month course especially designed for Middle Leaders (Heads of Department, Key Stage Coordinators, Phase Leaders etc), aimed at increasing their leadership and management skills, and therefore benefitting the school as a whole. Each year they select 14 people from each region, and I was lucky enough to be one of them.
The course is quite intense, with 3-day residential trainings taking place in both March and October. On top of that we had to complete monthly tasks via Nord Anglia University, an online training centre for all Nord Anglia staff. All of these exercises were designed to challenge our leadership styles, and to open our eyes to other possibilities and best practise. The culmination of this whole course was a 5000-word Action Research piece, of a topic of our choice.
I chose to focus my Action Research on Reflection methods within the CAS program. As the CAS Coordinator, I had noticed that many IB students did not enjoy the Reflection aspect of CAS, and as a result, their reflections were quite shallow and ineffective. I surveyed the students as to the reasons behind this, designed new methods and templates to combat these issues, and then introduced them to students. My research showed that by giving student more choices, and by providing them with easy templates that speed up the whole process, the reflections became both more enjoyable for the students, and more effective in terms of the depth of reflection reached.
This Action Research is quite a large undertaking, but one which I found hugely beneficial. I am pleased to announce now that not only have I passed the overall MLP course, but I also received a Distinction for my research project. Nord Anglia have now asked me to put together a short video clip further detailing my findings and the implications for CAS provision at all Nord Anglia schools. This will then be shared across the group via Nord Anglia University, and I am happy to share this with parents or anyone else who might be interested.
Philippa Williams
Head of Geography and CAS Coordinator
