Random thoughts

My resolution is take care, have fun, be cool but then of course I am nearly 60 and probably have a different attitude from some of our younger readers. I still work a 10 or 11 hour day so in that regard I am similar to many.
Regarding our colleague who is confused about how to move people forward. Here are a few thoughts without thinking too much:
Firstly remove all sharp instruments because it is not wrist slashing time yet – even at the point of writing I have only been back at work 9 days and don’t even know my final staffing for the year;
Have a cup of tea alone;
Have a cup of tea with the teachers;
Realise that every piece of data has a story and every story has data (I am sure someone said that once);
Look at school results, student outcomes etc to see what the issues are if there are any issues;
Spend time watching what teachers do and how they do it – I know a man who is Japanese and he can get his dog to do everything I can get my dog to do but we speak different languages;
Have another cup of tea to plan a strategy to present the data and the stories to the teachers;
Present the data and the stories with or without a cup of tea. This presentation should include a section on compliance – ie what we have to do whether we want to or not because our employer has dictated it.
Decide whether a change is really necessary and if it is, decide whether it is by revolution or evolution – my experience is that, where cooperation is evident, evolution is fine (99.999999999999% of the time) but once or twice in a long career revolution has its place.
Do you remember “Happy Days”? Fonzie was known to be the tough guy but nobody had ever seen him fight. When asked why this was the case he replied, “You have to do it once!”.
Be a leader in curriculum change if necessary – troops usually follow when the captain leads the charge – the captain rather than the general because he/she is probably away from the trenches and drinking tea;
Drink lots of tea.
Get out the sharp instruments (metaphorically speaking) just in case you decide to use them on others.

When working with teachers on moving forward with curriculum I found the best strategy initially was to ignore the syllabus and essential learnings etc.. (to start with). Many of our more experienced teachers have seen so many syllabus documents come and go, that waving another one of 8 at them must be off-putting, and just beg some "eye-rolling"....

What really worked for me, was engaging staff ( and students and parents) in a process of identifying what they wanted kids to be able to know and do when they left our school.. what was the legacy they want to give the children.... By making it personal like this it tapped the very strong opinions of the staff and engaged them...

We then organised them under "lifelong learner-type" attributes (also helped see if any gaps)... and then later we looked at which learning outcomes were going to enable and support what they wanted for our students... thus many connections were made for staff..

We also did not talk about what we were going to change.. because letting go of what you have been teaching for a while is hard.. particularly if you are not confident with what you are replacing it with.

We focussed on what we want our curriculum and learning experiences to look like in the future...and then the best of what we had done in the past came along quite naturally for this ride.