One Word 2015

The start of the year always brings renewed vigour around goal setting. We all set goals and then the blur of day to day work takes over and I’ve found again and again that by the time you get round to asking staff to reflect on their goals four or five weeks into the year, many often have to go and look up their goals to tell you what they were. Ive tried various strategies over my years of leadership to help staff make their goals become a living thing but with varied success. I was wondering how to do this for 2015 when my twitter reading brought me awareness of and interest in the #oneword2015 movement.

So I started thinking about what my successes last year were and what were the things I felt I didn't succeed so much with. And over the course of a week I came to the decision that my word for 2015 would be SHARE. 

• I will share the load- ask others for help, delegate tasks to others and give them the time and support to do those tasks.
• I will share leadership- we have constructed a really distributed leadership model of school wide teams for the year and  my job as the educational leader in the school is to coach the leaders of those teams so that  we have real sustainability.
• I will share my story as an educator and our story as a school with the wider education world.
• I will share my reading. I do a huge amount of professional reading but I don't always take the time to review that reading and consider the implications or pass that on to others.
• I will share my learning- I am going to finish my degree and I am going to really commit to learning Te Reo. And by sharing that learning it will make me more accountable to commit to the time that learning will require.

The process of reflecting on my last year-both the successes and the things I wanted to work on  and narrowing it down to one word was really powerful so now I’ve asked my staff to do the same thing.

We are currently spending a couple of days on one of the local maraes- reconnecting as a staff whanau as we do each year.

In between team meetings and planning sessions staff have been reflecting on their successes from last year and what they want to work on next. They have been talking about it with each other and documenting it in a way that suits them. And then they have been making a physical artefact to be a physical reminder of their word for the year.

  

Sally with stickers

       

Andrew planning

Steve thinking

Huia creating

  

Im going to integrate this word into their performance agreement and performance management for the year. On  Friday each week when we meet at 3pm to reflect on things from the last week, I’m going to ask them to centre their reflection on their #oneword2015.

Some of the finished words at the end of the day

Im going to put a photo of each staff member and their #oneword2015 artefact on the wall in the staff learning space so we are all aware of each others word and can help each other hold ourselves accountable to it.

An arrangement of the words once everyone had presented and explained their word to rest of us.

 "My goal is not to be better than anyone else but better than I used to be." 

Dr Wayne Dwyer