High Performing Teams

“Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.” Albert Einstein AITSL describes professional learning as a continuous cycle. Planning goals for growth should be a straightforward, self-directed process.  Without a plan there will be little or no growth.  The reality is that mandatory professional learning and compliance tasks have overshadowed the importance…

Teachers look forward to summer breaks as much as students – maybe even more than – they do. A few weeks without rigorously regimented days; we’re free to do things like take a toilet break or eat lunch whenever we need to and wear pants as little as we want. Summer breaks mean we don’t…

Racing toward summer holidays, rest, and recovery. Time to take a breath.  Family, friends, and a moment for self. Term 4 is here! Congratulations to our wonderful teachers and school leaders who have worked hard and made it to the end of another school year. It is not hard to understand the current campaigns of…

“Reading is a joy, a desperately needed escape — I don’t read to learn, I read to read”.  Christian Bauman There is an ocean of descriptions and observations about reading, and the pleasure in reading. Nora Epheon wrote “Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after…

Roberts (2010) argues that leisure is an important part of modern industrial societies. The time available for leisure is balanced between the interaction of social, psychological, and cultural dimensions of society. Medaille (2011) identified that reading for pleasure is important in the healthy development of self-identification, self-construction, and self-awareness. The importance of literacy in schools…

Our team of leadership coaches has the pleasure of spending time with 100’s of school leaders each and every year. At the end of every term, we discuss common themes that are addressed during our individual and team sessions and endeavor to create additional resources to help and support where we can. Most often these…

When I began our organisation I researched everything I could on high performing teams, both in business and in schools. I was so intrigued about why some schools saw continual increments and growth in student performance and staff development and why others stayed the same or in some cases went backwards. I looked at the…

Over the past 4 years I have worked with hundreds of schools and thousands of school teachers, leaders and teams. My initial research focused on the characteristics that we know drive high performing teams in organisations and I looked for links to see whether the characteristics on display in corporations were the same as those…