Being a head of department isn’t easy. You have the senior leadership team to keep happy on one side and then a team of subject teachers to motivate, guide and support on the other.
As such, you can become siloed in your own world, head down as you work through your to-do list, with little time to speak to other HoDs, save for the odd snatched conversation at lunch or in passing in the staff room.
However, this deprives us of opportunities to collaborate with the very staff members who are best placed to help one another, from solving problems or raising concerns to discussing new ways of working or teaching tactics.
This is why when I stepped up from being HoD to assistant headteacher, I wanted to ensure there was time and space in the diary to get together and draw on the expertise surrounding us all. Here’s how we made it work.
1. Reconnecting
The start of an academic year is always busy, with a huge list of tasks to get the department up and running and ready to start teaching. It’s the same every year and looking at our team of HoDs, I knew that we all pretty much knew what needed to be done - and so this wasn’t the main agenda.
We started the year instead by reconnecting with each other. Even though some of our heads of department have worked with each other for a number of years, it was a great way to be reminded of the wealth of expertise sitting next to you.
From ex-principals to former SLT members, new HoDs to experienced HoDs, it was inspiring to really listen to each other and to be made aware of the experience and support that was right in front of us.
Everyone reintroduced themselves and spoke about their own experiences. We then gave time to really think about what we wanted to achieve in our roles as heads of department this year.
Following this, I met with every HoD on a one-to-one basis to outline their own individual goals, requests and wishlists for the year.
All HoDs were encouraged to think big. After Covid restrictions, we’d forgotten the joy of planning trips and getting our classrooms back to being places of enjoyable learning.
Now we’ve got wishlists for an art gallery, international trips to China, Spain and Vietnam, a music lab and cookery rooms. We’re thinking bigger and better this year.
2. Setting the agenda
While we don’t deny that the admin tasks and to-do lists are a vital part of the job, meetings need to be more than this. To ensure this happened, we planned the agenda for the entire year, and now we roughly meet once every three weeks so we can work through that list.
On the agenda, we highlighted topics that might be of interest at key points in the year. For example, why and how do we observe and give feedback? What does assessment look like in our departments? How are we promoting oracy back in classes?
Furthermore, this agenda is always live and at the start of the year, we listed a number of topics that we would be interested in discussing at key times of the year. HoDs can add any items to the agenda so that they can have meaningful discussions that are important to them.
This one is still a work in progress as we try to slowly manoeuvre our way out from the original role of the agenda, but I’m keen to see this develop as time goes on. The key is that it’s live and so everyone can contribute.
3. Everyone takes part
One key idea we instigated is that rather than me or another designated person leading all the meetings, we rotate so that all HoDs take turns hosting our meetings. This has been really well received and HoDs now volunteer to take the next slot.
The meeting starts with an overview of what is going on in their subject area and this then sometimes leads to wider agenda points as it’s an opportunity to pitch for collaborative ideas and to get to know how other HoDs run their departments.
How do they manage homework, examinations and tricky staffing situations? This can help others who may be struggling in the same areas gain ideas or share a problem.
It can also help open up opportunities for cross-department collaboration. For example, the Spanish department contributed to our humanities assembly this term.
This happened when our head of humanities was hosting and he reached out to others to collaborate on the whole school assembly. It resulted in the head of Spanish offering and a historical event being presented in Spanish by one of our Spanish students. It went really well and would probably never have come about had they not had this space to catch up regularly.
We’ve got some HoDs with huge teams and others teaching across primary and secondary. Whatever our roles and responsibilities, these hosting sessions have enabled HoDs to appreciate all the exciting things that are happening across the school and to get involved with each other.
4. Share the expertise
As an assistant head in a new role, I believe in creating opportunities for us to share our expertise.
As such, our team of HoDs use our meeting times to draw upon ways to be efficient and effective in our roles. Sometimes this is about an admin task that needs to be done in the most efficient way and sometimes it’s about an aspect of teaching and learning.
Listening and advising one another is not only invaluable, but makes everyone’s time efficient and effective. If there’s a specific item on the agenda that needs addressing, I’ll call upon one of the HoDs who I know can explain what they do really well.
Making time to listen to our peer colleagues and how they do things certainly makes it feel like you are working with another team and not on your own.
When HoDs get together, conversations naturally arise and most of the time we run over because there’s so much to say. It’s a great way to support each other and raise each other’s profiles.
Maddy Jones is assistant headteacher at The International School @ ParkCity, Kuala Lumpur
