Courageous Sharing at HPSS



This afternoon my co-DPs and I had the opportunity to share our curriculum structures at EdChallenge (a PLG for senior leadership teams organised by the Albany Senior High School - thank you for including us!). It was awesome and terrifying to have an opportunity to attempt to articulate a year's thinking in a little over 20 minutes. A few things struck me. For one, we have done A LOT of thinking and we have come along way. It was great to hear Di and Lea share their journey with their teams in developing and realising visions for our Learning Design and Learning Relationships respectively. Their leadership has resulted in some incredibly deep thinking. 
Interestingly, we have remained true to our original thinking in Term One and indeed Maurie's and the BOTs vision from the year prior. However, on closer inspection, we have absolutely grown and built on these initial plans as we have welcomed on more and more of our team on board. There was a real sense of collaboration and leadership driving what was presented today (see above).

What was also evident was a sense of a thinking journey. We began the year with a period of convergent thinking - developing as a small team a strong nucleus or core to our structure. Then as teams were introduced we entered a phase of divergent thinking so as to develop different strands such as specialised learning, learning teams, project learning and professional learning. We now seemed to have come full circle with a need to become convergent once more so as to streamline our thinking and our taxonomies. This cycle will undoubtedly repeat itself as we continue to evolve, and may form a useful structure for 'leading as inquiry' process over the coming years. Converging to locate our next focus or priority and then diverging to explore solutions and opportunities. This echoes an interesting cycle of collaboration and autonomy - a cycle which seems integral to collaborative leadership being sustainable in the longterm.

Another thing that struck me as I left for home (only slightly traumatised by such an act of unbridled and uncensored sharing), is that we are bloody brave. In fact we are all brave at HPSS. Throughout this developmental foetal like stage we have basically been sharing our ultrasounds with the world! Guts and all, we have shared our thinking, our ideas, our challenges and and our excitement (not looking at anyone in particular Mouldey). 

This is awesome and something we should remember to celebrate. For this reason, I would like to dedicate this post to my courageous colleagues who have been sharing their learning and thinking online and face to face. 

And here we are, warts and all, the HPSS bloggers:

Senior Leadership Team

Specialised Learning Leaders

Learning Team Leaders

Project Learning Team

Professional Learning Team

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