It’s back to school season, and that means one major thing for school leadership: time to build capacity. One major area to focus in on is Situational Awareness. Take a look at this data to see why:
Who is Situational Awareness For?
- Anyone who interacts with others. Yes, that’s everyone.
- Specifically, let’s start with your admin team.
- Then let’s move into your leadership teams: instructional coaches, interventionists, team leaders, department heads, committee members, etc.
No school leader is left out. Situational awareness is a set of skills for all of your people.
Ideas for Building Capacity
Building capacity doesn’t require expensive programs or courses or even book studies. Here are a few ideas to help you start your capacity building with surface-level knowledge.
- Start with the chart below (if you’re reading in email, view the chart here on Twitter).
- Share the definition from Marzano, Waters, and McNulty (the book is here on Amazon).
- Ask the above-mentioned teams what situational awareness means to them and follow-up with questions such as:
- How does this impact our teamwork?
- How does this impact our relationships with the community and with parents?
- How does this impact serotonin?
- How will this impact the ways we focus on students?
- Then use redundancy to deepen your teams’ collective knowledge of situational awareness.
- Send an email after the team meetings reiterating your teams’ key points.
- Do a quick Q & A padlet (padlet.com) on the topic prior to your first staff meeting.
- Share an article on the topic prior to your next 2-minute meeting and discuss it at that meeting.
These ideas will get you started…and your teams will grow as a result! Not just in the area of situational awareness, but also in your commitment to learning.
Did you know the highest link between School Leadership Factors and Student Achievement is Situational Awareness? ⬅️⬅️⬅️
What does Situational Awareness mean to you? pic.twitter.com/rEOYNND2iP— Matt Foster ? (@mafost) May 18, 2018