504 Planning to Plan strategic planning

Strategic Planning is planning to plan, to promote positive changes within the school or organisation. It is about planning to make your organisation work – now and in the future. I have often experienced situations where the planning is done at the last minute even by event with no “big picture” or long term goals driving the planning.

School can and do get by on this but not always with the result of positive change in the school. If a vision has not been developed and communicated, each planning of events just becomes a short term solution to “what do we do this week”. I see time and commitment by all staff as the two major factors here.

I can relate to Davies and Davies definition of SP as inspiring and supporting others to achieve a vision based on clear values. Additionally Streeton PS discusses the need for plans to be documented so everyone has access to and understands them. This reading adds that data is useless unless analysed, interpreted and used for improvement. I always document and circulate copies of my year’s goals, planning and evaluation after stocktake. I am aware that is often not read by many, but at least it fulfils the purpose of clarifying in my head where I am going and why. I think one reason teachers don’t read everything they should is because of the paper overload I see in most schools, and many teachers don’t have a system of reading what may be useful – the general mess and collection in every pigeon hole seems to collect then just go to the bin! What can be done??? If I want something really important read I take it to a meeting and read through it with everyone, hoping for discussion to follow.

Hough and Paine have some good suggestions relating to teamwork, and support Law and Glover’s statements that school organisational success depends on teamwork, not individual teacher’s abilities. I also agree that it would be better if traditional committees were structured as teams, with a ’sense of team’.

In discussing teamwork, communication and planning they make the following salient points:

• if there is no ownership of a decision in a team, then members don’t feel a requirement to implement the decision
• “collaborative decision-making involves stakeholders at all levels working together to create new organisational knowledge”
• a team is a group of people working together to achieve a common output – sounds simple and sort of obvious but very useful definition
• total performance of the team is greater than the sum of individual performances – a good example of this was our group PowerPoint Presentation – I know my own attempt at this would have been very different and not nearly as satisfying.
• the stages of forming, storming, norming, performing are worth keeping in mind, good to focus on during the team process
• task learning teams empower members to be involved in continuous improvement