Everyone can empathise with the child called to the principal’s office, you can then understand my state being stuck in a small room with thirty principals. The challenge though had started well before walking into the guts of the Beaconhouse School System’s grand head office.
The Beaconhouse School System (BSS) is one of the largest international private education networks in the world with an outreach of almost a quarter of a million students in Pakistan alone and presence in over two hundred cities of the country. They are avid believers of training and development of their staff in lieu of which the BSS Central Region collected thirty of its heads of institutions for the one day programme on leadership.
The first challenge was to be able to compress the programme to a single day model to cover both the leadership aspect with the organisational framework and simultaneously contextualise it to the profession of teaching. This was aided with the help of the participants who were ready to learn, unlearn and relearn. Also, almost all of them had been teachers for a significant period of time before their current position of authority. I must admit that my personal experience of twelve years of various posts in the local education sector helped.
The design and flow of the programme itself was such that we started with diagnostic questions to the likes of their reasons for coming to work, their frustrations, their dream teacher and teacher from hell. We spent the best hour and half in laying the foundation of Intent and its realistic and relevant manifestations. Proceeding with the carrot-stick policies applied with a ‘taker’s intent’ we again had a profound discovery at the stage where we explored what implications it would have if we considered the child as means to our end of getting grades. This enabled the participants to contextualise and better articulate their problems with the current system of examinations, lesson plans, tuition culture and the final output – the high quality low grade citizen. Working in a large and hence highly bureaucratic organisation, the Care and Growth™ Model helped the much needed ruffling of the feathers to align their true line of service. It felt good to send the Principals with some homework to apply the Means-Ability-Accountability to empower their junior colleagues and faculty. This then was fuelled with the rediscovery of their Benevolent Intent and service to their true customer, society.
In spite of my experience it was challenging for me to be able to explain the relationship of process and output in the administrative context of teaching. Still uncertain, I sought assistance from my wife, Maira, who is also an administrator of a local college. I shared the findings of that discussion with the audience. When Maira and I took the example of coordinating with the faculty as one of the processes we found ourselves as if discovering the end of one hair in a bunch of hair strands. Following the process automatically shifted our focus from the inevitable outcome lying at the cuticle of the scalp to the way we were proceeding towards it. The participants immediately understood why then we needed to identify what going the extra mile meant for each of these processes. A teacher that voluntarily stays back to ensure the last child leaves before her/him, deserves a reward.
It is impossible to be in the presence of thirty principals and leave without learning something, as it is impossible to teach and not learn in the process. Besides appreciating the value of vulnerability I learnt how the very tools they applied apparently as ‘carrots and stick’ meant something completely different when they applied it with the right intent under the Means-Ability-Accountability. In the word of The Bard, nothing is ether good or bad only thinking makes it so.