Connect: Assistant Principals
Connect with a network of like-minded peers and enhance your adaptive leadership capability.
Connect: Assistant Principals will develop your adaptive leadership expertise and skills to positively lead your school so you can respond to a variety of situations and effectively solve complex problems of practice.
You will learn how you can meet the diverse demands of your role while improving teaching, learning and wellbeing in your school.
You will explore authentic leadership and the uniqueness of assistant principal identity, learn to lead with impact and how to create an equitable learning environment.
Audience
Designed for assistant principals in Victorian government schools who are:
- newly appointed
- in their first 5 years in the role
- in an acting assistant principal position.
Facilitators
Designed and delivered in collaboration with the University of New England (UNE).
Structure of program
Over 6-9 months, you will engage in and contribute to:
- 2 face-to-face, all-day conferences (6 hours each)
- 2 virtual workshops (3 hours each)
- pre- and post-workshop activities, and self-directed learning (approx. 6 hours)
- an adaptive leadership challenge (workplace improvement project) (approx. 3 hours)
- a face-to-face symposium (6 hours)
- 2 optional workshops (3 hours each)
Conferences
Authentic leadership: embracing your unique identity
Profiles concepts of leadership identity, adaptive leadership, metacognition and complex problems. Designed to strengthen your leadership capability, the focus is on empowering leaders with the skills and insights to lead proactively and positively.
Leading with impact
Provides insight into leading others by harnessing strengths and how to build a high-performing school culture. You will explore how leaders with strong influence shape attitudes and perceptions, and provide an impetus to strive for excellence. There will be a focus on leading to promote psychological safety and risk taking.
Workshops
Adaptive leadership
Equips you with the tools and strategies to become an agile and resilient leader. It will highlight the importance of adaptive leadership in schools and enable you to distinguish between technical problems and adaptive challenges.
Inclusive leadership and shared decision-making
Explores inclusive, distributed and shared leadership approaches which engage collaboration from all stakeholders in the school community. You will focus on distributing leadership so that teachers, students, and the broader school community have real decision-making power in implementing initiatives and solving problems.
The Academy is offering two additional virtual workshops to support and build on your learning in the assistant principal role. Attendance at the additional workshops is optional. More details will be shared at the first conference.
Attendance requirements
To successfully complete this program, you will need to attend the 2 conferences and 2 workshops. You will also need to complete the pre- and post-workshop activities and present your adaptive leadership challenge at the symposium.
Learning outcomes
You will gain knowledge and understanding to:
- grow your leadership capability to influence student outcomes
- enhance your ability to support your colleagues with strong, yet empathetic leadership
- develop adaptive expertise as an educational leader
- lead positive change within your school
- network with a range of peers, including establishing connections for regional and rural assistant principals.
