Pre departure

In just over a week I depart on an international study tour.

The study tour has been made possible by a generous scholarship I was successful in applying for through NGS Super and their Dedicated to the Dedicated program

I have been awarded a scholarship to undertake an international study tour to explore the relationship between leadership and innovation in a variety of educational contexts around the world. 

My investigations will consider what can be learned about visionary educational leadership in other countries, and how that learning can be applied to schools in the ACT and more broadly across Australia. My study tour will look at examples both nationally (in Australia) and internationally to observe highly effective leadership in practice, innovative practice across the school, and speak to leaders in those contexts that would be able to share with me wisdom and experience about what works and what doesn’t work with regard to leading and fostering high levels of innovation, learner engagement and educational progress.

My proposal is to take in as many high quality sites as possible to capture the various experiences and document them and identify the common elements, and perhaps the not so common elements, present in each.

 
The dates when I am travelling are 19 September to 16 October 2016.

I will visiting sites sequentially beginning on the west coast of the US, then the east coast, across to Scotland, London and then around through to the Netherlands.

My study tour and my engagement with leaders in each school and system will seek to explore and answer range of questions such as:

• What management structures best suit innovation?
• What are the attributes of leadership necessary to promote and foster effective innovation and to lead meaningful change?
• What are three key things your school has done to be so effective in creating great change?What curriculum reforms have been necessary to enable effective innovation?
• What are the most effective ways to engage with the community of your school to enable change and to address and overcome any barriers to change?
• What’s the single biggest barrier you have had to overcome with your community?
• How do you lead and guide a whole school community through significant change?
• What are the most effective scaling and diffusion strategies that can be applied to ensure that change and benefit are shared between schools?
• What policy challenges have the various journeys of success overcome and what were the best strategies for overcoming these policy barriers?
• What accelerators have been seen to advance the journey toward innovation?
• How did you define success when you began your journey of change?
• How would you describe success now?
• What measures of success have been applied in different contexts and how have these been measured?

My intention is to gather my findings and publish these in a summative report. I also intend to develop a variety of social media feeds to cover my journey. 

If you are reading this and feel inclined to, I'd be delighted, if you had some views or opinions about the questions above, for you to contribute to this dialogue by leaving a comment or by getting in touch with me directly.

The posts that I present here will include images from my travels, so until I depart I thought it made sense to begin with some of the iconic Canberra images.