When you become a leader of learning, you face a raft of everyday pressures that can have you feeling like you’re in a race against time. There can be competing agendas, difficult people to manage or mentor and endless tasks to tick off.
While you may have initially chosen this career because you love to teach, suddenly you find yourself thrust into the position of an executive, often without the support you need. Do you struggle to know what your leadership style should be? Do you know how to have a major impact, or even how to measure it? Or perhaps you struggle to trust everyone you work with or lead?
With all these competing demands, it’s easy to forget that learning lies at the heart of everything you do.
In this program, specifically designed for leaders including principals, deputy principals, and senior, middle and emerging leaders, you’ll learn how to apply the ‘Five Ways of Being’ to become a leader who is more trusting, brave, compelling, purposeful and focused on growth.
You’ll walk away with practical, evidence-based strategies, improved leadership skills and a renewed sense of clarity and confidence.
Do you feel comfortable as the leader you are, or do you feel more like an imposter?
If it’s the latter, this program will help you shift your narrative – and help you develop the mindset of a learning leader.
Learn to look within and embrace the ‘Five Ways of Being’: being trusting, being brave, being a storyteller, being purposeful and being growth-focused.
As a leader, you’ll know that the success of any school community is intrinsically bound to effective leadership at all levels. Through this program, we’ll give you the know-how and confidence to reach your hidden potential.
Book your keynote or breakout session for your conference including the topics:
This workshop supports learning leaders to understand what is critical for them to say and do each day as they commit to move from a model of doing to a model of being. The authors outline practical ways leaders can undertake a journey of self-discovery whilst ensuring they are laying a pathway for others to lead learning.
Outcomes and Objectives:
This seminar both challenges and supports learning leaders to author their own leadership story through career-changing self-discovery and practical tools. The authors engage participants in the theory, thinking, and practice learning leaders undertake to truly transform the way they see their own leadership and how they help others do the same.
Outcomes and Objectives:
Delivered as either:
4 x 1 day or 2 x 2 days
Learn 32 practical strategies to evolve your leadership.
Take a fresh look at the ways in which you view leadership. Find out what’s working for you – and what to let go of.
Move your school or team closer to a model that’s truly centred around learning.
Be successful in developing learning leadership skills for your colleagues.
Move from seeing leadership as role to embracing it as your calling.
Be trusting, be brave, be a storyteller, be purposeful and be growth-focused.
Learn up to 32 practical strategies to improve your leadership.
Take a fresh look at the ways in which you view leadership. Find out what’s working for you – and what to let go of.
Move your school or team closer to a model that’s truly centred around learning.
Become more successful in building learning leadership skills in your colleagues.
Learn to not only act like a leader, but actually make it part of who you are.
Be trusting, be brave, be a storyteller, be purposeful and be growth-focused.
Gavin Grift is the Founder and CEO of Grift Education. Gavin’s passion, commitment, humour and highly engaging style have made him one of Australia’s most in-demand presenters. Through his keynotes, seminars, and coaching services, Gavin connects with national and international audiences on how to cultivate authentic collaboration, build success in others and genuinely commit to reflective practice. His belief in the development of defined professional autonomy for educators both challenge and connect the head and heart of his audiences.
Having taught in schools and coached educators for over 25 years, Gavin understands the specific challenges teachers face. He is one of Thinking Collaborative’s most in demand Cognitive Coaching Trainers, having delivered the Cognitive Coaching Seminar® for the past 10 years, working across three continents. He has used his passion and belief in what educational leaders do, collaborating with Jane Danvers and Heather DeBlasio to design the Five Ways of Being leadership program, focusing on leaders who feel ill-prepared, overwhelmed, and sometimes lack confidence in the impact they’re making.
As a leading Hawker Brownlow Education author he has combined his beliefs, research and experiences on the importance of collaboration and coaching to co-author numerous books including 5 Ways of Being, Teachers as Architects of Learning, Transformative Talk, and Transformative Collaboration.
Heather De Blasio has spent a lifetime committed to growing others and refusing to put limits on what people can achieve. Her teaching career began with coaching tennis in rural South Australia and later developed into life as a bilingual ski instructor in both Australia and Austria. Since making education her formal profession, Heather has held middle and executive leadership responsibilities in pastoral care, curriculum, and teaching and learning at a range of independent schools.
Heather has participated at the executive levels of leadership of the subject associations of which she has been a member, including as president of the Association of Secondary Research Teachers, an executive committee member of the South Australian History Teachers Association and South Australian English Teachers Association, and as chief assessor/examiner for modern history and the research project. Heather also played an important role in the project team responsible for developing and training teachers to implement the Research Project, a new compulsory subject at the Year 12 Level, across South Australia. As a part-time lecturer and tutor at Flinders University’s Graduate School of Education, as well as through guest presentations to master’s students at the University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education, she has helped shape the careers of many aspiring teachers.
The recipient of an Outstanding Presentation Award at the 2017 Australian Council of Educational Research’s Excellence in Professional Practice Conference, Heather is an engaging presenter. She has spoken at state, national and international conferences, including the Australian Council of Educational Leadership, Australian College of Educators, International Congress of School Effectiveness and Improvement, uLead and the International Conference on Thinking, on topics ranging from tackling in-school variation to intentionally developing the leadership skills of middle leaders.
She is a contributing author to the second edition of Patrick Griffin’s Assessment for teaching (2017) and is currently completing a Doctor of Education at the University of Melbourne in the area of building middle leaders’ leadership capacity.
Jane Danvers has served the Australian educational community for over 20 years. She is the principal of Wilderness School, one of the most recognised girl’s schools in South Australia and was the inaugural principal of University Senior College. Jane’s leadership extends beyond the school gates. As the Presiding Member of the South Australian Certificate of Education board (SACE) and Chair of JamFactory, she has a deep understanding of the intricacies and challenges of leading others.
Jane plays an active role in shaping policy and driving positive change across education sectors and in the broader community. She sits on numerous industry-related committees including the Committee for Economic Development of Australia's (CEDA) SA/NT State Advisory Council board, the Duke of Edinburgh Award South Australia Friends Committee and the Premier’s Council for Women.
Throughout her professional life, Jane has contributed to the wider educational debate and championed pedagogical advancement in schools. Over her career, she has been a continuous learner, completing a Master in Education at the University of South Australia, Oxford University’s High Performance Leadership Programme and Harvard University’s Leading Learning that Matters Project.
Jane has presented at numerous national and international education conferences, including the Global Forum on Girls’ Education, uLead and the International Conference on Thinking. She has mentored new leaders at the Association Heads of Independent Schools of Australia New Members Conference and the Association of Independent Schools South Australia, Leading Learning Program. An advocate for gender equality and diversity, Jane was recently quoted in Madonna King’s new book Being 14. She is proud to have overseen the development of academic scholarships for adolescent girls in rural Nepal. In 2013, Jane was awarded the AISSA Noel Volk Excellence Award and the Principals Australia Institute’s John Laing Award.
