Leading Effective Teams

The session began by deciding what good teamwork meant to us before sharing our ideas with the others in the group. My initial thoughts are below:

• Working together towards a goal.
• Helping other members when they require it.
• Effective communication.
• Clear instruction/delegation of individual tasks.

In small groups, we had to share what we individually thought a good team looked like, sounded like and felt like before sharing we with the rest of course members. Our group came up with the table below:

Look Like	Sound Like	Feel Like
Relaxed atmosphere	Ideas Sharing	Eustress
Efficient	Laughter	Happy
United	Holding to account	Valued

Where Eustress is the area where the level of stress is good enough to allow people to be energised, focussed and where work feels effortless, so will all people to perform highly.

Reflecting on my own practise after this discussion, areas for development include:

• Holding others to account.
• Efficiency
• To share good ideas/practise with colleagues more often.
• To delegate tasks to others, where appropriate.

The main theory of the session was based around Belbin's Team Roles. 

I mainly identified with the Teamworker role but do see elements of the Plant role in my practise. Developing as a leader, as will need to incorporate some of the Shaper, Implementer and Coordinator roles.

The First Session

In the first part of the session, the expectations of conduct and what as individual we wanted from the course. For me, the main priorities of completing this course are:

1. To develop skills to become an effective leader.
2. To gain confidence from others.

The reasons these are my main priorities are:

• I would like more responsibility within my department and potentially lead on some initiatives.
• To be more confident in directing others, to delegate tasks and to be assertive when delegated tasks are not completed in time. 

Next, the skills we believe an effective leader should have, were discussed and evidence of where in our current practice these were already present. My current areas of strength are communicating ideas on a 1:1 basis (supporting colleagues with behaviour issues, developing T&L ideas) and identifying areas for development and working on implementing these (Maths question of the week and numeracy across the curriculum) The areas which I believe I need to develop in order to be an effective leader are; raising my profile when leading on a task and also asking for support/ delegating when leading on a task.

Reflection on Learning Style.

The Kolb learning Style Inventory showed that I have the assimilating style meaning that, my approach to learning is to focus on abstract concepts. This is not surprising as I am a Mathmatician! Moving forward, I need to strengthen my use of the accommodating and diverging styles, meaning that I need to influence and lead others, and also liaise with others more rather than working in isolation. This highlights the areas I had identified as ones to develop and my motivation for doing the course.

The Leadership Challenge

The rest of the session was left for us to discuss on our tables about what our leadership challenge should be. My first thought was to look at closing the gap between boys and girls achievement in Mathematics in the Sixth Form. This is because, when going through the DIP, the achievement of Boys lowered the overall figures for AS and A Level Mathematics.