Education staff and learning champions - developing your role
Inspiring Learning for All can be a transformational tool, both organisationally and personally.
As learning champions or education staff, you are likely to be called on to:
- Form a cross-organisational group to implement Inspiring for All
- Build the team and agree your objectives
- Build partnerships to meet your objectives
- Lead on the initiative - engaging and persuading senior staff and stakeholders.
As learning champions or education and learning staff:
- Do you have a strategic voice?
- Are you represented directly on the management team?
- Do you and your learning colleagues have access to elected members or trustees
- Are you engaged in corporate initiatives or only brought in to advise on schools issues?
- You need to develop yourself and your role to bring influence at a strategic level.
Here are some of the things that you might do:
- Plan for your own professional development - find ways of developing strategic thinking and planning
- Get involved in strategic planning so people perceive you as a lateral thinker, not only as a learning specialist
- Keep up to date with current initiatives - your enthusiasm, expertise and engagement with the learning agenda will convince others
- Develop your facilitation skills - become skilled at managing groups on an equal level.
- Build learning and support networks - find colleagues and others with whom you can share your learning and from whom you can learn
- Broaden your own role - for example, plan reader development activities or after school clubs, or participate in developing new exhibitions
- Communicate effectively - feed ideas upwards as well as downwards; in informal settings (café/corridors) as well as meetings
- Stretch yourself - seek opportunities to work outside your comfort zone.
