Join clinical psychologist Dr Hayley Watson as she explores trauma informed strategies for supporting students during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This training session will explore tools for supporting the wellbeing of students as they return to school, helping teachers and school leaders provide specific assistance for students who are struggling with anxiety, depression or lack of motivation. The session will also empower school leaders and staff to support colleagues and parents in coping with the many changes occurring at this time.

Leaders are often told they need to be instructional leaders because this type of leadership is supported by research, and can have an enormous impact on student learning. Although instructional leadership is one of the most researched forms of leadership, very little practical insight into how to implement it exists, and many leaders struggle to put it into practice. Peter DeWitt, Ed.D. will take the research behind instructional leadership, and dive deeper into six areas that he found is crucial to practices that lead to instructional leadership.

That deeper dive involves breaking instructional leadership into six distinct parts, which are implementation, focus 4 learning, instructional strategies, student engagement, efficacy, and evaluation of impact. Leaders need to understand these six areas of instructional leadership, but also need to be provided with time to consider practical ways to implement each one, which also includes understanding implementation science. This session will help meet that need.

The COVID-19 pandemic has added extra stress to an already weary profession. But supporting our teachers by monitoring and responding to their wellbeing is possible. Although educators face enormous challenges in their roles, the difficulty of the profession can be eased by recognising and responding to cultural enablers that ameliorate the impacts of stress on the teaching profession.

This session will provide strategies that support teacher wellbeing at self, school, and system level. Considering the ongoing stresses facing the profession, this workshop unpacks way to foster and integrate teacher wellbeing as a key focus in the area of school improvement. Isn’t it time we did things for teachers, rather than to teachers?

Schools are complex organisations. Inherently human focused, their success is the consequence of the quality of the relationships that exists within and beyond school walls. The quality of these relationships can support school improvement, yet leaders working in this space must have more than knowledge of pedagogical and assessment theory, as it is the cultural factors that can impact upon teacher practice and student learning. In this session, participants will be introduced to several interrelated concepts that enhance school culture and connectedness. By exploring Social Capital, Collective Teacher Efficacy, Teacher Agency, Teacher Wellbeing and Self-Determination Theory, participants will begin to develop strategies that support leadership practice, staff relationships, and student outcomes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown up a host of challenges for school leaders at all levels. Not only must they deal with their personal journeys, they must be physically, mentally and emotionally present for their school communities, and help navigate their school through totally uncharted waters. This is a challenge that has called on teachers and other school leaders to step into the realm of leadership in ways that many would not have imagined beforehand. Some have found this quite stressful; others have found that the pandemic, because of the difficulties it presents, has afforded them a unique opportunity to step into aspects of leadership that had unavailable to them, or which they had thought outside their capability. Working out what to do when you don’t know what to do is at the heart of Adaptive Leadership. Drawing on the work of Heifetz, Linsky and others, this workshop will introduce the concepts and practices of Adaptive Leadership. It is for those wishing to expand their conceptualisation of leadership and discover how they can begin to apply it in their working lives.