 Maen nhw Nadine. I'm the academic director of 80 Cymru schools. We have three schools, two here in Ireland and one in the UK. So I'd like to share with you this morning my experience of communicating a change to our teachers, to the teachers in our two Irish schools at least. Now communication obviously is an essential skill for any manager to have, but I think your ability to communicate well with your staff is really, really put to the test when you are asked to communicate change. Because, well, at the end of the day nobody really likes change and in fact they say the only people who really welcome change are ladies in wet napkins. So with that in mind, what was the big change that I was tasked with communicating? Well essentially in a nutshell it was a complete overall of our curriculum. So this entailed designing a new syllabi, a new syllabus at each level for each course type, new syllabi at all the plus levels, asking teachers to adopt a completely new approach to lesson planning and a new approach to classroom based assessment. So essentially big change, big change in our school, which took place over the course of a year and in fact really is still ongoing. So the first thing I did when I had made all these changes on paper was to plan out how I was going to communicate the changes to the teachers. So we had decided to implement two big changes separately and so all our initial communication was focused on the new syllabus and changes to lesson planning and the idea was that when that was up and running and well established only then would we begin to communicate with the teachers about the new assessment to separate communications. So the first thing we did was to sit down and think about what means of communication we had at our discussion. So the first thing most obviously I guess was meetings, face to face meetings. Importantly I had secured a budget in order to pay teachers to come together for an hour or more for a number of meetings. What we did was we had some initial meetings where we introduced the changes to the teachers. Then we asked them to go off and implement them a moment before a while and then when they had some experience in working with the changes we then held more meetings, they came back together again and had some feedback meetings where we discussed the success or otherwise of the changes. These feedback meetings in particular really proved invaluable to the success of the project. The next method of communication open to us was handbooks. Now granted it's not the most communicative form of communicating and I think George might say don't confuse the handbook for communication but the handbooks allowed us to convey large amounts of relevant information to our teachers and information that they would need to access again and again throughout the process. So we had a different approach with the syllabus and with assessment. We desired a handbook for the syllabus and a handbook for assessment. With the syllabus we had the meeting first, we introduced the changes then we gave the teachers the handbook and we asked them to go off and implement the changes. With assessment we gave the teachers the handbook a week or two prior to the meeting in order to allow them to process the huge amount of information we were giving them. Then we came together to discuss the initial changes in the meeting to assessment. So this was a more effective way of doing it essentially because it allowed teachers to come to the meetings, cracked and ready with questions and it was a more effective way of doing it essentially because it allowed the teachers to come to the meetings, cracked and ready with questions So while the meetings allowed us to communicate the what and the why of change it was really the training sessions where we communicated the how. So they allowed us to focus on very particular specific aspects of change, practical aspects that we wanted teachers to implement in the classroom. So the idea was that we told training courses every few weeks and that the training courses would be run by the directors of studies, Duran, the director of studies from our Dublin students here today and Ifa, the director of studies from our Bray school is currently on the way to... So every few weeks training sessions as every two rows and what actually happened in practice was that those teachers who had adapted and taken on the change well from the start actually came on board and offered to provide training for their colleagues. So I think this was really important for getting more and more teachers on board it was less top down when other teachers saw their teachers implement the change and talk about best practice and how to do it and how successful it was for them and their students where people came on board. So that was how to communicate, excuse me. The next thing then I sat down and thought about was what to communicate and it was at this point that I realised that there was so much more to communicate to the teachers than the mere facts of change the fact that we were going to change. First and foremost I realised that I really needed to be clear with the teachers from the onset as George entered in his talk as to why we were changing, the reason and the purpose of changing. So I had, we had in our academic team in the school had a vision of where we wanted the students to be in this time. And this entailed, you know, building a curriculum of the highest quality and offering our students a learning experience of the highest quality and providing our teachers with a wonderful space to work where they come in every day and engage in best practice and engage in everything. Because this was the vision and I knew I had to really convey this to them from the outset. Yet there was still more, there was still more to communicate. So what I did was I sat down and I made a list and this list turned into two lists, what I wanted and what I needed. So what I wanted to communicate very clearly to the teachers as we come together for our meetings was the following. I wanted teachers to be excited, to be as excited about the change in this project as I was. Now, needless to say I didn't say that to them. But I hoped that my enthusiasm for change would come across in my communications with them. And I think I had, I was successful, I had some degree of success at this. And I did this by reiterating, keeping this vision we had of quality and best practice to the forefront of the discussion at all times. So I kept coming back to it again and again and again. Quality, best practice and benefits for everybody. I also wanted the teachers to feel involved. I realised that this was very important for getting people on board to ensure that they felt involved. So I wanted them to know that although this felt like a top-down enforcement change and I guess in effect it was, at the same time the final product, the new service, the new assessment framework, the shape of the final product was open to discussion. Disposit had been written down on paper, it was in second stone. So I wanted them to know that we were going to ask for their input along the way and that they would have choices along the way. I wanted them to be reassured. I wanted them to know that we were going to make these changes slowly, one at a time and that there would be support there for them and that really they had nothing to fear from the change. And then finally I wanted to be honest about the parameters of change and what I mean by this is I wanted teachers to know that although we were going to ask for their input along the way and we were going to ask for their suggestions and recommendations, at the same time we were only going to consider their suggestions within certain parameters. So to give you an example, we could come together and discuss the shape of the syllabus, the content of the organisation of the syllabus but the syllabus had to be action oriented. Assessment, we could talk about the assessment criteria, the wording of the assessment criteria, the number of assessment criteria but assessment has to be followed by doing reference. So there were parameters in which teachers suggested to meet him. Then what I needed, what I needed to convey to them and what I needed from them. I needed change to be made and I needed them to know that change had to happen and not change in this. I needed them to be open to us. I needed them to try and adapt positive my way and to be patient and to understand that change takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. It can be a bumpy road, it won't necessarily be a smooth journey initially but to be patient and to trust that it's all the work that needs to be done to stick with us. And then lastly I needed teachers to just run with it, to just go into the classes and implement it and we would take it from there. So this is what I think I was relatively successful with getting across to them from the asset, more or less. Then I sat down and I thought about the challenges that we might face along the way and this is when I became pretty anxious. I thought about the particular aspects of change that teachers might be most resistant to. I wrote all the things down and I thought very carefully about how I was going to address these concerns on my net. I planned to the point of almost scripting my response. So there were the challenges you would expect, extra workload, and maybe the students won't like it and what kind of support are we going to get and I made sure that I was ready with the answers. And it's testament to our teachers I think that I actually met less resistance than I had anticipated for the most part they did actually just run with it at last and I am eternally grateful to them a lot. But that's hard to say that there was no anxiety about change that there was. Actually I think I failed to anticipate just how anxious some people would be about change. I had assumed that everybody would feel able to enter into the changes. Excuse me, I thought they might want to and I thought they might feel a bit disgruntled about being asked to but I thought they would feel able or unable to do so. When in fact some people were quite stressed and some people were quite anxious about their ability to cope and their ability to do their job properly as they had it all this time. So in retrospect while support was there for them I think this is the one thing that I didn't communicate clearly enough from the outset just how much support was there for them. I wasn't explicit enough about the type of support that was there and if I were to go and do this again I would probably draw up a programme of support and hand it out to them. I could actually talk about this all day because this was such a huge project and it's just there's so much to say about it but we have time constraints. So very quickly some top tips from my experience of planning and carrying out the communication of this huge change project. A lot of these will be self-evident to you guys but if there is planning out there and planning and embarking on a similar journey this is what I have to say. I think I've got eight tips. So firstly face-to-face communication is very effective. This is pretty obvious. But do as much of it as you can. If you don't pay for your teachers to come to meetings normally try to secure funding so that you can guarantee attendance by everybody there. When you do meet just make sure that you give your teachers a form for addressing any concerns that they have, expressing concerns and giving you feedback that they have that kind of space to communicate with you. It's not all about doing the communication to them. Plan your communication well. You know we can get so caught up in planning the actual change event itself which I'm guilty of spending so much time on planning this actual change that you don't necessarily need enough time to plan your communication of this change. Without effective communication there is a higher chance at least of the change. Be very clear about your objectives as George said. Be very clear that you convey or communicate to your teachers why you are planning these changes for what purpose. I need to say in the classroom make sure that these objectives are achievable. Make sure that your stakeholders feel involved. There are many different stakeholders in this project that we did for the purpose of this talk. Do all you can to make sure that they are involved and feel involved. If you can give them some ownership of the final change process and communicate this from the outset how they will be involved. That said, set your parameters and be very clear about what you and they can do. I think this is important because if you don't do this at the very start and you invite their opinions and their suggestions and they give you suggestions and you start to decline them because they don't fit in with your image in your head of how things should be then they'll start to become despondent and lose trust in you and your assertion that you want them to be involved. So set those parameters from the start. Anticipate anxieties and how you will respond to them. So understand that we thrive on routine predictability and with a change to routine comes uncertainty and for some people, not for everybody but for some people, uncertainty can translate into anxiety. So think along and hard about the personalities you have on your team and about how some people might respond and make specific issues on anxieties they might have. And then think about how you're going to allay the fears, what you're going to do and sit down and communicate this to them from the start. Maybe even one to one rather than the group meeting. This is pretty obvious. Needless to say, don't over-prepare with a big presentation. Leave lots of space for discussion and dialogue and debate and, as I said earlier, for their input again to expect themselves. And finally, starting to meeting with the team, it's happy to have the very least or indeed a boss of quality streets when it's done to get it.