The training sessions will help you to develop a workforce committed to good-quality professional development, giving senior and middle leaders the skills to challenge complacency as well as to encourage well-performing staff to innovate and seek to raise their game still further.

• Identify underperforming staff and negative behaviours
• Engage staff in a collaborative approach using a coaching style
• Maximise constructive solutions that are time and cost effective
• Achieve whole school improvement by turning around poor performers

Session Breakdown

Training Session 1 – Identifying Underperforming Colleagues and Choosing your Strategy

Learning Outcomes:

• Be able to identify and share with each other which teachers or other staff need to improve performance or professional behaviour
• Explore their behaviours and observe some of the ‘common denominators’
• Consider what strategies such colleagues use to make themselves difficult to approach and  how we might respond to those strategies

Training Session 2 – Conflict and your emotional response

Learning Outcomes:

• Explore the sources of emotion in any conflict situation
• Understand basic principles of conflict management and how this underpins our strategic approach and behaviour in tackling the problem
• Learn ways to overcome your own insecurities and ‘blockers’ to taking action
• Have practice of building empathetic understanding
• Learn a series of fundamental steps as part of an ‘emotional strategy’

Training Session 3 – The Coaching Conversation

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand motivational theories and consider what motivates colleagues
• Acquire techniques to help motivate demotivated staff
• Acquire and employ some ‘simple and wise’ questioning techniques
• Have practised a ‘courageous conversation’ in the coaching mode

Training Session 4 – The Courageous Conversation in more Challenging Circumstances

Learning Outcomes:

• Consider the transition from collaborative to directing mode
• Have practise of giving negative feedback, while staying in collaborative mode
• Know how to use strategies to cope with defensiveness and denial
• Have practise of how to ‘negotiate for improvement’
• Understand the role of notes, letters and written records in the process to this point
• Understand the criteria which might indicate the need to move to formal procedures