Harvard Graduate School of Education - Day Four and Five
Leading Strategically
Faculty: Elizabeth City
Time: 8:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Session Overview
In this session we will take up the question of how to lead strategically amidst all the competing demands on your time and energy. We will use several hands-on activities to help you diagnose the current state of your strategic leadership and identify areas to strengthen it, with the goal of helping you prioritize, as well as supporting you to build others’ strategic capacity.
Required Reading*
* “IntroductionDownload Introduction” (p. 1-10) from Leading Strategically: Achieving Ambitions Goals in Education by Elizabeth A. City and Rachel E. Curtis. Harvard Education Press: Cambridge, MA. 2025.
Notes from Liz's session
Which of the five elements of strategic leadership do you feel strongest in? How has that shifted over your career?
Relationships and context. *relationships across bodies of work across the school. communication, esp listening What is something I don't know that I need to know? Have got stronger in being able to discern and harnessing the power in our context.
Which of the five elements of strategic leadership do you want to pay more attention to as 2026 begins? Why? Discern & think big, act small, learn fast.
Think big - and the identify small ways to achieve this.
Power - Where is the power sitting in our school ? DM - institutional power and positional power ST/TS - influential power in tech. How can I harness this for good ?
Discern - slow down and figure out the purpose (our north star BEST), what is the problem we are trying to solve (school wide quality of teaching practice), what is the right action (which goal/s to focus on)
PRIORITIZING
Stephen Covey - Getting Things Done - Big Rocks Exercise with jar and rocks.
Jar is the capacity. Not all the big rocks would fit.
Capacity can change over time.
Beginning of the year - what is our capacity at the moment?
This organisation capacity may change over the year. Personal capacity also changes.
Most organisations cannot usually handle more than three rocks at once.
Think about how to be clever and combine rocks ie engaging family in order to lift progress in reading.
Put the biggest rocks in first. One to three.
What things can we take off the table to allow space for these 1-3 priorities?
Ensure there is "space in the jar" for those unexpected things that happen in schools. If we don't need it the spaciousness will be win to help us with the mahi.
A PRIORITIZATION TOOL
Team Leaders could do these with team ahead of each week.
Ease-Impact Graph
Think of your top ten initiatives for 2026 - put each one on a sticky note and add to the two by two chart.
Hard and High Impact
Easy and High Impact
Hard and Low Impact
Easy and Low Impact
Mandated - make it have as much impact as possible. Make it easier to implement.
How could I use this with SLT to help them make sense of where their priorities sit for the first half of the year ?
EFFECTIVE TEAMING
Something for our team to consider
a. Hold and name the “big thing,” aka the ambitious goal in mind
b. Start small - take small steps, break something big into many small parts, work on a small scale - as you
pursue the ambitious goal
c. Gather evidence to assess implementation, including from people closest to the work to understand
their experience of the changes underway
d. Pause to learn from implementation and make improvements based on that learning
NAMING CHALLENGES
Brutally Honest Truths
(This helps us name the tension, not about blame it is about clarity)
IF (what the school is currently doing)
and
BUT (what compomises the effort, implicate ourselves)
=THEN (consequence, what is at stake)
(must implicate ourselves, put a mirror up to ourselves)
An example for BIS
If we say we work in high performing collaborative teaching teams that focus on BEST but we don't hold each other to account for this, then the consequence is that we will have silos of good and poor practice in teams.
If my goal is to create boundaries between home and work but I spend my weekends and evenings thinking and overthinking about work situations then I will sacrifice quality relationships with family and friends and potentially burn out.
If we say that everyone has a voice in our school but dominant voices and personalities dominate meetings and the staffroom, then power and personalities will dominant and others will retract and not feel valued or that they belong.
LEARNING FAST
Rapid Learning Cycles p132 Leading Strategically
Plan where you are going to do - try it - learn from it - adjust based on what you learnt.
In this culminating session, you will engage in a simulation to apply the learning from the week to realistic school leadership scenarios drawn from your context. You’ll work through complex challenges and decision points, practicing how to apply key frameworks and strategies from TPCA. The session is designed to help you rehearse leadership responses, reflect on your choices, and leave with concrete next steps for your own setting.
DAY FIVE NOTES - THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES
On arrival
NZ map - born, place of significance (different coloured stars)
Birthdays on a calendar (CANVA)
Karakia/kai . Connect time.
The first five minutes -
My intent - be calm, be warm, be clear and focus on the one key rock!
Be careful about my language - do not say busy, do not say govt mandates.
A photo that brings you joy. Connect this to our kids - each of these kids will be on someones camera roll. Parents gift us these children - they are our kids.
Rock exercise. Model this.
Our biggest two rocks -
focusing on teacher practice and our shared understanding of best practice.
focusing on building strong high performing teams.
DAY FIVE NOTES - GROUP DISCUSSION
"At the highest level, the work of a leader is to lead conversations about what's essential and what's not .."
Heifetz’s enduring metaphor is the balcony and the dance floor. On the dance floor, you’re in the middle of the action — immersed in the noise, speed, and pressing expectations. On the balcony, you step back to see larger patterns: who’s moving with whom, which conflicts repeat, and what’s avoided.
Maya Angelou “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
George Bernard Shaw
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." This quote highlights the common misconception that simply speaking or sending a message means it has been understood, emphasizing that true communication requires confirmation and clarity, not just transmission.
Robert Burns
"Oh, would some Power the gift give us To see ourselves as others see us! It would from many a blunder free us, And foolish notion".
Robert Kegan
Leaders are widely recognized as significant discourse shapers, influencing the language, values, and accepted norms within their organizations and broader society. Their words and actions create a framework for how people communicate, interpret events, and make decisions.
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