Top tips for leadership interview please!

[NewYearNewWho]

Hi, I am an experienced teacher in a large special school. A leadership role has been created for “Research and Development” and I have been offered an interview. As it is a new post there is scope to be quite creative with the remit as it is not yet fully defined. I have a few ideas of initiatives that might work well in my setting, but just wanted to use the collective intelligence of Mumsnet to ask; if you had a departmental head (in any educational setting) with this title, what would you be expecting an exceptional one to be doing? Thanks!

I did this exact thing until recently. It was extremely poorly defined. make sure your idea of what this is matches your head's!

It is a very old fashioned title with the 'and development' bit tagged on which suggest they might not have a clear idea of how things have moved on.

My post just completely fell through really but I imagine very different circumstances since yours is being advertised and mine was 'created'!

What do you think you will be expected/asked/aiming to do?

I would expect the main job of someone in my school with that title would be to keep abreast of current research and synthesise it in a way that is useful to colleagues (or find people that have synthesised it in a useful way).

I wouldn’t expect them to insist that individual teachers embark on their own research projects and ‘feed back to the school’ because this is timewasting bollocks. Individual teachers are not trained to conduct research (or indeed read and understand research) and thus anything they do beyond ‘I did this particular activity in my classroom with 9 set z and it worked well’ needs to be treated with suspicion.

Oh, and maths teachers need their own CPD. If I have to sit through another session about how to get kids to use writing frames or Blooms or whatever, I will be very cross.

I suspect that they want someone who will do research. Read Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science to see why this is a bad idea!

Well, in my particular case even the word research was ill-defined. Read things and summarise with the findings that SLT want to hear, would be more accurate. but that is in a particularly behind the curve school , to be fair. In the right school, it could be a great job.

This paper on research leads is worth reading www.educationdevelopmenttrust.com/EducationDevelopmentTrust/files/93/93c332a4-40df-41ac-8a9b-f803c6573d10.pdf

As is the ResearchED & Research school stuff. Loads on Twitter.