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3. Lay the foundations

Having determined your goal and identified who can help you to achieve it, you need to lay the foundations that will support your action plan and assemble any resources you will need in order to bring your vision to reality.

Resources

Your action plan will have identified and ascertained the cost of any necessary resources, including personnel. In many cases, there will already be provision for the resources within existing budgets for things like teaching and learning resources, the electronic distribution of resources and reprographic costs.

The hardest resource to find is time. Yet time is what you’ll need if your Subject Learning Coaches are to complete the programme and fulfil their objectives of working with colleagues to share and develop best practice. Opportunities will probably already exist for this to happen, but it’s worth looking at your own situation and examining whether you have really made it possible for those you have tasked with carrying forward the initiative to do so.

  • Is it possible for your Subject Learning Coaches and others supporting the initiative to meet together regularly? Something as simple as timetabling a slot once a week/fortnight/month when all involved are free to meet can make a big difference.
  • If you have tasked your Subject Learning Coaches to work with others, have you also allowed time for those others? Is this time recorded as part of their ‘contact time’? And does it contribute to the continuing professional development record of those being coached?

Structure your approach

Once you have identified who can help you achieve your objectives, it is important to have structures in place to support them. You may find it useful to nominate a coordinator to oversee the work of the team and arrange for them all to work together regularly in order to make plans and review achievements. In addition to signifying to others how much you value the initiative, doing this will build capacity and establish a community of practice committed to a common purpose.

One way of establishing a committed and collaborative team is the Roundtable approach adopted first in the USA and later in the UK to support the introduction of new learning technologies to education. The name comes from the legendary concept attributed to King Arthur: everyone meets regularly, has an equal voice, shares responsibility for chairing the meetings and is supported by a senior manager who provides patronage and endorsement. Roundtables differ from committees and forums in that they are neither hierarchical nor mere ‘talking shops’, but retain an independence and flexibility that enables them to be proactive in identifying work areas and to progress these actively.

  • How will you ensure that reporting processes are in place to promote successes and act on any issues identified?
  • How will you communicate key messages from senior managers to your Subject Learning Coaches and others working with them?

Making connections in this way will enable you to establish a robust support mechanism, stimulate ideas and interest and maintain momentum as well as formalising monitoring and recording processes.

Quality assurance processes

Aligning your plans for implementing NTLCP to existing quality assurance processes will provide valuable controls and maintain a focus on the key deliverables and measures of success you have identified. Agreeing what constitutes success and then determining how to measure it constitute the first step. It is also important to gather baseline data at the outset for comparison purposes and as a means of measuring the impact of your interventions and the distance travelled.

  • What data-gathering processes already exist that you could use to measure success?
  • How do you keep records of what each Subject Learning Coach does and the impact it has?

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