WRITING YOUR APPLICATION

CONTENT

  1. Address the selection criteria, not the position statement

You should what you write for each criterion with references to the position statement, but it’s the selection criteria that must be addressed

  1. Your script for each criterion needs a balance between what you have done to demonstrate your skills over the past three years, and how you could use your skills to help them address the key challenges that you have identified in their data

Focus on impact you have had and could have. Avoid a long list of involvements. A panel is looking for more than just involvement. They want to see how your leadership effected changed practice and did so by taking people on board

  1. Know the school to which you are applying

Know their data. Read their website. Know their challenges. It helps if you can say that you have had key discussions with key players from the school.

  1. Refer to experiences before three years ago, but don’t dwell on them

The most recent experiences are the most telling, but do refer to past leadership positions and the impact you had if they are relevant. Don’t elaborate on them.

  1. Avoid too much of the “I” and emphasise the “we”

Principals want team leaders. They want leaders who have developed and nurtured quality teamwork that has built capacity and achieved outcomes. Your role in creating the “we” is critical.

  1. Your application needs to stress the impact your leadership has had and can have

The leadership positions you have held are important - but only in so far as what you achieved in those positions

  1. Don’t write an essay that lectures a panel

This is a common fault. In an attempt to show the panel that you understand what good leaders do, you write a didactic opening paragraph. Demonstrate your understanding of the critical nature of this criterion through showing what you have done, or will do.

  1. Engage your readers

Panellists and principals want to sit up and take notice. Engage them, as you need to with any audience. Style and substance are important. Your style of writing might suggest an engaging communication skill – and isn’t this critical to good leadership?

  1. Choose your referees carefully and give a sentence explaining the perspective they might provide for the panel

In choosing your referees, go for balance, and make sure that they understand something re your leadership abilities and capabilities. In choosing them, ask them how your choice of them could add weight to your application.

  1. CVs can be useful aids for the panel

Panellists quickly peruse CVs to get some idea of your past school and leadership experience. That is all.

  1. Professional Learning

Your professional learning activities should not be an endless list. Indicate the ones that have been most relevant to you, and what you did as a result of the program

PRESENTATION

  1. Write about a page for each criterion

This is a mere rule of thumb, but it will ensure succinctness. Panellist hate waffle, and anything that takes too long will get them offside

  1. Dot pointing is useful, but not if you are just listing examples without saying how these examples demonstrate your impact
  1. Check the script for formatting, spelling and grammatical correctness

This seems so obvious, but is so often breached. Spell-check is useful, but only to a point. Get your draft proofread by a couple of reliable people. Badly or carelessly written applications get put aside very quickly.

  1. Get others to read your drafts and respond to their feedback

Feedback is the food that spurs growth. Those that don’t seek, analyse and respond to feedback don’t progress.

  1. Write a short letter to the principal and place it together with a hard copy of your application

This can’t go onto your on-line application but is nevertheless important – if it’s simply not transactionary. It must engage and make the panellist want to find out more re your leadership achievements and ideas.

  1. The application must be online, or it won’t be valid

By providing a hard copy, you please school admin because they don’t have to run it off…..it also allows you to include that letter.

  1. Principals and their panels are looking beyond the key selection criteria for that spark that will engage them

This spark should infuse your application and your interview. It’s about showing initiative, lateral thinking, a sense of humour, flexibility, empathy, big picture thinking, looking beyond the boundaries. It’s what lies at the core of your moral purpose as a leader and as a character.

THE KEY SELECTION CRITERIA

Leading Teachers will need to demonstrate the key selection criteria set out in 9.2.3.2 of the Teaching Service Order186, and in doing so, will be required to meet the following professional standards required of a Leading Teacher:

  1. Demonstrated exemplary teaching and learning performance
  2. Demonstrated strong commitment to personal leadership growth
  3. Demonstrated high level leadership in the school community and beyond
  4. Demonstrated ability to build and maintain effective teams and develop cooperative working relationships that promote excellence in teaching and learning within the educational and broader community
  5. Demonstrated ability to initiate, plan and manage significant change in response to new educational directions, and manage the planning, development, implementation and evaluation of curriculum policy and programs
  6. Demonstrated high level of ability to articulate educational issues and perspectives in communication with colleagues and others

Selection Criterion 1: Demonstrated high level understanding of initiatives in student learning including the Standards, the Principles of Learning and Teaching P-12 and Assessment and Reporting Advice and the capacity to provide leadership in the alignment of these areas.

It’s this last part that is critical in the selection process. Panellist will want to know what you have done and could do to provide alignment for your teachers – how you have got them on board and built their capacity, or intend to do so.

Selection Criterion 2: Demonstrated outstanding classroom teaching skills and the capacity to support colleagues to continually improve teaching and learning

Whatever role is specified, you will be expected to lead teachers and build their capacity to be excellent teachers. Excellent teachers have excellent student engagement and management. The panel will be particularly interested in what you have done in this regard, and how you could operate in this role over the next few years to help teachers be better teachers. How have you/will you build a performance and development culture in the teams that you lead?

This should be the focus of your response to this criterion, but you also need to show how you use learning intent, success criteria, perhaps the e5 components, ICT, student learning data to differentiate your teaching, as well as helping others to do so.

Selection Criterion 3: Demonstrated high level ability to monitor and assess student learning data at the individual, cohort and whole school level and to use this data to inform teaching for improved student learning

Be specific. What strategies have you used to build teacher capacity in this regard, and how would you operate in the position for which you are applying to do so? What data have you used, and how have you used it to inform your work in building teacher capacity in this regard?

Selection Criterion 4: Demonstrated high level written and verbal communication skills and high level interpersonal skills including a capacity to develop constructive relationships with students, parents and other staff and contribute to the leadership and management of the school

Your role in team leadership is critical here. Focus on your work/capacity to build and nurture effective teams.

Selection Criterion 5: Demonstrated commitment and capacity to actively contribute to and lead whole school improvement initiatives, manage major curriculum or student activities and a commitment to ongoing professional learning for self and others to enable further development of skills, expertise and teaching capacity, (and in particular as they relate to the needs of junior school students – included in the state-wide criteria but not applicable to Hallam)

Be very specific here. Explain the impact of your leadership of these teams and these initiatives.

How have you helped teachers build their skills? What have you done in ateam context? Have you/will you coach or run coaching conversations in a systematic manner. What use have you/will you make of visiting teacher classrooms and helping teachers reflect on observed practices? How do you incorporate professional learning activities in your meetings?

Selection Criterion 6 (the local criterion):

SC6 demonstrated capacity and passion to lead a whole school approach to sustained improvement in VCAL & VET programs.

SC6 Demonstrated capacity and passion to lead a whole school approach to the development of innovative learning and teaching practices to improve student outcomes.

SC6 Demonstrated capacity to lead and manage teams in the pursuit of school improvement initiatives.

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