Experienced heads of department, Femi Adeniran and Matt Findlay, join me for an epic conversation about leading a maths department. We cover everything from consistency versus autonomy, departmental meetings, handling parental complaints and allocating sets. You can access links to the resources discussed, time-stamps and videos on the podcast show-notes page here: https://www.mrbartonmaths.com/blog/168-how-to-lead-a-maths-department-with-femi-adeniran-and-matt-findlay/
Time-stamps:
- Matt's favourite failure (06:26)
- Femi's favourite failure (10:38)
- Matt's route into becoming a head of department (15:45)
- Femi's route into becoming a head of department (18:17)
- How many year's classroom teaching should you have before becoming a head of department? (21:02)
- How strong a teacher does the head of department need to be? (24:41)
- What does your timetable as a head of department look like? (28:43)
- Do you find you are teaching more these days than 5 years ago? (32:38)
- Does your teaching suffer with all the other things you have to give attention to? (40:00)
- How does your workload compare to a teacher with a full time-table? (46:39)
- How often would you be pulled out of a lesson to deal with something? (52:13)
- How do you balance the need for consistency across your department with a desire for teacher autonomy? (56:46)
- What are the non-negotiables that members of your team have to follow? (1:32:54)
- What do your departmental meetings look like? (1:57:13)
- How do you ensure good practice is shared around the department? (2:21:51)
- How do you support less experienced colleagues, non-specialists, those who are struggling? (2:23:16)
- How do you deal with directives from SLT that you don't agree with? (2:41:26)
- What do you do to help non-specialists (particularly SLT) understand what the characteristics of high-quality T&L in maths are? (2:48:37)
- How do you deal with difficult members of the department who are reluctant the make changes? (2:54:59)
- How do you deal with parental complaints? (3:00:48)
- How do you allocate teaching sets? (3:05:19)
- Final reflections (3:19:37)
- Craig's takeaways (3:32:42)
