over other stakeholders in the organization(Kotter, 2012). Intentionally acknowledging and including informal leaders is consistent with a distributed leadership approach (Avolio, 2009) and with the principals of equity and inclusion underlying transformative leadership (Shields, 2010). At a minimum, the guiding coalition must include the primary principal, the assistant principals, and the primary curriculum coordinator. Additionally, it will be important that the guiding coalition includes a range of stakeholders from across the primary division so that it may be seen as broadly representative of the staff. Volunteers will be encouraged to participate, but those possessing significant informal influence will be explicitly invited to join. The guiding coalition will be referred to as a ‘steering committee’.
The steering committee will include the author of this OIP and will be tasked with the following responsibilities:
• Keeping stakeholders informed through regular communication.
• Liaising with the professional learning community to ensure coherence.
• Plan the use of staff meetings and in-service days to support the development of teaching and learning practices to encourage student action.
• Develop and communicate a clear vision of the desired future state of the organization based on the recommendations from the IB and the content of this OIP.
• Establish a shared definition and understanding of the full range of forms that student action can take amongst all teaching faculty in the primary division. • Develop a set of criteria with which to use to review the school’s programme of
inquiry, with the intent of ensuring that curricular content is significant, relevant, and meaningful enough to encourage student action.
• Develop a visual model to help clarify what effective teaching and learning for action looks like.
• Identify and promote professional development opportunities both within the school and externally.
The coalition should include members of the early years and the lower and upper primary. There should also be someone to represent the specialist teachers and teaching assistants (Kotter, 2012). There is potential for a great number of staff members to want to be involved, but it will be important to keep the size of the group under 12 if possible (“Is Your Team Too Big?,” 2006), but also be as inclusive as possible.
Members of this steering committee who are in teaching roles will be asked to form a professional learning community (PLC), which is currently part of the professional development expectations for all staff members at TIS.In order to engender credibility and be directly
involved in the PLC, the author of this OIP, who currently serves as the assistant principal, will partner with a few teachers to be directly involved in working with students in classrooms throughout the school year. PLCs have been running across the school since August 2017. August 2019 will mark the beginning of the third iteration of PLCs and TIS. If there are more than 12 volunteers to join the steering committee, some may be encouraged to join the PLC instead. There are currently three staff members, in addition to the curriculum coordinator and myself, who have expressed interest in being directly involved in this initiative. I will put out a call for further volunteers, and approach a few key people individually to invite them to join. Professional learning communities are viewed within the school as collaborative groups of educators who seek to critically analyze and share their practice in an ongoing and iterative manner to improve student learning (Stoll, Bolam, McMahon, Wallace & Thomas, 2006). This approach to engaging staff in enacting meaningful change is well aligned with the principals of this OIP as it involves distributed leadership (Hairon, Goh & Lin, 2014). Additionally, a PLC focused on student action complements the principles of transformative leadership, which Shields et al. (2018) describe as focused on equity, democracy, social justice, and meaningful change.
The most significant potential pitfall at this stage of the change process would be a lack of interest in the guiding coalition. While there is always some risk that interest in such an initiative is low, it seems likely that I will be able to attract 12 people to join the steering committee. Given that the curriculum coordinator and I will be members of this steering
committee, and that three others have already expressed interest in joining, it will only be necessary to attract another seven members. It would, of course, be possible to operate with a smaller group as well. With a staff of approximately 100 teachers, a group of 10 could still be considered adequately representative. There are a few key teachers I will approach directly and ask to join because they are seen as highly credible and well respected within the organization. Having them on the steering committee will bring further credibility to the entire process.
It will be helpful for the director of teaching and learning to be directly involved as well, but his time may be limited as he is working across all three divisions of the school and
overseeing the entire evaluation and accreditation process. It will be important for the steering committee to liaise with him regularly. Currently, the director of teaching and learning holds bi- weekly curriculum meetings. This will provide an appropriate context for a member of the steering committee to keep the entire curriculum team, including the director of teaching and learning, well-informed.
While there are no immediate financial implications of forming a guiding coalition, it will be important that this group is provided with an adequate amount of time to meet. As I oversee all of the extra-curricular activities, I am in a position to ensure that one afternoon per week is kept free for all members of this steering committee to meet regularly throughout the year. This group will also be provided with time during the orientation week in August, and during the in- service days in October and February (a total of four days during the year). A call for expressions of interest will need to go out by early June with the group formed and ready to meet during the second week of August 2019.
Stage 3 - Developing a Vision and Strategy: The vision is a clear and desirable picture