Center Directors play a vital role in creating successful schools, but existing knowledge on the best ways to delegate tasks to staff needs to be more extensive. Knowing how to work with a team and successfully delegate tasks makes you feel significantly better prepared, perceive the opportunities offered by the directorship more positively, and will encourage you to plan to stay in this role. It will also enable you to make a difference in the lives of the families you serve, influence school change, and grow professionally. Here, we discuss what effective delegation entails and strategies to accomplish it.
Have a plan
Before assigning roles and responsibilities, you want a well-defined and well-integrated idea of what will improve the center. It's more like a vision of change and goodwill to the community, teachers, and learners. Of course, this vision should align with the school's motto, vision, ethical code, and brand. Having a vision erases any doubts about your directorship. It gives the staff confidence and keeps them motivated, knowing they are under a unanimous purpose. But how do you have this unique plan before delegating tasks? This brings us to the next point, which is observation.
Observation
Much of being an excellent director will be grounded in your analytical skills. Assign a team to do this, or do this personally. You want to analyze classroom practices, how the kids are growing, and whether the teachers are comfortable in the role. If not, why? How is the attendance? Try to supervise in person and apply videotaping. You can also have a walk-through in the morning session or at random hours. These observations can best be conducted with a staff who can provide context and explanation. The more data, the better; you can also collect feedback from teachers and children on their experiences in the classroom. It will make a huge difference even if you can only do this quarterly or once every semester.
Collaboration
Initial transitioning to a delegated task can be difficult. To reduce this, show respect for your subordinates' professionalism by inviting them to a meeting and discussing the vision or goal in further detail. This meeting is not to force decisions; you want to empower the staff teacher as much as possible. Everyone should know they can make at least some decisions - there is room for flexibility. In the meantime, these meetings can be weekly or monthly, but if you can increase the frequency, then that will be better. In the meeting, get to hear problems. Rather than regarding your plan structures as fixed, see other perspectives that can still be achieved. It could be getting teachers to work together, swapping classes, increasing recess time, departments to hold their weekly meetings, or adding some resources to the class. But the overall goal should be clear.
Evaluate
Your directives and plan can be complex; thus, you must have solid evaluation criteria for whether you and other staff are achieving the goal as discussed. Start by defining a list of criteria that can be used for evaluation—for example, parents' feedback, children's academic performance, and teacher satisfaction. If a parent comments, "The staff in this school is fantastic," that should not be missed. If the teacher says, "I think that there is much support amongst the teachers," then again, record this and use it as part of the evaluation. If there is a consistent pattern among the metrics, this could be used to conclude that tactics are successful and meet your goal.
Reference:
Silver, P. (1986). Case records: A reflective practice approach to administrator development. Theory Into Practice, 25, 161-167. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405848609543219.
Training that will help with delegation:
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