A matrix like this can be useful to frame your thinking and discussions around prioritising your strategic initiatives.  In this particular version, the value and effort associated with undertaking and delivering an initiative is focused on.  You determine the value and effort parameters.

The high effort, high value elephants are the the initiatives that you will need to break into smaller, bite-sized pieces. 

Organising the initiative into 'natural' stages is one approach.  For instance you might bundle together your research, consultation and drafting of a sizable curriculum change into one stage and then test the update in select classes (and evaluate the results) in the next stage.  Amending and incorporating the new curriculum content across the whole school might then take place over the following year or two.

This sort of approach makes your big, ambitious programmes of change more manageable and less overwhelming.  It also lends itself to decision points which allow you to reflect on your effort to date and decide if as well as how to proceed.

How you retain oversight and accountability will also need to be considered within your annual planning.

Any sort of win is energising and validating.  Quick wins will help you get some early runs on the board to show your stakeholders.  They can also provide momentum for your team to keep supporting the change. 

Thankless tasks are time-consuming and absorb resources you may decide to deploy elsewhere.  Fill ins often tick by in the background and can be completed when there is capacity to do so. 

The conversation you have with your team around the value and effort of achieving each strategic initiative can yield rich discoveries. 

At a minimum, it will provide you with an opportunity to re-emphasise your strategic direction with the people who are critical to its success.  Any chance to develop a common understanding of why you are doing what you are doing is gold.

How will they measure up?

When secondary schools finally reopen their doors for face to face learning again, the test of success will NOT be whether young people have kept up with their academic learning, nor will it be measured by the school’s league table of NCEA endorsements, community decile ratings or the certificates and trophies presented at prize giving at the end of the year.

The measure of success of a school will be whether the institution and its teachers have prepared, and can keep up with, a new age of student who have had a taste of independence, self-directed learning and agency from the comfort of their bedrooms.

Covid is forcing secondary schools to drop the last remnants of the factory model. They will no longer be able to rely on conformity, tradition and enforcement of rules to manage and measure a student’s success.

Young people are discovering what power over their learning really means and this will be a challenge for those adults who are used to controlling their every move, judging their success by the correctness of their uniform, their ability to put their hand up, stay quiet and still in their seat and conform to an antiquated set of rules.

Our young people have discovered they can choose when, where and how they receive their learning. If that means they will not begin until after mid-day and work from their beds how will they react to being told to sit down in a grey desk in small chair in a closed room for an hour and then repeat this 6 times a day?

They no longer have to sit in a classroom and accept that a lesson is an hour of copying notes off a whiteboard.

They have discovered that the colour of their hair, how many earrings they have and whether they are even wearing shoes, has no impact on their ability to navigate their way through their study.

Some schools will need to re examine how they assess the young 15 year old boy who has spent the last four weeks on the farm helping his parents make sure the rest of us get the food we need. He will not have had time to answer the online survey asking about his well being. He has been too busy out in the sunshine, contributing to his family, developing resilience.

What about the boy who has designed and constructed a waterproof woodshed out of what is lying around in the backyard, too busy to come inside and complete a hastily written, scanned and emailed worksheet on algebra.

How will we judge the girl who will have almost completed her full year’s portfolio in Art by the time she goes back to school, creating beautiful out of boredom, painting hope out of isolation? Will she be rewarded with the requirement to do more?

How will these schools measure their own success at the end of all this?
More importantly how will the flexible, creative, responsive and resilient young people judge them?