School Leadership — from strategic objectives to actionable items

After many gruelling hours of brainstorming and discussions, you have finally defined your school’s big strategic objectives. Now what?

Strategic objectives in a school context usually involve 5 or 6 big ideas or long term objectives spanning 5 to 6 years, which have emerged from lengthy brainstorming sessions with the entire school community. In my last school, these included digitisation, internationalisation and excellence in languages, to name a few. As a school leader, how can you convert these big ideas into tasks that can be implemented by the school community? As a school leader, this is your responsibility.

SWOT analysis, first developed at Stanford University led by Albert Humphrey in the 1960s-1970, can be used to identify the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats for each of the strategic objectives. Using the Internationalisation strategic objective as an example, the following is a simple SWOT analysis carried out in a Spanish, English speaking school:

Actions or initiatives are now identified to make the most of the Strengths and Opportunities or commonly called Offensive Strategies. For example, by observing the items F1 to F4 and O1 to O4, we were able to determine…