The staff were fortunate recently to hear a presentation from renowned NZ educationalist, Bali Haque.

Bali’s involvement in education in New Zealand has spanned many years. He has been principal of four secondary schools, as well as a deputy chief executive at NZQA responsible for the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). Bali’s most recent work has been in chairing the Tomorrow's Schools taskforce, who were tasked with reviewing the ways our schooling system is currently governed and managed to identify changes needed for the future. Bali reported that the taskforce has reviewed feedback from the community and the revised report is due to be published in early September.

The focus of Bali’s address was on presenting some ideas about solutions to some of the background factors which had led to the taskforce review: namely teacher workload, isolation and what has been described by Canadian educational researcher, Michael Fullan, as ‘presentism’ [when there is a feeling of overload and the focus is just on getting through the day]. Bali talked about the need for collaboration as a response to these issues and about the idea that 'moral purpose' should inform all aspects of teaching and learning, that work without a moral purpose is just 'busy work’. He shared with teachers some models of leadership to challenge teachers to think about the way they work as a leader of students or as a leader of their colleagues.

One of the models discussed was an interesting take on leadership in that it focused on followership. This Kelley Model of Followership (1992) could be applied beyond the teaching context to the context of developing as a good citizen. This model challenges the notion of ‘group think’ and identifies five types of followers, from passive followers to exemplary and effective followers.

Overall, Bali challenged us to examine our own mental models, that is, the assumptions and thought processes which shape our understanding of what we see and how we behave, including how we respond to problems. As Bali said: “Poorly defined problems lead to poorly defined solutions.”

A short edited clip of Bali’s presentation may be viewed on the Hagley website.