Invicta Vlogs
Mrs Derrick's Blog
With the Half Term holiday over, we are about to embark upon a very busy 6 weeks that will effectively enable us to ‘cross the line’ of being half way through the academic year. That is a daunting thought! We often comment about ‘how time flies’ but at this juncture, the well-used phrase certainly resonates.
Nevertheless, we have a lot to look forward to, for this Half Term: The Kent Debating Competition, National Offer Day (when we excitedly send our invitations to our ‘new’ Year 7 for 2019), Year 8 Options, Senior Prefect Hustings, Kent Schools’ Senior Debating Competition, STEM Week, Kent Speakers’ Competition, World Challenge and Duke of Edinburgh training, the Snowdonia Trip, our Spring Concert, our New Entrants’ Welcome Evening and a visit to Thorpe Park. These are just some of our events! We have lots more!
One element that is required for all of this, along with our students’ academic progress, is collaboration. Collaboration sums up everything our school community stands for. We could not do what we do, without the collaboration of students, staff and parents.
Over the holiday, I read The Bees by Laline Paul. It really resonated with me and how our school community works. I can certainly relate to the concept of the ‘hive mind’ - a collective consciousness, analogous to the behaviour of social insects, in which a group of people become aware of their commonality and think and act as a community, sharing their knowledge, thoughts, and resources.
Working collaboratively has characterised my career. It has brought me a lot of joy and opened a lot of doors for me, but when things have not been collaborative, it has also caused challenge for me. As leaders, we need to know what our own trigger points are and people who are ‘Queen Bees’ and those who work in a territorial way frustrate me.
For me collaboration is about removing barriers, finding solutions to problems, sharing the workload, sharing best practice, networking, being outward facing and connecting people, ideas and projects together. Collaboration is about being part of a team, about being part of something bigger than yourself and about seeing the bigger picture but understanding how you can contribute to a shared vision and team goal.
Invicta is, I hope, a safe space for collaborations to be sown and to grow; it is the glue that holds the jigsaw pieces together. We are so fortunate to witness through all the events listed above; what true collaboration provides us with. I do hope that you will join us in further developing collaboration across our whole school. So, as we embark upon the theme for this week, ‘Engage beyond the curriculum’, let us see how collaboration really does reinforce such an important aspect of Invicta. After all, we are about so much more than exam results! Please do reflect too, on the importance of sharing our knowledge, thoughts and resources. By doing this, we can achieve so much more!
