Doing your self-study: planning the process
You will need to carefully consider and plan how you will explore and address the focus of your enquiry and the various subsidiary questions that arise. It is expected that your self-study will evolve and therefore a concrete plan is not likely to be created at this stage. Instead what you need to do is:
- decide on an appropriate focus
- justify why this is important
- consider what kind of data you might need and how you might create this data
- have some thoughts about what you might look for in this data
Starting Points: Begin to notice
After you have read 'what is self-study?' and the readings assigned to this week (see tutor guide) and contributed to the self-study wiki you should be starting to have a clearer idea about what might be involved in doing a self-study.
You should now 'Begin to notice' more closely what you are doing in your daily practice in terms of your leadership roles and practices. How do you interact with people? what perceptions of leadership prevail? look for subtle clues about structure, hierarchy, roles and responsibilities around your school/context. What have you had to do today/this week that has offered you a leadership challenge or frustrated you? What about others in leadership roles - what do you notice?
Create a wiki page in your personal wiki called 'Beginning to notice'. Start to make notes in your wiki about what you are seeing. Make connections to your readings and theories. Note down questions that arise as a result of what you see.
You might wish to take a picture or draw a diagram to illustrate or represent an aspect of what you see (this could be an image of the school, staffroom layout, you in context, something abstract, notice on the wall, sign around school). You should upload this to your personal wiki and explain its relevance.