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Best Practice Focus: Crucial conversations: A field guide for school leaders

Every single day school leaders are faced with challenging yet crucial conversations – conversations that if handled badly can damage morale, relationships, trust in your school. In this Best Practice Focus, Robbie Burns offers strategies and examples for getting leadership conversations right
Advice: This Best Practice Focus offers practical strategies to help school leaders prepare for and deliver crucial conversations - Adobe Stock

 

Available to download as a free pdf, this Best Practice Focus looks at leadership as conversation and how as school leaders we can have conversations that are "present", "curious" and "courageous".

The author Robbie Burns, who is a vice-principal working in the North East of England, discusses his five-step process to help prepare for and deliver crucial conversations as a school leader.

He then applies this process to two fictitious examples of conversations that happen regularly in many primary schools.

Download this free pdf via the button above. This Best Practice Focus first appeared in Headteacher Update's Spring Term Edition 2025. This edition was sent free of charge to UK primary schools in January 2025. A free-to-download digital edition is also available via www.headteacher-update.com/content/downloads 

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