You’re halfway through a DTL—HOD meeting.
You’ve just unpacked your school’s aspirations: deeper learning, more student agency, richer thinking. Around the table, people are respectful and engaged.When you pause for questions, hands go up—about assessment schedules, staffing, room changes, and reporting templates.
No one is being obstructive.They’re doing exactly what they’ve been trained and rewarded to do: keep the department running, keep the engine smooth, protect staff from overload. You leave the meeting wondering, “How do I help them see themselves as designers of learning, not just managers of logistics—without implying they’ve been doing it wrong all these years?”
That tension is real. HODs are often hired and praised for subject expertise and organisational competence. Yet the work we now ask of them is different: to nurture innovation, coach teachers, and lead learning that prepares young people for a complex future. It’s easy to feel that this demands a “role change”announcement.
In reality, you can start much smaller and gentler. You can begin by shifting what you all routinely pay attention to when you’re together.
Change the default question, not the job title
Consider what usually dominates your HOD meetings: deadlines, data cycles, exam results, compliance.These matter. But if they take all the air in the room, there’s no space left for what you say you value: curiosity, creativity, collaboration, and deep thinking.
Instead of launching a new initiative, you can introduce a simple ritual that re‑centres learning.
Imagine this at your next meeting. Before the usual agenda, you say:
“Before we dive into our tasks, I’d love us to share one moment from the last fortnight where students were really thinking hard about something that matters.”
You give them a minute to think, then ask them to jot a few notes: which class, what the students were doing, what made it stand out. At first, there might be a bit of shuffling.Then the stories emerge.
A Maths HOD talks about a class wrestling with a non‑routine problem, arguing about different solution strategies. A History HOD describes students debating a controversial source, changing their minds as they listened. A Science HOD shares a practical where students designed their own fair tests instead of following a script.
You ask them to share in pairs, then invite two or three people to share with the whole group. You capture key words on a board: “students persisted,” “students argued productively,” “students asked their own questions,” “students connected it to real life.”
In ten minutes, a few important things have happened:
- you’ve signalled that stories of learning matter as much as operational updates;
- you’ve affirmed HODs as close observers of student thinking, not just overseers of coverage;
- you’ve planted a quiet seed: this is the kind of learning we want more of.
You haven’t changed anyone’s job description. You’ve just changed the default question.
Let the routine do the heavy lifting
The power is not in doing this once; it’s in doing it again and again.
Next meeting, you might ask:
- “Where did you see students show real agency - taking initiative or making decisions about their learning?”; or,
- “Where did students show creativity - producing something original, making an unexpected connection, or trying a different approach?"
Over time, these small prompts begin to shape what HODs look for in classrooms, what they ask their teams about, and how they talk about their work. Without a single “role change”speech, you are shifting identity from subject managers to leaders of learning.
Try it tomorrow: the ‘OneLearning Moment’ routine
At your next HOD meeting, try this 10‑minute starter:
- Set the prompt: “In the last fortnight, where did you see students genuinely struggle productively with an important idea?”
- Quiet jot: Two minutes for each HOD to capture a brief example.
- Pair share: Three minutes in pairs, exploring, "What happened? Why did it matter? What helped it happen?"
- Whole group harvest: Two or three volunteers share. Capture key words/phrases where everyone can see them.
- Simple close: Thank them and move into the rest of the agenda. No action list. no pressure.
Reflection prompts for you and your HODs
You might use these at the end of the term, or in one‑to‑one conversations
- "What patterns are you noticing in the learning moments we’ve shared?”
- "Where do you already see your department creating these conditions?”
- "What small change could amplify these moments without adding to workload?”
You don’t need to announce a transformation for it to begin. Sometimes the most powerful move is to change the questions you ask and the stories you invite. The role will quietly start to reshape itself around those new conversations.
