Building strong, effective school teams

Tshwarelo Hosia | Monday July 14, 2025 09:50

The setting was the University of Botswana in the 1990s. Perhaps due to the passage of time, I just have no recollection of the exact academic year it was.

The Student Representative Council (SRC) convened a general assembly of students to moot the idea of boycotting intervarsity games. Several factors were advanced as to why everyone should rally behind the call to boycott the games.

But the one reason given, which stands out to me, was what was presented eloquently by one of the revered and outspoken members of the SRC.

To paraphrase his words he said the intervarsity games glorified the Vice Chancellor (VC) of the university and that the ripple effects of the boycott would be much more felt in the management office than anywhere else.

This made sense to everyone because of the then already existing student disaffection towards the school administration, especially the VC. To its credit, the SRC had skillfully identified a rallying point - a purpose bringing together the student community.

For the moment the students who were not a homogeneous entity buried their political differences to rally behind a cause that appeared so noble and inspiring. Leaders can make or break an institution. The fate of an organisation should not be linked to that of an individual leader.

People in an organisation or school should never think that they are working for the school principal. The school principal is a component of the school and should never be equated to the school. The school serves a purpose bigger than the school principal.

Hurting the school principal places lives of those the school was created to serve at risk. Little did the university students realise that beyond fixing the vice chancellor there was a bigger goal to be achieved or compromised if the boycott succeeded.

The goal that would in jeopardy was that of pushing the agenda of cultural exchanges between countries involved and promoting health through sports.

The biggest losers were to be the students themselves. School teams must find the one single rallying point. It is a purpose- a big issue beyond the school principal.

There is one single thing that makes school teams gel. That is a common understanding of the vision - meaning the bigger picture that the team sets itself. A vision is a rally point. The vision is bigger than everyone involved regardless of positional power or authority they wield.

It unites all for a purpose from the security guard at the gate, office cleaner responsible for keeping the office, the cook in the cafeteria, the teacher in the classroom, the senior teacher manning a department to the school principal in the board room.

Unity of purpose and mind around the vision undermines sectional interests pushing every member of the team to surrender his / her best self towards the attainment that which every one desires to identify with.

Executing my oversight responsibilities of schools in my jurisdiction, last week I visited schools to embark on instructional rounds. Instructional rounds are visits to schools to gauge the quality of school governance, classroom.

Instruction, frequency of assessment and student feedback. It involves interviewing the different actors to hear what they have to say about the overall health of their schools and also checking what they do to contribute towards the success and prosperity of each and every evidence.

Documentary evidence in the form of lesson plans and student-learning outcomes is important for one to have a comprehensive understanding of the character of a school. The equivalent of instructional rounds would be medical rounds in the medical profession.

Doctors take medical rounds to hear how patients are responding to treatment but they also gather evidence in the form of blood pressures and body temperatures. This is a standard practice that doctors repeat and follow religiously.

The one school encounter that caught my attention involved a school that experienced significant student gains in the last academic season. I had asked each head of the department to present a story of how the turnaround came about in the department.

The presentations were quite rich and educational ranging from targeted interventions aimed at upgrading chronically achieving students, humanitarian aid that teachers extend to the children from less privileged backgrounds to the efforts made to lure parents and community support. I found the schools devotion to duty not only total but also unparalleled.

It didn’t require a rocket science to tell that a lot of investments had gone into the school team building exercise.

The school principal is hardly two years old in the schools. When I approached her early last year about the possibility of a ‘ cabinet reshuffle ‘ in her school, she asked me to wait a little while because she was preoccupied with a rigorous team building exercises.

I yielded and gave her a chance to execute the plan. Well a year later the school experienced phenomenal changes in terms of student learning outcomes.

The one glaring thing in our interactions was that the school places the student as the centre of everything it does. Every talk involves how to make the students achieve better than yesterday.

The students generally come from low-income backgrounds and this factor rather than being a source of demotivation, it has become a source of strength.

The school thrives in instilling positive attitudes in the minds of students. The encouragement makes students to believe in themselves and their abilities.

The one common rallying point the school has adopted which is appealing to all and sundry is the desire to change the village. The school identifies with a bigger purpose beyond the school.

Yes, the school community could be applying itself fully out of reverence of the school principal but much attention is fixated on addressing poverty and inequalities the children are suffering from back in the village. With this approach the school is poised to go far.