Innovating in school management: a challenge to be faced

When talking about the impact of the pandemic on education, the first image that comes to most people's minds is classrooms, with students and teachers. Working behind the scenes, but no less relevant, managers also had to adapt to the new reality of teaching and remote and hybrid work, immersing themselves in learning new processes and innovations that were not previously part of their daily lives. According to professor, consultant and researcher George R. Stein, the challenge of reconciling management routines, being attentive to the demands of the school community and, at the same time, keeping in touch with more collaborative ways of teaching and learning has been a great challenge.



“By adapting the school’s offering during this time of pandemic, we deal with the challenges of taking care of the health of the school community, of effectively incorporating educational technologies into the learning process and we also seek viable financial ws data and relational support for the school”, he explains. In addition to thinking about the sustainability and financial health of the school, most of the school manager's challenges relate to dealing with people, whether in person or through digital platforms. After more than a year of social distancing, the routine of meetings, discussions, remote work and longer working hours — shared with self-care and family care — has caused extreme fatigue in most education professionals.







“Perhaps the biggest challenge is exhaustion, not only for parents and students, but also for teachers and staff. And the school manager, even more exhausted by the paradigm of speed to handle everything and still respond in an innovative way to changes, finds himself lost in the lack of a support network and also in the lack of care for himself”, says Professor George. For the school to follow a continuous process of learning and institutional transformation that also provides for the care and development of these managers, it is necessary to use innovation in favor of school management, points out the teacher.



“It is crucial that the school manager acts in an innovative way to continue training new generations, taking into account communication skills, empathy, dialogue and collaboration, and enabling the necessary transformations, both at the individual and collective level”, he points out. When we talk about innovation in management, it is not just about using digital technologies or online tools. In this way, how can the educational manager put into practice new levels of care that open space for learning and transformation? “We believe in new attitudes and skills that deal not only with digital technologies, but mainly with social technologies, which involve innovation management approaches focused on complexity and which encompass practices of dialogue, collaboration and collective decision-making”, concludes the professor, who created a survey to map the challenges that managers are facing and how, which can be answered at this link. Alongside professor Marcelo Ferreira de Castilho, George R.



Stein will teach the course How to innovate in school management: attitudes, technologies and practices , within the Imersões Singularidades cycle, in which all the topics mentioned above will be addressed in a practical and experiential way, to enhance innovation in school management. You can find out more and sign up here.