E53: Siobhan Fitzgerald on Empowering Student Voice Through Public Speaking and Leadership in a Rural DEIS School

In this week's episode, I share strategies for staying composed when an unexpected interview question catches you off guard. One blip doesn’t mean failure. I explain that many questions link to the Looking At Our School (LAOS) leadership competencies, and offer practical tools: don’t confuse surprise with difficulty, give yourself permission to pause, listen for the competency being assessed, decide on one main point, connect the question to an existing experience, use action verbs to o...

In episode 58 of the Growth in Educational Leadership podcast, I share practical tips to stop rambling in leadership interviews, based on issues that often come up in mock interviews with my clients. I explain that interview answers should focus on the words the panel wants to hear, not everything I want to share, and that each answer needs one clear core message. I recommend answering the question in the first sentence, using one strong example, keeping context brief, and using a tight...

In episode 57 of the Growth and Educational Leadership podcast, I discuss handling multi-part interview questions that can throw school leaders off under pressure. I explain practical strategies such as asking permission to use a notepad, requesting clarification or repetition, and taking a brief pause to process before answering. I show how to decode questions by pulling out the key verbs (e.g., led, engaged, overcame, evaluated) and then chunking the response into clear sections, usin...

In this episode of the Growth in Educational Leadership podcast, I speak with Anne Jan Van Den Dool, an educational leadership specialist and director at Poel Management, about his 20+ years across primary, secondary, and vocational education, including interim school leadership. He describes learning leadership “the hard way” after becoming a young middle leader, realising that leading teachers is a different profession requiring skills, knowledge, and an identity shift, including clearly “s...

In this week's episode, I welcome Shane Leaning to the Growth in Educational Leadership podcast, and we discuss his work in Shanghai, including leadership development through Education Leaders and his not-for-profit Work Collaborative, which grew out of his book Change Starts Here, on how schools build confidence to lead sustainable change amid external pressures. We explore “othering” as distancing people by treating them as different, including a self-protective form linked to imposte...