A colleague once said to me, "a school's schedule is an expression of what that school values." I couldn't agree more, and it made me look differently at every system, procedure, and plan that makes up the daily life of a school — including, as it's the beginning of the school year here in the northern hemisphere, our onboarding process. At our school we call it our Orientation Program.
I lead Lincoln Community School (LCS), a well-established international school in Accra, Ghana, West Africa. For many reasons, onboarding new teaching staff is a regular, sizable part of our "beginning of the school year" — anything from 10 to 22 teachers each year, in my time here. That volume means the process is vitally important, not incidental: our entire senior leadership team is involved, and by listening each year to the feedback of the "newbies," we've gotten better and better at aligning what we do with what we value and who we are as a school.
The Scaffolding
The scaffolding of our program is straightforward — much of it will look familiar to anyone who has run onboarding at an international school. The values live in the details underneath it. Here's the shape of it:
Our orientation program has two main focus areas: making LCS your community and making Ghana your home. Every session is connected to one of these, so our new people can always see why they're being asked to do a particular thing.
The program runs up to five days, with new staff arriving in-country at least five days before everyone else returns. This lets the leadership team focus entirely on onboarding, without competing against the pull of a full staff return.
Onboarding starts back in March, with at least three optional Zoom calls between new staff and our leadership team, the last of which is a chance for the incoming teacher to connect directly with the outgoing person whose role they're stepping into. From appointment onwards, our new teachers are in direct contact with our human resource Director, who handles all of the nuts and bolts of getting people here.
The program includes the practical business of becoming an official person in a new country: visiting the immigration office, a medical examination, opening a bank account, sorting out a new phone number.
It includes learning the culture and customs of a new country. Each day, the newbies learn a Twi word of the day and hear about health care, security, and cultural do's and don'ts.
It also includes sessions about our school itself: our mission and vision, our curriculum, how our tech systems work, how we communicate with each other and the outside world, and — most importantly — how we work together as teams of people.
The Little Things
This is where I think the values actually show up — not in the schedule itself, but in the small, specific choices underneath it.
Every new teacher and their family are met at the airport by either myself or a member of the senior leadership team, and driven to their new apartment or house, which our school provides. Groceries and essentials are waiting for them when they arrive. Transportation is provided all week for the inevitable trips to the supermarket and the mall. On Day 1, each new person is issued a laptop, and we take the time to make sure logging in, passwords, and printing access are all sorted before anything else is asked of them. Every newbie receives a gift of Ghanaian fabric on arrival, and during the week we arrange access to a dressmaker so that shirts, skirts, and dresses can be made as soon as possible — a small thing, but one that lets people feel dressed for the place they've just moved to, not just visiting it.
Each day, we close our final session with an exit ticket, "what wonderings do you have now?" Those wonderings are collected and answered at the start of the next day, so nobody is left carrying a question too long. The process is more than just answering questions, it is an opportunity for the school’s leaders to listen and make changes as we go.
Every newbie is also given three buddies — one for personal connection, one for professional matters, one for tech support — so there's always a specific person to ask, whatever the question is. The school provides breakfast and lunch every day for the newbie and their family, and children are cared for on campus while orientation is underway. The week is deliberately balanced between professional time and personal time, because we want our new people to know, from day one, that they've arrived somewhere where they will be both cared for and treated as the professionals they are.
A specific time is set aside for storytelling, with newbies responding to the question “why an international school for you?” We take the time and provide the space for this and the focus is on listening to each other’s unique stories, as a way to connect and value each other.
We take feedback from each incoming group seriously and use it to improve the program for the next cohort. We think of onboarding and orientation as a year-long process. The first five days are a significant step in the onboarding journey, but it does not stop there.
If a school's schedule reveals what it values, then so does everything else it chooses to notice and provide for the people arriving in it. My suggestion to any school leader reading this: look past your own onboarding checklist for a moment and ask not just what you're doing, but what it reveals about what you actually value versus what you say you value. The gap between those two answers is usually where the real work is.
Lesley is the Head of School at Lincoln Community School in Accra, Ghana.
