Leadership Floorbooks offers a practical, creative and collaborative solution to support you in developing a visual space where leadership thinking becomes visible and valued. Just as Floorbooks document children’s learning journeys, a Leadership Floorbook documents the learning journey of your educators.
“To lead well is to learn well – and to do so alongside your team.”
Across Australia and New Zealand, educators navigate complex professional landscapes. Frameworks like the National Quality Framework (NQF) and Ngā Ara Whai Hua: Quality Framework for Evaluation and Improvement emphasise reflection, inquiry and continuous improvement. Leaders are expected not only to guide practice but to cultivate teams that learn together, critically reflect and make evidence-informed decisions. Yet too often, the thinking behind leadership decisions is invisible. Meetings end, emails are filed and ideas fade. How do we capture the questions, reflections and reasoning that shape professional practice?
Leadership as a learning journey
Effective leadership, like learning, is a process. Children explore, question and revisit their ideas. Leaders and educators do the same. Observing practice, reflecting on children’s engagement, questioning environments and testing new approaches are all part of leadership as learning. Your Leadership Floorbook can capture this ongoing journey.
- A photograph of a learning environment might spark a question.
- A team discussion might reveal new perspectives.
- A single word can stimulate thinking.
- A research article might inspire a change in practice.
By documenting these moments, your Leadership Floorbook becomes a living narrative of professional curiosity. It shows not just what was decided, but how the team arrived there. Over time, it tells the story of a setting’s collective learning.
Making thinking visible with Leadership Floorbooks
One of the most powerful aspects of a Leadership Floorbook is its ability to make thinking visible. Leadership decisions are often seen only in their outcomes. Staff notice changes, but not the reflections, dialogue or research that led there. Your Leadership Floorbook can change that. Pages can include photographs, handwritten reflections, diagrams and questions – capturing the reasoning behind decisions.
This visibility builds trust. Educators see that change is explored collectively and evidence informs decisions. It also slows reflection, giving teams time to question assumptions and deepen understanding.
Supporting reflective practice
Reflection is central to leadership in an early childhood programme. The EYLF and Te Whāriki encourage educators to examine pedagogy, interactions and environments critically. A Leadership Floorbook will extend reflection into the collective learning of the team to improve quality of provision. Observations documented in your Floorbook allow educators to revisit, compare perspectives and explore interpretations.
For example:
- noticing that children’s engagement outdoors is brief might prompt questions about adult interactions, the environment or resources
- through testing new approaches and documenting reflections, teams create a cycle of professional inquiry.
Reflection becomes dynamic, collaborative and deeply connected to practice.
Fostering collaborative leadership
Leadership today is shared and distributed. A Leadership Floorbook supports collaboration by inviting contributions from all educators – valuing and supporting equity of thinking.
- The visual and accessible format encourages everyone to record observations, questions and reflections.
- Staff meetings become spaces for inquiry rather than simply information sharing.
- Teams begin to see themselves as researchers of their own practice.
- Leadership becomes facilitation rather than instruction.
Multiple perspectives inform decisions, and professional dialogue becomes embedded in everyday practice.
Linking inquiry to improvement
The Leadership Floorbook also aligns naturally with inquiry-based approaches which embrace change, failure, testing theories and striving for improvement for children and families.
This creates a transparent record of improvement in a multimodal way. Over time, your Leadership Floorbook shows how professional curiosity has led to meaningful change in practice. This can then be backed up with diverse forms of data to provide a culture of action research.
Keeping children at the centre of Leadership Floorbooks
A Leadership Floorbook always return to children’s experiences and using them for leadership is no different. Observations of play, children’s voices, and learning outcomes ensure that leadership decisions are grounded in real evidence.
This aligns with Te Whāriki’s emphasis on relationships and children’s perspectives, and with the EYLF’s focus on Belonging, Being and Becoming. By keeping children central, leaders ensure that reflective practice drives improvements that matter.
Building confidence, continuity and professional identity
Your Leadership Floorbook can build confidence and professional identity. Educators see their observations and reflections about their work as part of a collective professional narrative – not as isolated comments in a meeting.
They also support continuity. New team members can explore the documented journey – understanding what questions were explored, what approaches were trialled and what learning emerged. Rather than starting anew, the team continues to build on shared knowledge.
Learning through Leadership Floorbooks
The role of a educational leader in early childhood is not about having all the answers. It is about creating spaces where questions can be explored, curiosity is valued and learning happens together.
A Leadership Floorbook can provide that space. They capture the thinking, collaboration and reflection that drive improvement. They slow practice down in the best way, allowing teams to interrogate assumptions, revisit ideas and stay connected to children’s experiences.
Ultimately, a Leadership Floorbook reminds us that leadership is part of the learning journey. To lead well is to learn well – and to do so alongside your team.
About the author
Dr Claire Warden is an educational consultant who has developed her approach to nature pedagogy and experiential learning through a variety of experiences. Her experiences have taken her on a pathway that includes working in a variety of types of centre, advisory work, and lecturing in further education.
