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leadership

Marking is an act of folly

2016-12-04T17:26:15+00:00November 30th, 2016|leadership|

Contrary to popular belief, marking and feedback are not the same thing. Clearly they're connected - and, ideally most marking has the intention of giving feedback - but the process of marking or giving marks does not, in and of itself, equate with feedback. Those who see marking as an essential component of a teachers' role should wonder why, in many parts of the world - particularly east Asian countries which seem to do very well in international comparisons - teachers do not routinely mark students' work. If it were essential this would not be possible. Anglophone countries - and the UK [...]

School improvement: Can you buck the trend?

2016-12-31T16:26:22+00:00July 4th, 2016|Featured, leadership|

In my last post I discussed the natural volatility of GCSE results and the predictably random nature of results over the long-term. I ended by saying, "The agenda for school improvement has to move away from endlessly pouring over data looking for patterns that don’t exist. We need to find new – better – ways to hold schools to account and come up with new definitions of what school improvement means." Interestingly, two readers got in touch to cite the example of Michaela School as a potential outlier. Obviously, Michaela's first cohort are still a number of years away from sitting [...]

7 habits of genuinely expert teachers

2016-03-09T22:44:13+00:00March 9th, 2016|leadership|

Science is not 'organized common sense'; at its most exciting, it reformulates our view of the world by imposing powerful theories against the ancient, anthropocentric prejudices that we call intuition. Stephen J. Gould Being a teacher is a tough job. The quantity and the complexity of the decisions and responses we make in the course of a day is daunting. Useful as it would be to think deeply about and reflect thoroughly on each of these interactions, there isn't time to stop and stare. In order to function we have to rely on our intuition. Most of what we do in [...]

The rise of the unscrupulous optimist

2016-03-05T16:33:51+00:00March 5th, 2016|leadership|

"Optimism, n.: The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly." Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary Education is a project filled with hope. We stand, framed heroically against the setting sun and scan the horizon for new stuff to transform the tired, outmoded, factory clamour of the past and hope - oh, how we hope - that everything will be better. But our forward-looking, progressive stance means we can all too easily miss seeing a landscape littered with failed ideas and the scorched ruins of unscrupulous optimism. Here are a couple of recent examples for your consideration: The College of Teaching Tom [...]

The role of teachers is not to make managers’ lives easier

2016-02-29T19:17:28+00:00February 29th, 2016|behaviour, leadership, workload|

"To supervise people, you must either surpass them in their accomplishments or despise them." Benjamin Disraeli Questions about the purpose of education divide and bedevil: there's no real agreement about what education is for. But what about teachers? Surely, even if we disagree about what exactly teachers ought to teach we all at least agree they should be teaching children something? And - at least in theory - I think we do, broadly, agree that teachers should teach. Whatever your ideological stripe, you probably agree that the education of children - whatever that means - is the main thing. Everything else is peripheral. [...]

When planning fails… what to do when behaviour breaks down

2016-02-17T15:50:51+00:00February 17th, 2016|behaviour, leadership|

"There is in the act of preparing, the moment you start caring." Winston Churchill Lots of people who don't normally like the stuff I write seemed to approve of the post I wrote on responsibly planning for predictable behaviour to reduce exclusions, and some of those who are usually approving were less pleased. There's two things I might take from this: 1) I've occupied the centre ground and communicated a moderate message that confirmed readers' biases, or 2) I didn't manage to explain myself very well. I think there's a bit of both at work. My point is that we should plan [...]

Taking responsibility for predictable problems

2016-02-18T17:33:18+00:00February 16th, 2016|behaviour, leadership|

"All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control." John Von Neumann Let me preface all this by saying that I think refusing to accept excuses for low standards and poor behaviour is a very good thing. Here's what 'no excuses' means to me: Making an excuse is failing to take responsibility. The students most likely to be excluded from school are the most vulnerable. This may, in some circumstances, be unavoidable. After spending quite a bit of time looking into the work of Virtual Schools (Local Authority bodies with a specific responsibility for the education over children in the Local Authority's care) the [...]

Big data is bad data

2016-01-12T09:49:42+00:00January 11th, 2016|leadership|

The cost of bad data is the illusion of knowledge. – Stephen Hawking Schools, as with almost every other organ of state, are increasingly obsessed with big data. There seem to be two main aims: prediction and control. If only we collect and analyse enough data then the secrets of the universe will be unlocked. No child will be left behind and all will have prizes. Can we learn from the past? No. Or at least, not in any way that helps. We can see trends, but these are far more likely to be noise than signal. When exam results are rising [...]

On fragility: why systems fail

2015-12-26T12:07:08+00:00December 24th, 2015|leadership|

In Antifragile, Nassim Taleb argues that the opposite of fragile is not, as is commonly supposed, robust or resilient. These are merely neutral conditions. The antonym of fragile doesn't seem to exist in English, hence the neologism, antifragile. If something fragile is damaged by chaos, stress and challenge and something resilient or robust is immune, then something possessing antifragility is enhanced. The best, perhaps only, way to thrive in an uncertain world is to learn from the antifragile and shun the merely robust. Evolution is a good example of an antifragile system: chaos, stress and challenge provoke the flourishing of random mutations which benefit [...]

Student voice: windmills of the mind

2015-12-12T23:27:30+00:00December 12th, 2015|leadership, learning|

Pray look better, Sir … those things yonder are no giants, but windmills. Cervantes Does it matter if students like their teachers? Is it worth knowing if students don't maths or hate PE? Should students be asked to evaluate the quality of their lessons? It sometimes seems that the clamour of 'what students want' drowns out even the presumed demands of 'what Ofsted want'. Students' opinions might be interesting but should they be used to judge the effectiveness of teachers? Certainly some school leaders appear to think so. An anonymous blog on the Labour Teachers site* reveals the extent of the rise of this [...]

One more thing I want from school leaders

2016-06-30T23:22:40+01:00December 9th, 2015|leadership|

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything. Goethe A few weeks back I wrote this post laying out my wishlist for the 'perfect' school leader. Since then, one startling omission has become clear. I addition to wanting school leaders to be humble, loving, determined, focussed and possessing of vision I also want them to be clever. Too many people are, for a variety of reasons (but probably the biggest is confidence,) promoted above their ability. This results in the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the finding that the poorest performers are the least aware of [...]

Discord isn’t disharmony: in praise of inconsistency

2019-06-21T08:36:46+01:00December 3rd, 2015|leadership|

Consistency is the playground of dull minds. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens  What’s so great about consistency? How has the consensus that everybody 'singing from the same hymn sheet’ is always the best idea arisen? Superficially it makes sense – a choir singing from different hymn sheets would create a cacophony – but if we stretch the metaphor a little we can see that while a choir may be singing the same hymn, different choristers will be singing different parts and in different keys. Their hymn sheets will be different. As Harari says in, Sapiens, “Just as when two clashing musical notes [...]

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