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leadership

What I want from a school leader

2019-03-14T14:14:09+00:00November 28th, 2015|leadership|

In response to various posts on book monitoring earlier in the week, Lee Donaghy asked what the role of school leaders ought to be. Now, some would have it that because I don't lead a school any opinion I might offer is invalid. Many people do not understand the purpose of leading teaching and learning. Why? Because they have never done it. — @TeacherToolkit (@TeacherToolkit) November 26, 2015 This is an interesting perspective. In response, I'd like to submit that there might be plenty of people who do lead in schools who don't seem to understand the purpose of what they're doing either. Just doing [...]

The problem with book monitoring

2020-01-02T17:17:02+00:00November 26th, 2015|leadership|

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way. Albert Camus Most schools these days routinely monitor students' exercise books in an attempt to extrapolate the quality of teaching. In some ways this is positive and reflects the growing recognition that we can tell much less than we might believe about teaching quality by observing lessons. On the whole I'm in favour of looking at students' work, but, predictably, book monitoring goes wrong for pretty much the same reasons lesson observation doesn't work. The thing is, there's nothing wrong with observing lessons, work scrutiny or any of the other practices used to [...]

Workload, retention & accountability: One policy to rule them all

2015-11-22T09:52:46+00:00November 22nd, 2015|leadership, workload|

More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies. Rudyard Kipling There's a lot wrong with the way schools are held to account which result in perverse incentives for school leaders to treat teachers less well than we might want. There are also huge fears about a recruitment and retention crisis in education:  Teachers seem to be leaving the profession in droves and new cannon-fodder is failing to step up to the plate in sufficient numbers. Teachers feel overworked and under-appreciated. The two reasons most often cited for leaving the profession are unnecessary workload and poor behaviour management [...]

The Illusion of Knowing

2017-04-18T23:41:37+01:00November 20th, 2015|leadership|

Knowledge, n.: The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. Ambrose Bierce Advanced Learning has commissioned me to write a piece about the uses and abuses of data in schools. My thesis, if that's not too grand a term, is that while data can be extraordinarily useful in helping us make good decisions, too much data leads, inexorably, to overload. When we have too much data we start doing silly things with it, just because we have it. The cost of bad data is the conviction that we have figured out all the possible permutations and know exactly what we're doing [...]

We don’t know what we don’t know: the uses of humility

2020-07-20T13:37:31+01:00November 5th, 2015|leadership, psychology|

Humility is the only true wisdom by which we prepare our minds for all the possible changes of life. George Arliss In my last post I challenged the widely-held belief that teachers' judgements are generally sound and suggested instead that we are routinely beset by very predictable but unconscious bias. Two criticisms emerged that I want to address. Firstly, some commenters noted that it's impossible to prevent teachers making judgments and that, in essence, a large part of the act of teaching is making judgements about pupils' learning. As such, any attempt to remove subjective bias from teaching is fundamentally flawed. [...]

Five techniques for overcoming overconfidence and improving decision-making

2020-01-21T18:39:02+00:00November 3rd, 2015|leadership, psychology|

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. Bertrand Russell Every successful leader will have one thing in common: they trust their judgement. And why not? Their intuitions must have proved their worth otherwise they wouldn’t be successful, right? Well, maybe not. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman suggests that “the amount of success it takes for leaders to become overconfident isn’t terribly large.” Kahneman’s paper, co-authored with Gary Klein, Conditions for Intuitive: Expertise A Failure to Disagree, argues that overconfidence is at the [...]

Is teaching a 'wicked' game?

2015-10-12T22:34:44+01:00October 12th, 2015|leadership|

What a wicked game you play to make me feel this way. Chris Isaak, Wicked Game Ok, I've cheated a bit. In this paper Robin M Hogarth identifies what he calls 'kind' and 'wicked' domains. A kind domain is one which provides accurate and reliable feedback, a wicked domain is one where feedback on performance is absent or biased. Hogarth cites two examples. First a kind domain: The meteorologist is well-placed to develop accurate intuitions. She has much knowledge about how weather systems develop as well as access to much current information on which she can base her forecasts; she also [...]

“Works for me!” The problem with teachers’ judgement

2019-02-10T18:46:05+00:00October 11th, 2015|leadership|

It is with our judgments as with our watches: no two go just alike, yet each believes his own. Alexander Pope One of the difficulties inherent in challenging teachers' judgments is that when those judgements appear to be contradicted teachers sometimes say, "Well, it works for me and my students." This is hard to challenge. Anthony Radice made a similar point in a recent blog post about the debilitating nature of complacent certainty: A clear example of this kind of complacency is contained in the words, ‘I know my pupils’. It’s the killer punch to an argument, because it is not [...]

Equality is unfair

2015-10-08T21:23:57+01:00October 8th, 2015|leadership|

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality. Erich Fromm In my first post on Intelligent Accountability I suggested we shouldn't treat all teachers, or all schools, the same. This is advice that doesn't just apply to education. In the interests of egalitarianism, we might suggest mothers and fathers should be allowed to take the same amount of parental leave after the birth of a child. At first glance, this might even seem fair, but it doesn't take much to see that women go through far [...]

The melody of education: what should we be accountable for?

2015-10-08T09:25:46+01:00October 6th, 2015|leadership|

Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end, it would not have reached its goal. A parable. Nietzsche This is the third in a series of posts about what I'm calling Intelligent Accountability. Peter Blenkinsop pointed out that a problem with holding teachers to account for their professional judgments is that we may not all be playing the same melody. I've written before about the battleground that is the purpose of education. The problem with trusting schools and teachers to do what's right is that we [...]

What can education learn from aviation?

2015-10-05T19:34:44+01:00October 5th, 2015|leadership|

Certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we’re so fond of it. - George Eliot Flying is a dangerous business. All sorts of things can go wrong and any one of them could result in disaster. That said, it's become a cliché that flying is the safest way to travel. No other form of transportation is as scrutinized, investigated and monitored as commercial aviation. According to research into flight safety, over the fifteen years between 1975 and 1994, the death risk per flight was one in seven million. [...]

Intelligent Accountability

2016-10-05T20:44:27+01:00October 4th, 2015|Featured, leadership|

The history of human growth is at the same time the history of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn, and the brighter dawn has always been considered illegal, outside of the law. - Emma Goldman So many teachers I speak to are afraid to make nuanced professional judgements. When I make suggestions on how they could manage workload, organise classroom, speak to students, select curriculum content or plan lessons very often I'm confronted with,"That sounds like a great idea but I wouldn't be allowed to do it." Too many school systems have become blunt instruments used to [...]

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