The purpose of leadership
The purpose of effective leadership is not to tell people what to do, but to support people develop. Your goals must be focused on developing those around you to make better decisions. This is why as Simon Sinek tells us ‘Leadership is a choice, not a rank’ (Sinek 2014).
I remember being told something you’ve probably heard too, that you’re not a leader until you’ve made another leader. I really like this idea, but I don’t think that leadership is just about your job role, especially in a school. Teachers are leaders in their own right and as I’m lucky enough to work in the quality of education team at my school, a big part of my job is helping teachers make effective decisions in the classroom.
Now, let’s be real. When we talk about leaders supporting teachers to make effective or better decisions, what we mean by that is contextual. School leaders need to ensure that teaching is aligned enough for us to say ‘this is what we believe and this is how we do it here’.
Whilst the sceptical view of this is that leaders seek to ultimately control what teachers do, I’d argue that if we start with why we are doing it and offer a range of useful techniques that support effective teaching, from which individual teachers can choose, we are striking a balance. This means teachers have space for autonomous decision making and school leaders can ensure that these are done well through CPD and that pupils get a relatively consistent understanding of what going to lessons in your school means. If these techniques don’t work for you or you don’t feel they match up with your morality linked to teaching, its important to reflect if this is the school for you.
I’ve been reading Simon Sinek’s Start With Why and essentially the point of the book is that as soon as we start focus on what we are doing rather than why we are doing it, then the dreaded lethal mutations emerge. I think it’s difficult to try and break teaching and learning down into a simple process for the sake of efficiency. Teaching is such a wonderful and complex thing so much of the time, I don’t really like structured approaches to lessons that much. Of course, I’m not the first person to realise this. Kate Jones and Dylan Wiliam shared their thoughts in a blog through Evidence Based Education where they explain:
‘The danger here, of course, is that if teachers do not understand the principles behind [practice], they may modify ideas and techniques to such an extent that they are so far removed from the original concept or suggestion that it is no longer effective, or even counter-productive—a lethal mutation’ (Jones and Wiliam 2022).
Ultimately, if we do not understand and value what the purpose of practice is in the classroom we will not be able to replicate it effectively or use it at an appropriate time and it will not only fall flat, but it will impact teachers and students alike.
Why not what
My core belief that teachers should have opportunities for autonomous decision making in the classroom and my understanding of what effective leadership is came to a head at school last academic year when we noticed there was a common area of feedback across the school; teachers were not clearly articulating what students were doing and why they were doing it. This led to a confusion about what should happen and in cases low level disruption. We are an instructional coaching school and I had confidence in my colleagues expertise, knowing that they could effectively transfer the techniques we had learnt in our CPD sessions into their classrooms, so what was going on?
I like to give feedback in person where time allows, so I met with enough colleagues over a few weeks to talk through their lessons to get an idea of the common theme of what was going on in lessons and it was this… teachers were undertaking activities because we had completed training on them. For example, cold calling, think, pair share and retrieval practice.
These weren’t landing as intended because the action in the classroom – the what did not match what the teacher wanted the class to accomplish that lesson – the why.
More CPD (in the traditional sense) wasn’t the answer. Nor was adding more structure to what teachers needed to include in their lessons. I’d hate this, so I would never enforce it as a leader. Instead, we decided to look at the thought process needed to plan a lesson and asked teachers to consider the flow of thought through each stage shown below:
We noticed that when things weren’t quite going as the teacher had intended, it was because the answers to these questions did not match up. So, we made this the focus of briefings, feedback and our general conversations around teaching and learning. Additionally, when teachers were really onto something and we wanted to share their great ideas, this common language linked to the process of planning helps us to do this efficiently within our morning briefings. Any example of this would be:
Focusing on questions rather than directing action did two things:
It allowed me to spot where the implementation did not match the intent and so I could give more effective feedback to colleagues
It created an interesting dialogue between colleagues about what this looks like at classroom and departmental level enabling us to focus on consistency of quality of teaching rather than all doing the same thing
How do we embed this?
We are still working on making this part of the day-to-day discussions we have about teaching and learning, but this has been embedded in our Monday morning briefings where applicable since Christmas. We have looked through this thought process together and used it as a framework for sharing best practice from around the school. We’re only at the start though and basing professional conversations around these questions is still something we need to build on this academic year.
The main thing that has helped embed this idea is that this is the way that teachers are thinking anyway. I can honestly say that the teachers at my school are the most talented and dedicated group of professionals I’ve ever worked with. They know their kids, they know their curriculum and they really, really care. This model was never meant to restrict, but more to capture the great work that is going on in our school and finding a mechanism through which we could capture it and share it with all. Refining practice, getting better and giving space for interesting conversations has always been the goal.
I’m our ITT coordinator and have been using this with our trainee teachers. Trainee teachers have fed back that this has been a useful process for them to undertake in the early stages of planning lessons and I think this is being picked up by our teacher training provider more widely after I shared this at their conference earlier this year.
I work closely with our middle leaders and when we have looked at teaching and learning techniques in CPD sessions, middle leaders used subject specific examples of what this could look like in each subject, rather than us all focusing on something generic and not necessarily applicable.
In a middle leaders’ meeting towards the end of last academic year, we gave middle leaders time to talk together about the common practices in their department, using this questioning structure to explain how this process works at our school for existing and new staff. Blank copies of this are now in our teacher planner so departments can go through these with their teams to decide what approaches they’d like to use and what this would look like in their subject, for example, source analysis in history.
We found similar themes emerging in different subjects for key elements of lessons a few of which I’ve summarised in the below table (click to expand):
Conclusion
As I said earlier, I can be really sceptical when teaching and learning principles fit neatly into little boxes or acronyms or make something wonderful and complex seem overly simple. However, we have to start somewhere and having a series of questions we ask about teaching creates an accessible and open dialogue about what we do in the classroom, why we do it and what this looks like on a practical level. This processes helps us to harness the great thinking our teachers are doing and sharing our ideas around what teaching and learning looks like in our school.
Reflective questions
How does your school model the through process that leads to the effective application of teaching techniques in the classroom?
Are you clear about the ‘why’ behind what you do in school and how well do your teachers understand this? Is this part of your professional development?
What ‘lethal mutations’ do you see happening in your school and which aspect of planning do you think this is linked to?
How do you create opportunities for teachers to have reflective conversations about planning lessons?
How are you supporting middle leaders to create a shared understanding of subject-specific practice?
References
Jones, K, and D Wiliam. 2022. "Lethal mutations in education and how to prevent them." In. Online: Evidence Based Education
Sinek, S 2014. "Leadership is about making others feel safe." In TED2014. Vancouver: TEDTalks
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