As my road-trip work comes to an end for the term, I’m reflecting on the qualities of all the great people I meet visiting schools. Without exception, people everywhere are working hard, often in tough circumstances, and I have huge respect for everything they’re seeking to do.
However, there are some schools I visit where it’s clear that the quality of teaching and learning is high, sometimes within a particular phase or subject team, sometimes across the whole school. Without exception, when the teaching is evidently strong, you also meet the leaders who make it so. Within a school where there is variation from team to team, I think the team leader is nearly always a key factor. What are the qualities of those leaders? My impression is that there are three key elements:
1. Energy and Drive
All schools are mad busy places but where you see teaching that is strong, there is always a sense that they have focused their energy where it matters; they mean business; they’re on a mission; there’s some urgency to it; they commit to action; they prioritise time for talking about curriculum and teaching. There’s a sense that the leader bustles around their team or school with real purpose; they’re close to the action, regularly visiting lessons, knowing what is happening and boosting the energy of those around them. They’re not bogged down, stuck in the mire… they can see their way through it and commit to the structural changes that are needed. Rather than allowing historical structures to become barriers to change, they’re prepared to sweep them away and make things happen, doing what has to be done.
2. Motivating Powers
There are plenty of schools where the SLT or leaders feel they work hard but find that others don’t respond. Here teams or individual teachers resist initiatives, seeing them as external directives; the inertia is strong. Sometimes that resistance feels entirely justified or least understandable. However, where I see things really moving forward strongly, the leaders have formed the relationships needed to motivate others. Their energy and drive inspires others; there’s a sense of collective action – that we’re all in it together. This links to supportive, developmental feedback cultures where teachers engage in productive professional dialogue about the challenges they face and the solutions that might be worth pursuing. I always think it’s striking that the strongest teacher teams are often the most self-aware and self-critical. They have the confidence to express doubts and share concerns; they push each other, knowing things could be done even better and seeking for ways to achieve that. The leaders create this climate. And when they don’t -that’s where the defensiveness comes in. A defensive team leader is normally a major barrier to change. At the same time, accountability-driven approaches rarely seem to work. It’s the motivational forces within a team that drive it; rarely the pressures from outside. ‘No system’ is usually a total roadblock but ‘too much system’ can kill the spirit.
3. Expertise around teaching and learning
The very best practice I see is nearly always led by someone who seems to really understand the mechanics and spirit of a strong learning process within their context. They are constantly trying to get a better sense of what goes on inside that big black box.. how exactly do we get better outcomes? What things can we work into routines? What can we ditch because, in truth, it’s not doing enough. This can be fuelled mainly by curriculum thinking – lots of teachers are orientated by their context-specific identity: Reception Teacher; Science Teacher; Maths specialist; English leader. They seem curious to know what others do, looking over the horizon, tapped into communities of practice beyond the school. Or, they are a fair way along the axis of learning nerdiness, deeply interested in cognitive science or more general concepts about learning and the reasons that some children find learning difficult. One way or another, they’re deliberately expanding their expertise and fuelling that process for those around them.
The combination of these three qualities is phenomenal. To give one example, which they won’t mind me sharing, I recently encountered the staff at St Michael’s in Aldbourne, Wiltshire. It’s a gem of a school. The teacher team is experienced and highly skilled; the wonderful Headteacher, Jude Arkwright, and other senior leaders bring the energy, fuel the motivation and foster ever deeper expertise. They’re developing a coaching trios model where teachers observe and support each other and ask each other probing questions; they look at details – the forensics of how to run a room, to set a question, to construct environments where children flourish, to sequence learning in maths and in writing, to maximise time in the day. And it’s all done in a joyful way, not a heavy, laboured way. The teachers certainly work hard – there’s an intensity to what they do. But it pays off wonderfully and you feel that this is a place you’d want to be; as a teacher and as a child.
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