Keen to speak to more ASCL members than his last keynote to four delegates and the caretaker during the Sunday morning slot in Harrogate, Ian took delegates through eight leadership themes that should be keeping school leaders awake at night.
This is what they were...
1 Leadership of…Rule Breaking
Put simply, creativity means breaking the rules. To look at the way things are and think, ‘Nah, not like that now, like this.’ As a school leader, is it your job to think new thoughts or to maintain things the way they have been?
Darwin didn’t use the term ‘evolution’. The phrase he used to describe the way organisms survived by changing to adapt to changing situations was ‘descent with modification’. Creativity is cognitive evolution. Playing by the rules and doing what we’re told is the opposite of evolution. It is descent without modification. And when things don’t change, they die.
Do you encourage rule breaking in your staff? Your students? Yourself? What if the school motto for the 21st century were ‘It’s better to ask forgiveness than seek permission’ (but in Latin, obviously).
I’m not advocating anarchy (although have a look at these quotes from people who have gone through just such a process: ‘Order or chaos’, Ricardo Semler, Brazilian industrial leader and author of Maverick; ‘Let chaos reign’, Andy Grove, former head of Intel; ‘Forecast for most companies is continued chaos with a chance of disaster’ Arie de Geus, Shell.) I am suggesting that the previous purpose of school - to generate future workers who did what they were told, who knew enough of the 3Rs to be able to make sure they were doing things right, who would respect authority, love God and country and die for both if asked – such a purpose has needs to change dramatically.
2 Leadership of…The Future of the Brave New Flat World
Consider these forecasts for the BRICs economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China):
• India larger than Japan by 2032
• BRICs larger than G6 by 2039
• China larger than everyone but US by 2016
• Cnina larger than US by 2041
What sort of world order are you preparing your students for?
Or consider the best-selling book The World is Flat whose overriding message is a wake up call to us in the West: ‘The future is coming!’ For example, the author talks about jobs that are ‘fungible’ – they can be digitized and sent elsewhere in the world. Why should I pay my accountant £37.50 an hour when I can pay someone in China £3.75 an hour to do exactly the same work? Are our successful schools simply preparing the next generation of unemployed accountants?
Reading this book a question kept coming into my head:
Why do I need a teacher when I’ve got Google?
There are good answers to this question, but only for good teachers, teachers who teach children, not subjects. (And if you still think teaching can’t be outsourced check out www.tutorvista.co.uk - qualified personal tuition for just £50 a month coming to a computer near you all the way from India)
3 Leadership of…Brains
Is yours a ‘brain-friendly’ school? Do you keep up to date with learning in the same way you would expect doctors and nurses to keep up to date with medical science? This is way beyond dabbling with learning styles or leading staff in a round of Brain Gym during Monday morning briefing.
Are you aware, for example, that adolescents are not people? That the bit of our brain that balances risk and reward is the pre-frontal cortex or PFC, that this is the last part of the brain to mature, something that takes between 20 and 30 years (calling into question the phrase ‘Act your age’), that there can be as much as three years difference between maturation levels of children of the same age and that you can’t be older than your brain?
Such insights explain much about student behaviour (as well undermining so much of what goes on in the name of discipline and teaching).
4 Leadership of…Trying New Stuff
Insight should lead to innovation. To what extent, then, do you not only encourage but actively seek out and reward innovation in your school, even if it does not every time lead to great lessons? A classroom is a laboratory, where each lesson is a mini-action research project. And if every lesson is an experiment, teachers cannot fail. (And do things with children, not to them. Involve them in learning about how they learn best.)
But teachers are scared. They are scared of letting their children down (even though we have statistical evidence that, as a nation, we ‘let down’ 53.5% of children last academic year), they are scared of what Ofsted will say (but Christine Gilbert’s 2020 Vision document encourages innovation), they are scared of what their colleagues may say (sometimes teachers are their own worst enemies) but most of all, in my experience, they are scared of what you may say (despite what you actually say).
To what extent are you encouraging a ‘Ready; Fire; Aim’ culture in your school, where getting some lessons wrong leads to making a great many lessons better for a great many students?
4a Leadership of…Not Wasting Money
One example of ‘the way we’ve always done it’ is the use of supply teachers. I was approached by a school who said ‘Enough!’ and was looking to technology instead. Together we built the Learning Bug (click here for more information and to arrange a visit to see it in action) which is, in effect, teacher-less learning. Where in your school can you draw a line in the sand?
(And how much money did you collectively spend on supply by between 2003 and 2006? That’s right, £2,571,013,084.)
5 Leadership of…Little Things
One thing I stress to teachers is that if the word ‘laminate’ crops up when planning lessons they are trying too hard. Millions of dollars of neuroscientific research often boils down to one little change in a classroom that can change everything forever. Don’t let any teacher tell you that they can’t implement multiple intelligence theory, for example, because they don’t have the time/money/resources/training. It’s not true. Teaching children a quick ‘muscle memory’ technique takes seconds but can mean the difference between two out of ten and ten out of ten. A set of Post-It pads makes for just as good a ‘kinesthetic learning opportunity’ as a set of laminated cards in their own colour-coded envelopes. Using rhythm can be just as effective (and much more efficient) than using rote.
Little things that can make a huge difference – no excuses.
6 Leadership of…Thinking
I was a copywriter in advertising for a while (something that explain my relaxed approach to starting sentences with words like ‘And’, ‘But or ‘So’). (And to verbless sentences). So, I was expected to think up ideas to sell things that people didn’t need to people who couldn’t afford them anyway. Yet, when I sat there staring into space doing this I was accused of doing nothing. So, I made busied myself with not thinking.
Do you feel the same way? If someone entered your office whilst you were sitting with your eyes closed, feet on the desk, deep in thought would you apologise? Would your staff prefer you to your job without thinking?
Is yours a thinking school? Do you teach your students how to think as well as what to think? Do your teachers stop teaching long enough for children to think for themselves?
If, as Piaget suggests, intelligence is ‘what you use when you don’t know what to do’ would all your students, especially you’re A* students, be able to answer ‘Thunks’ such as ‘Is a broken down car parked?’ or ‘Is there more future or past?’ Are you students – and staff – able to share with you what they think with as much confidence as what they know?
7 Leadership of…Self
I once heard that self-esteem is like oxygen masks in an aeroplane. If you are traveling with a child, you put yours on first and then help them (and if you are traveling with more than one child, choose your favourite). To what extent are you looking after yourself to be able to look after others? Are you practicing what Charles Handy calls ‘proper selfishness’? There’s a true story of a man who died at his desk. The thing is, no-one noticed for three days. Why? Because he was always the first one in and the last to leave.
Would your staff notice if you were dead?
Dee Hock is than man behind the world’s first trillion-dollar business, Visa. In his words:
‘Without management of self no one is fit for authority no matter how much they acquire, for the more authority they acquire the more dangerous they become… Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers and free your people to do the same. All else is trivia’.
8 Leadership of…a world where whatever innovations you have in mind will probably not be enough
Churchill once said ‘Headteachers have powers with which Prime Ministers have not been invested’. Gordon Brown – a former Chancellor of the Exchequer – came/shifted to power declaring ‘Education is my passion’. One of his first acts? To put in charge of schools a man who had been at the Bank of England. In the words of American business guru Tom Peters, ‘Education is economics; economics is education’.
In case you haven’t got the message, you have the future of this country in the palm of your hands.
You also have the future of the word there too. We are living in a time where, in the old trumpeter’s adage, ‘If you can say it, you can play it’. Ideas from science fiction - controlling computers with our thoughts, restoring sight to blind people with ’braingates’, instant translation devices, lifts half way to the moon, holidays in space and more - are becoming a reality. The learning environments of the 21st century could resemble something from Asimov very quickly. We are also living in a century where it is possible that our species may not see out the end of it.
Such a time demands that headteachers use the power that Churchill so envied, after all, as one American general put it:
‘If you don’t like change you’re going to like irrelevance even less’.
For more information about Learning Bug, Thunks or anything else above, you can e-mail ian@independentthinking.co.uk.
Ian's follow up book to Essential Motivation in the Clasroom is 'Why Do I need a Teacher When I've Got Google?’ and will be published by Routledge next year.
This article first appeared in ASCL's Leader magazine