Thinking fast and slow
We’ve reached the midpoint of the academic year, and with this comes an opportunity to reflect on our plans for this year, how far we’ve come and what still needs to be done.
It’s in this context that I read Kat Howard’s latest blog this week. I all really resonated with me, but particularly the section about the pursuit of continual school improvement.
As a school leader, it can sometimes feel as if you are not moving forward if you aren’t striving for change and making continuous small steps of improvement. The reality is that we can easily become surrounded by so much ‘noise’.
The day-to-day minutiae of our jobs are of course all important, but they can take up so much room that there is not often enough space and time left for deep strategic thinking.
Here, Howard explores how cognitive biases can impact our decision-making. Her analysis is based on Daniel Kahneman’s popular book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, in which he distinguishes two distinctive modes of thinking: theintuitive and automatic, and the deliberate and analytical.
The realities of school leadership encourage the first. But making the quick and ‘easy’ decisions can become so automatic that when it is time to do the deeper thinking, we struggle to slow down and allow ourselves the time we really need.
Howard’s also mentions the danger of other common cognitive biases playing into this fast-thinking reality. Among those, one that really spoke to me was the ‘availability heuristic’, which is overestimating the prevalence of issues based on memorable examples.
We all have that one example to draw upon when describing how terrible something in our job is. Sometimes, that example harks right back to our initial training. And yet it still provides us with a shortcut for decision-making. But rightly or wrongly?
The key to Howard’s piece is that to enable the success of our long-term plans, we need to engage the deliberate and analytical system.
It’s great advice. But will all the changes coming down the track really help us to do that?
From inadequate to worse
And on the subject of those changes, the latest episode of the NAHT’s school leadership podcast discusses Ofsted’s proposals for its new framework and the future of school inspection. General secretary Paul Whiteman and assistant general secretary James Bowen are in conversation, and share their union members’ widespread skepticism about the content of the consultation.
Ofsted’s stated aim is to provide a more nuanced five-step rating scale across eight core areas, many of which will be familiar, but the addition of a new judgment category for inclusion.
This shift is designed to provide a more comprehensive evaluation of schools, moving away from the current labels to detailed assessments that better reflect each school’s unique strengths and areas for improvement.
But while the ambition may be widely shared, so is the dismay at Ofsted’s suggested means of achieving it. NAHT members (and the digital staffroom more broadly) are very unhappy. “Very, very angry,” in fact.
It would have been thought impossible for Ofsted to make things worse for itself a year ago. Now, NAHT members “feel betrayed, and I don’t get the sense that either the government or Ofsted quite realise the depth of mistake they’ve made here”.
The Headteachers’ Roundtable joined the fray, with a warning in these pages that this new framework “could annihilate not just the current generation of school leaders but the next one too”.
Perhaps Ofsted should have engaged their deliberate and analytical systems.
Sunday-night scaries
And on an unrelated note, my social media feed was alive with comments on a post about teachers’ ‘Sunday-night scaries’. Cue: dozens of stories about early retirement, burnout and other sundry departures from the classroom.
I won’t use this column to sign-post those, but if that’s you this weekend, you could do worse than to listen to this new episode on the US podcast, The Principal’s Handbook – precisely on conquering that sinking Sunday feeling.
At least Ofsted will only call on Mondays now.
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