The dedicated pursuit of improvement in student achievement and wellbeing is a key responsibility of educational leaders, whether they lead a team, a school or a network. At a time of marked disparities in attainment, the effective discharge of this responsibility carries even greater weight.
While our focus is rightly on closing these gaps in classrooms, professional development is often aimed at teachers themselves. Middle and senior leaders, meanwhile, are left to rely on their intuition in their efforts to drive rapid and sustained improvement.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Intuition based on experience can be effective, but it has many obvious shortcomings, not least that it is slower, less precise and assumes agreement from others. Instead, a more deliberative approach can lead to more effective leadership of improvement through a more collaborative, non-blaming and respectful approach.
School-based problems that contribute to unsatisfactory student outcomes are common across settings. They might include:
- Team meetings with more time spent discussing behaviour than the relationship between teaching and outcomes;
- Leaders assuming that team members are doing what they think has been agreed;
- Reluctance of a department to alter its curriculum despite student feedback and consistently declining enrolment;
- Scepticism about the validity and importance of data showing considerable underachievement.
Tackling problems such as these requires high-quality conversations with those involved so that common ground can be reached about what is actually happening, why it is happening and what, if anything, to do about it.
Intuitive leaders frequently delay discussion of important problems
Leading by Learning (LbL) is a development programme based on research into the leadership capabilities required to resolve such problems. Launched as a UK pilot this January through Ambition Institute, the research that underpins it addressed three main questions:
- Why do educational leaders find such problems difficult to resolve?
- How do they think and act while talking about these problems with those involved?
- What type of professional learning builds leaders’ capability in collaboratively resolving such problems?
What the research shows is that intuitive leaders frequently delay discussion of such problems or address them so indirectly that little improvement materialises. They often feel caught between maintaining good relationships or tackling the problem, typically giving priority to the former by minimising their concern, asking leading questions or putting off the conversation. Another equally ineffective strategy is being blunt and task-focused, risking defensiveness or grievance.
LbL teaches a theory and practice of interpersonal effectiveness which enables leaders to build trust while tackling challenging problems. Leaders learn how to express their beliefs about a perceived problem in ways which enable them to check rather than assume their validity. Their goal is not to win and be right but to collaboratively test the quality of their own and others’ thinking. This approach stops ineffective quick fixes by promoting a culture of rigorous thinking and respectful discussion about how to understand and resolve problems of teaching and learning.
LbL workshops focus on participant’s self-selected on-the-job problems, so they are not left wondering how to apply the learning to their own context. Rather than just focusing on what to say, facilitators help participants examine how their thinking and motivations produce more and less effective meetings and conversations.
It is exciting to move beyond descriptions and explanations of leaders’ difficulties to interventions that offer practical and effective assistance. For example, a recent study showed that focusing on the quality of middle leaders’ collaborative problem-solving skills significantly improved the effectiveness of their conversations with their teachers about the long-standing underachievement of target students in reading.
Even more pleasing was the evidence that the improved and more focused collaboration between leaders and teachers resulted in accelerated improvement in the students’ achievement.
With a decade of progress in closing disadvantage gaps wiped out by the pandemic, and pre-pandemic evidence showing efforts to close these gaps had already plateaued, it’s important to remain focused on evidence to drive improvement.
Teachers need support to make effective change, but we can’t rely on iterative, intuitive leadership to create the environments where such change happens effectively. Middle and senior leaders need support too, to seize the best evidence about what works and deliberately contextualise it for their settings.
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