Happy Friday Reader When Change Starts Here came out, I sat there waiting to be found out. My name was on the cover next to Efraim's. I should have felt proud. Instead I felt like I'd somehow fooled everyone, and any minute now they'd realise. It still happens. Whenever something new lands, or I'm in a room where I'm meant to be the one who knows, it creeps back in. I sat down with Julia Bialeski for this week's podcast, and we open with her version of it. She'd just been promoted to...
14 days ago • 1 min read
Happy Friday Reader Imagine you've made a call at school today. Maybe it was tough feedback on a lesson observation. Maybe you signed off a timetable change you know a few people will grumble about. Maybe you said no to a parent who really wanted a yes. You felt fine when you made it. Clear-headed, even. Then you go home. You're brushing your teeth. Or you're on the sofa. Or you're driving back in traffic. And there it is. That sickly feeling in the pit of your stomach. Did I get that right?...
20 days ago • 2 min read
Happy Friday Reader Most school leaders I speak to want their students to leave school with the confidence to do something useful in the world. The same leaders, often in the same conversation, are also worried about results, behaviour, the basics not slipping. There's usually an assumption underneath that worry. The idea that one of these things has to give. That if you really make space for student voice and student passion, you've had to soften the rules to do it. Schools like Green School...
27 days ago • 1 min read
Happy Friday Reader I walked into a school last month and within twenty minutes I'd already started building a story in my head about what needed to change. I could see the patterns. The meeting structures that were eating time. The feedback loops that weren't quite landing. I've seen versions of this before in dozens of schools, and my brain was already reaching for the solutions that worked elsewhere. And then I caught myself. Because what I've learned, sometimes the hard way, is that what...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Happy Friday Reader I was working with a school recently that had a behaviour challenge. Or at least, that’s what they thought. Every teacher was running their own system. In some ways that was great because people had ownership and autonomy. But it was also creating all these little conflicts. Between classrooms, corridors, playgrounds. Students didn’t know what to expect from one room to the next, and teachers were getting more and more stressed trying to hold it all together. What they...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Happy Friday Reader A few weeks ago I posted a poll on LinkedIn. Dead simple question. When an outside trainer comes into your school to deliver a session, what's the usual outcome? Around 100 people voted. 57% said "engaging, but nothing changes." 30% said "short-lived impact." 11% said it was a waste of time from the start. And lasting change in practice? 1%. One person. Click here to learn more about our partner, Teaching Walkthrus Now look, it's a LinkedIn poll. Tiny sample. But the...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Happy Friday Reader Episode 151 went out this week. And I did something I probably should have done a long time ago. I properly introduced myself. If you’ve been here a while, you might have the same experience as a lot of my readers and listeners. You know the podcast, you’ve heard the conversations, but you’re not entirely sure what I actually do on a Tuesday morning. So this week felt like the right moment to fill that in. Click here to learn more about our partner, Teaching Walkthrus...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Happy Friday Reader Picture a classroom in Shanghai. Grade 9. A teacher asks students to hold up mini whiteboards showing their answers. She scans the room. Six students have it wrong. She nods, says "good effort everyone," and moves on. I was in that school last week. And I've seen versions of that moment hundreds of times. It's not that she didn't care. She'd done exactly what the training said. Gather evidence of learning. Check for understanding. Use the tool. What nobody had taught her...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Happy Friday Reader Elizabeth Newton did a study at Stanford where she split people into tappers and listeners. Tappers had to knock out a well-known song on a table. Happy Birthday, something like that. Listeners had to guess what the song was. The tappers predicted about 50% of listeners would get it right. They could hear the melody in their heads while they were tapping, the words, the tune, all of it. But only in forty people guessed correctly. The listeners only had taps. No melody, no...
3 months ago • 1 min read