A perspective on leadership development

Conceptual build:
1⃣ Complex adaptive systems
2⃣ Leadership is a social process of influence
3⃣ Leader vs leaderSHIP development
4⃣ Improve leadership through improving social interactions

🧵1/8 1⃣ Schools are complex adaptive systems

▪️Interdependence
▪️Nonlinear
▪️Patterns of interaction between people
▪️Emergence of behaviours and capabilities from interactions (as opposed to top down imposition)

We can Influence but not control complex adaptive systems.

2/8

What big ideas sit at the heart of your behaviour strategy (if you're a leader) or the way that you manage your class (if you're a teacher)?

Some to consider:
🧵 Paul Dix's 5 pillars of practice:
1⃣ Consistent, calm adult behaviour
2⃣ First attention for best conduct
3⃣ Relentless routines
4⃣ Scripting difficult interventions
5⃣ Restorative follow-up

A 🧵 on school policies…

1/14 What do we actually need policies for?

Firstly there are statutory policies (for England):



2/14gov.uk/government/pub…

School and MAT leaders: What’s your school improvement model?

How do you go about improving your school?

Here’s a model and a thread explaining it…

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1/11 First some assumptions about school leadership.

▪️Schools are complex
▪️Improvement is more about problem solving than applying a ‘formula’
▪️Problem solving requires expertise
▪️(Groups of) schools therefore need to be good at building and sharing knowledge

2/11

Self evaluation and strategic leadership

An emerging idea on integrating the two into a better organised mental model of school leadership

Feedback please, Twitter!

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1/22 I’m never satisfied with the whole SEF / school development plan process.

I think that we should prioritise structuring our thinking over filling in proformas:

mrnickhart.wordpress.com/2022/09/23/sef…

2/22

Is teaching and school leadership more difficult now than pre-pandemic or pre-2018 and the new EIF?

Some thoughts on complexity and sense making. The feeling from talking to teachers is that it is more difficult now.

But why?

My hypothesis is that we are suffering from cognitive overload in schools at the moment.

What is contributing to the cognitive overload?

Great session with @LouiseStoll @CEL_IOE on educational setting as learning organisations.

▪️The concept of school leaders and teachers as knowledge workers who need to find / create knowledge
▪️Schools need to learn fast because of complexity

🧵
1/10 What makes a school a learning organisation?

oecd.org/education/scho…

1️⃣ A vision centred on student learning

2️⃣ Creating and supporting continuous learning opportunities (leaders are designers of organisational learning)

3️⃣ Team learning / collaboration

2/10

Pulling together some thoughts on professional development…

1️⃣ What do teachers need to get better at?
2️⃣ What conditions are necessary for teachers to learn?
3️⃣ What mechanisms and forms can we use?

🧵
1/13 1️⃣ What do teachers need to get better at?

While we often describe the actions that we want teachers to do (better), in some cases it may be an underlying belief that needs to shift because actions are sustained by beliefs.

mrnickhart.wordpress.com/2021/11/26/cpd…

2/13

Often leaders come to the conclusion that they need to ‘change the culture’.

But how?

Edgar Schein has written about organisational culture and here are some of his ideas applied to schools…

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1/16 3 fundamental influences of culture:

1️⃣ The founder’s beliefs, values and assumptions

2️⃣ The learning experiences of colleagues (as the school develops)

3️⃣ New beliefs, values and assumptions introduced by leaders or colleagues

2/16

Fancy some half term reading?

Try #Culturebook!

Here are the abstracts for each chapter to whet your appetite along with related blog posts and pages from my leadership handbook…

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1/12 1️⃣ What is culture and why is it important?

mrnickhart.wordpress.com/2022/07/27/bel…

mrnickhart.wordpress.com/2022/08/04/bel…

mrnickhart.wordpress.com/2022/05/13/lie…

2/12

All my posts about curriculum and subject leadership in one thread.

Which might you have missed the first time around?

Which do you still think about?

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1/13 Strategic curriculum leadership
Phase 1 | The big picture

mrnickhart.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/str…

2/13

I’ve been thinking about complexity in schools and what this means for school leaders.

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1/12 Schools are complex because every action taken by adults and children have consequences that are desirable and undesirable; predictable and unpredictable; shorter term and longer term.

Each action that leaders take might advantage some but disadvantage others.

2/12

If you missed my talk @researchED1 today, here’s a summary.

Blog post out in the morning…
#rED22

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1/11 Leaders ought to develop their expertise.

Just doing the job isn’t enough to do this.
mrnickhart.wordpress.com/2021/11/05/poo…
2/11

Even more thoughts about quality assurance…

🧵
1/13 The first thread pulled together ideas about complexity (as opposed to simple cause and effect relationships), domains of impact and two models for quality assurance:

2/13

https://twitter.com/mrnickhart/status/1559108904185102336

Some more thoughts on quality assurance / monitoring…

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1/23 Think of any monitoring activities as one of three layers:

1️⃣ Checking understanding of purpose
2️⃣ Overview activities
3️⃣ Depth activities

2/23

Some thoughts on quality assurance / monitoring.

It is all very well observing lessons and discussing children’s work with them but maybe there are opportunities to pick up strengths and areas for improvement sooner…

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1/16 The bottom line is that leaders need to know the extent to which children are flourishing, whether that is academically, socially, behaviourally, emotionally and much more.

If we know this, we’re better placed to think about what we might do to improve them.

2/16

@RobinsonViviane has had a huge influence on my understanding of school leadership.

Here are some key ideas with links to related blogs, books and videos…

🧵
1/14 Here is her paper on the capabilities required for leading improvement.

research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewconten…

There is no single unifying model of school leadership but this comes close.
2/14

The May 2022 White Paper set out the parent pledge.

gov.uk/government/new…

Some thoughts on what it means for school leaders…

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1/12 We need to clarify what falling behind means.

First, we need a well sequenced curriculum.

The highest expectation is that every child learns what we have intended.

Don’t mistake learning for performance.

mrnickhart.wordpress.com/2022/02/10/cur…

2/12

Maths worded problems.

The importance of teaching underlying structure to aid understanding and avoid misconceptions.

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1/13 First off, I don’t think that teaching children that certain words mean certain operations. Words only have meaning in context.

2/13

Some thoughts on encouraging better attendance through considering positive interactions and understanding belonging…

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1/22 Schools have systems to ‘manage’ poor attendance:
☑️ attendance tracking to pick up attendance below a given threshold
☑️ message / letter home expressing concern at poor attendance
☑️ coding for authorised / unauthorised absences
☑️ leave request forms
☑️ involvement of EWO
2/22

This was interesting and got me thinking about how my understanding and practice regarding learning objectives and success criteria evolved.

🧵
1/19

https://twitter.com/kieran_m_ed/status/1550746938122948609

As an early career teacher I remember having and displaying learning objectives that were basically the task that children were going to do.

Then I came across @shirleyclarke_ and her book Outstanding Formative Assessment.

amazon.co.uk/Outstanding-Fo…
2/19