education

The lightness of being

theprimaryhead2 Comments

face

As I walked out of my office, for the last time on the final day of my first ever Ofsted inspection as a Head, I made some off the cuff gag to the governors who were waiting. This prompted the Lead Inspector to slap me on the back and say ‘I can’t believe he’s still smiling, he’s had a tough old two days, and he’s still smiling.’

I had. And I was.

Not because I am some super-being. (Although the 360-degree survey I conducted on myself shows that I’m darn close). Not because I didn’t get the gravity of the situation. (We’d just been placed in RI, the lowest outcome for the school in a hundred years, so, yes, I had realised that the week’s newsletter was going to require some careful editing.) Not because I was drunk. (That was to happen 91 minutes later.)

The reason why I was still making cheap gags at such a time was because…why not?

I enjoy being alive. It’s fun. If I can’t smile, what’s the point?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some irritating buffoon who feels the need to make light of misery. I wouldn’t for example, on hearing the news that…

[Blank space representing all the inappropriate jokes in relation to serious incidents that my editor has deemed it necessary to delete even though I claimed that my readers were intelligent people and could understand the difference between me actually being offensive and me making a point. But, my editor argued, you’ll put it out on twitter and they’re mostly idiots.]

…of course I wouldn’t say that! That would just be highly insensitive and extremely offensive.

But even though I don’t make light of serious issues, I see no problem in tackling serious issues with a lightness of touch. This enables hard messages to be communicated clearly but sensitively. It allows points of view to be heard. It provides freedom of speech without either side feeling battered by an over-bearing and one-sided narrative.

In times of united struggle, being able to end on a light note, doesn’t so much provide others with hope, (that would be an incredibly pretentious claim) but it can help put things in perspective. It can allow others to take a breath and relax before fighting on.

Twitter could do with gaining a lightness of touch. I don’t want this to sound like the hundred other blogs out there that say: Why is everyone so mean? Why can’t we all just get on? I don’t want everyone to get on. I want there to be discourse and conversation. I want passionate teachers to spar with each other on the educational battlefield.

What I don’t want, and what is beginning to be boring, is the joyless and heavy bombardment of over-serious and self-worthy laments. These tedious battles that end up nowhere. I mean, come on people: WAR! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!

I don’t care what side you’re on. I don’t care what your beliefs are. Just remember: this is Twitter! It’s next to meaningless. Nobody cares, that much, what you do in your classroom. What you say might be interesting but then again, it might not be. If you put it out there be prepared for others to ignore it or knock it down. Don’t object. Get over it. If they’re ‘abusing’ you, report them or block them. But don’t tell everyone you’ve blocked them whilst tweeting a ton of screenshots of something they said fifteen years ago before twitter was invented as if we care about your justification: just do it.

If people in the real world have an issue with your beliefs, go and work somewhere else. You’ll be happier. If you can’t and if the real world is being unfair and unjust, tell us about it and we will all rally round and support you. Because that’s why we all signed up to this. We want to make friends, learn something, and support the education community. Oh, and we want to occasionally tweet funny things that happened to us or share the occasional gif of a cat ice skating or whatever.

So, please, Twitter: lighten up!

I: Head

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tree-brain

The Big Bang

I doubt there are many Heads who don’t consider themselves to be top of the tree. That’s why we took on the job, right? We had the belief that we were the best person to oversee the running of an entire school. I bet most of us got that inkling when we first walked around the building before we even applied for the job; we just knew that something was right here and that this school was a perfect fit. Sure, others might be able to do a perfectly reasonable job, but, when we received the call from the Chair of Governors saying we’d got the headship, we knew that it was because they had seen what we knew: no one was going to do the job better than us.

Few of us (I hope) have the ego that makes us believe we would be the best in any school. No way! But I bet most of us believe that we were the only choice for our school. I know I did. I felt an immediate affinity with my school, as if somehow, I knew it better than anyone else. I could see through it and I understood what was holding it back. I could see its potential. I believed that only I could unlock its strengths. I knew we belonged together.

I know one day I won’t feel that. One day it’ll dawn on me that I can no longer see the school for what it is. I will be blind. I may care more about preserving its name and covering up its secrets rather than constantly exposing its faults to make it stronger. When that day comes, the school will need someone else at the helm. I will require replacing. I will need to look for a new school that needs me.

Superhead

So, you’re the Head of the school. You have all the plans and all the ideas. You have the capacity to inspire, uniting your community in striving to achieve the ambitions you have for the school. You are respected and people warm to your leadership.

That’s great. But that will only get you so far.

I thought my leadership was pretty darn great in my first year. A friend of mine regularly reminds me that I once judged my leadership to be a solid nine out of ten. This causes him no end of amusement especially when I am in the middle of some crisis. However, I stand by the fact that in my first year I was great! I think it’s easier to be good in your first year of headship at a new school. Your role, in that first year, is simpler. Have a plan, convince everyone that you know what you’re doing and end the year with most people on your side. Yes, you are building teams but you’re building your teams. You work tirelessly, often independently, but hopefully not in isolation.  I worked with some fantastic people in my first year and they helped me no end but for most of the time it was ‘my show’.

The point of your first year however is to end it with it no longer being just ‘your show’. And then of course, being a Head becomes much harder.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts

Since my first year I don’t think I’ve reached the dizzying heights of a ‘nine out of ten’ ever again. The job is so much harder. Headship, post year one, is not a job that can be done alone. Partly because the more you do it the more you become aware of the role’s complexities; partly because situations arise that really test you; partly because the job itself evolves. What becomes clearer though, the more you do it, is how much you need strong people around you. I am lucky that I have a very close senior leadership team. Between us, we know what the rest of us are like. We know our strengths, weaknesses and our characters. For me, them knowing what I am like, is invaluable.

I know what I’m like. Therefore, I know what I will shy away from; what I will find uncomfortable; what I would rather not do. Sometimes this helps. I don’t, for example, like confrontation. Therefore, I try to minimise the need for confrontation through my leadership style. This works, most of the time. When it doesn’t, I am blessed to have a leadership team who will challenge me to go out of my comfort zone. They will recognise the signs that I am avoiding something and push me to get it sorted. Occasionally they misunderstand my perceived avoidance; they cannot see that it is a masterful strategic action that is several steps ahead of the game that they are, as yet, unaware of…sometimes they are bang on the money.

I am eternally grateful for this challenge and the way in which the people around me challenge me to see things from different perspectives. I trust them because I value their integrity and their motives: they want to work in the best school possible. They are able to challenge me because they know I want that too.

There are still times when I excel as a leader. There are plenty of other times when those in my orbit outshine me. Often, when I lead well, it is because I know that it is expected of me, or, because other leaders have prompted me to do so. Either way, who cares, so long as it enables the school to move forward?

I doubt there are many Heads who don’t consider themselves to be top of the tree. But I bet most of them will acknowledge that one of the perks of being in that tree is knowing that they are in good company.

Paper planes

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paper-plane

I don’t know a lot about the increasingly popular ‘no excuses’ rhetoric that is pervading the edu-landscape at the moment. I am sure it doesn’t mean that we just expect children to behave impeccably – no matter what – just because they happen to be on our side of the school gates. I’m sure it doesn’t mean that, should a child behave poorly, they are immediately disciplined with the underlying message being that they should simply understand how to behave better especially now they’ve just been caught out. I’m also sure it doesn’t mean that the longer a teacher has their high expectations in place, the less they feel they must work at ensuring their pupils reach that standard.

I’m sure a ‘no excuses’ culture does not mean any of that, when it’s done properly. I can’t help feeling though, that some people think that’s what it means. I can’t help feeling that there may be some teachers who perceive themselves to be great teachers simply because they have high standards of behaviour. As if having high standards is a silver bullet that shoots out perfectly formed and well behaved children without the teacher having to do anything.

In my experience this has always been the folly of student teachers or NQTs. They get very agitated talking about the children that ‘just won’t’ behave. I’m sure we’ve all had that awkward conversation with students or inexperienced teachers where we’ve had to remind them that they’re the teacher and getting children to behave is, kind of, their job.

I personally have very high standards of behaviour. I did when I was a teacher too. It was exhausting! Sometimes I used to wish that my expectations were lower just so I wouldn’t have to work so hard. I was always slightly envious of those colleagues (and I’ve only met a few) who would moan about the behaviour in their class but who never seemed concerned enough to do anything about it. They must have had it so easy! Instead, there I was, anticipating when, in my next lesson, certain children would find a way to misbehave and trying to work out how I could make sure they didn’t.

As a Head, I have never used the expression ‘no excuses’ to describe an approach to behaviour management. It sounds too ripe for accountability avoidance for my liking. I like high standards. I’m happy to support, and back up, staff when a child has misbehaved. But I must fundamentally believe that they did everything they could to prevent the misbehaviour from happening to do so. I am very sceptical of teachers bringing me a child who has misbehaved ‘repeatedly’ during a lesson or who has completed ‘next to no work at all. I want to ask them: ‘At what point did you step in and try to change it?’ I don’t want to find out that the teacher’s solution to the poor behaviour is simply telling the child to buck up their ideas. I want to hear about how the teacher put something in place to help the child improve?

I want to hear about paper planes.

Paper planes are things I expect every teacher to put in place every day. They should underpin every activity, lesson, visit, event that occurs in the classroom. It’s very simple:

  • Plan
  • Anticipate
  • Provide
  • Evaluate
  • Repeat

In summary, whatever it is you have planned, anticipate who, in your class, you would put money on struggling with it (behaviour wise) and put in place something that will enable them to get through it without falling foul of a telling off. Afterwards, decide if you could realistically put that in place next time and if you think that you could, do so.

This isn’t about lowering your standards for key pupils. This approach isn’t about mollycoddling naughty kids. It allows them to meet your expectations. And, when you think about it, that’s the whole point of the teacher. We think nothing of differentiating work before a lesson, so, why shouldn’t we differentiate for behaviour. I always think about how I used to take my class swimming. I knew which children to sit next to on the coach, who to send into the changing rooms first, which children needed to get out the pool five minutes before everyone else, and of course, the golden rule to ensure we never missed the coach home: no talking until your socks are on. With all this in place, every child – even the boy who got banned from the swimming pool the year previously – could go swimming every week without earning a detention in the process.

Planning Little Actions Normalize Expectations.

A good teacher builds these paper planes to make sure children behave. A lesser teacher sits back and allows children to fall below the required standard, believing themselves to have been carrying out their job description just through having an expectation that they wanted to be met. An effective teacher builds equity into their behaviour management and has, in storage, different paper planes for different situations. Less effective teachers believe that if a child can behave during quiet reading, they will automatically be able to behave during DT. They are outraged that glue guns, saws and screwdrivers often prompts behaviour that requires a little more effort on their part to keep things moving along without incident, fuss or conflict. A decent teacher understands that behaviour management is a part of the job that never stops. A poorer teacher believes that children should just know how to behave, all of the time, and if they don’t it’s their fault rather than their own.

I don’t know about ‘no excuses’. All I know is that, in my experiences, the best teachers develop a 360° awareness of their class’s needs and are therefore able to manage them effectively. Over time, fewer paper planes are needed because the children, not only know what is expected of them, but also know what these expectations feel like. In the end, there is no need for excuses. Not because your pupils are perfect but because teachers and children are both working hard to make the expectations a reality.

Sometimes the paper planes crash and the child misbehaves. When that happens, deal with the fallout and, remembering that you’re the teacher, build another one.