What I'm learning on SLT secondment

I've been a Subject Leader since my second year in teaching. Virtually every time I've been appointed to lead a department, the appointment was to say the least fortuitous, if not utterly accidental. I have never felt the need for promotion, and have only ever gone for promotion consciously when I've got to a point of such frustration with the "I could do a better job than that" attitude that I've just gone for it. Never have I really believed I had much to offer at any level higher than middle management.

However, the school I work in at the moment have a habit of giving people opportunities to lead, and I've taken everything that's come my way in the last year. Again, none of this is out of any egotistical desire to be in charge, but much more out of curiosity, to see whether I actually have anything to contribute at SLT level: I'm not 100% convinced yet, but... Amongst the opportunities I've been given have been a place on the Aspiring Senior Leadership Development Programme, and a secondment for two terms onto our Leadership team. Over the next few months, I'm hoping to be able to blog about what I'm learning, and share it with anyone else who might, more fool them, be interested in what I have to say.

So let's start with this: Over the last few weeks it's been a privilege to observe first hand the remarkable group of people that is my SLT. I'm not saying this to suck up. None of them read this blog (I think). It would be embarrassing if they did. Not to mention a waste of their time. So this compliment is just between you and me, you understand?

I have always been impressed by the unity of the team since they came together three years ago. When I was seconded, one comment I received from a slightly cynical colleague in another school suggested that once I was on the team and could see what went on behind closed doors, "I'd soon see where the fault-lines were": But no...

Lesson One: Unity of purpose and vision
When you lead people, you have to have their confidence, and they have to believe you know where you're going, that you have a clear rationale for going in that direction, and that you know how to get there. Importantly, if you're in charge of a team leading another even larger team, then that SLT has to be behind your ideas, otherwise you get the sort of back-biting that undermines the team and the leadership completely. When the weavils start gnawing at the rudder, don't be surprised if your boat goes nowhere. Is a phrase you're not likely to hear again today...

So getting everyone on board is a very powerful tool in inspiring confidence.

Lesson Two: Keep it simple, stupid.
Uncontentious is a good way to get everyone behind your general principles. Teachers are all pretty well-intentioned people, or at least started out that way. They come to the profession with a desire to make a difference, and your leadership vision has to reconnect them to that original moral purpose they came with. They have to feel they are coming to work every day to do the thing they wanted right from the off: Change the lives of young people for the better. How you achieve that vision of success for young people can be debated ad infinitum within SLT, openly and honestly, but as long as you agree your general direction, then there is strength in your position as a group leading the school. The main thing is the main thing.

Lesson Three: Communicate the vision clearly and often
Alignment is a word much used on the ASLDP, and I must admit it is a word which is easily mistaken for coercion, which naturally gets people's backs up. But if you don't have a set of values and principles behind which people can align themselves, then why would they follow your direction? Learning to communicate your vision to the staff, and overcoming the suspicion people have of anyone who wants to go into a senior role, is a fundamental part of your job. Remember that most teachers came to teach young people, and therefore may well have a pretty legitimate suspicion of anyone who seems to want to "escape the chalkface". Your reason for being a member of SLT has to come through loud and clear in your words, but most importantly in your actions: It's about service. As a teacher, you can serve students. As a member of SLT you can serve students, and you can more importantly serve teachers in order to help them to do their job better. Repeat, in case you didn't get it first time: It's about service, and communicating your mission to serve others.

Lesson Four: Put in place the right systems
The word "system" conjures up a mechanistic view of management which most people hate, because they're people, and nobody likes to think of themselves in a box. But your systems are for two purposes: To make it easier for teachers and students to do their jobs, and to monitor and interrogate how that can be done even more effectively. Good systems of accountability should be light work, but provide excellent evidence upon which to act. If you are systematically asking the correct questions, the answers you come up with can automatically be looked at, and take into account individual variability such as student or teacher performance. But it's important that those questions be asked, that the story behind the figures be found, and that the knowledge that they bring is on the table for discussion.

Lesson Five: Create an effective team
A group is not a team. School "teams" are often inherited, and made up not of people who have ability and aptitude to lead the school or carry out specific tasks, but more often of people who have been teaching longer or have specific experience in schools. However, if this is the culture which exists in education today, we have to work with that, rather than bemoaning the fact that we can't just fire someone and hire the right specialist, as they might in industry. It's important to develop our leaders into a team, as they will model everything the school aspires to be: SLT should work towards becoming...

• A team with shared purpose
• A team which builds up complementary skill-sets and capacity (the right "chemistry", if you will)
• A team which reviews the school's activities and processes (as well as its own) constantly for refinement
• A team which learns from its mistakes and moves forward
• A team which develops its emotional intelligence in order to make dealing with teachers and students more effective
• A team which trusts its own members, the teachers it serves, and which is in turn trusted by staff and students to run the school in a direction which is mutually beneficial to all

Lesson Six: Everything is about development, not blame
Common purpose should always overcome individual egos. If it doesn't, the result when interrogating certain data or findings is that people get defensive and therefore will not give the whole truth if they can avoid it. An openly debating culture within SLT such as I have witnessed at my present school allows all the facts to be put on the table without embarrassment so that everyone can look at what can be getting better. Just because you've been put in charge of an area doesn't mean you're bound to have all the ideas, and sharing your results, your doubts, your qualms etc allows others to contribute, allows you to get multiple perspectives, and ultimately allows you to come up with better collaborative solutions. But if your team doesn't have that open culture and common sense of purpose, you have to build it first.

Lesson Seven:
This one's for the SLT rookies out there. When someone asks you if you would like to take the minutes, the answer is no. Or a more polite version thereof. And if at the end they congratulate you and say that you have got "your turn" out of the way, what they mean is that the busiest agenda of the term is now over. Mwa-haha-haha-haha...

Next they'll be saying it's my turn to pay for the SLT team-building curry outing...

Taxonomy of an iPad lesson

I haven't blogged about our iPad journey for a while, so I thought I'd update how it's going, and impart a few of the lessons I've learnt the hard way! Forgive the length of the post, but I thought it was time to get into the nitty-gritty of the learning which occurs when iPads are used so you can follow my thinking, and improve on what I'm doing (and hopefully suggest those improvements to me in a comment at the bottom? Who knows?). And I'll chuck in some cartoons to alleviate the boredom too, how about that?

The first thing to comment on is a class procedure which has changed: The first thing my students do when they come into the class is to wash their hands with the anti-bacterial gel soap, a dispenser of which is on the wall at the entrance to the class. Bizarre, eh? One of the things which has always troubled me in schools is that, in a computer-heavy subject area like mine, cleaners NEVER touch the computers, keyboards or mice. And with the iPads' arriving, they certainly wouldn't touch those! (There is always the excuse that they're "not allowed to", but I can't honestly see it being likely that the person in charge of cleaning services is telling their staff any such thing). And kids, let's face it, are snotty and prone to poor hand hygiene. Some of you may be laughing at how remarkably understated I'm being on this matter... Anyway, I reckon that if you combine their hygiene habits (or lack of them) with the sharing of computers and iPads between 5 different classes every day, chances are you'd be able to account for a good 30% of the bacterial transmission within schools! And seeing as Dave Brailsford reckoned there were marginal gains to be had in keeping his cyclists healthy by using simple hygiene methods such as that outlined above, well, I decided to go for it. And I know this is anecdotal, but frankly the levels of attendance in my classes this year have been especially good amongst the classes using the iPads. Go figure. So, change number one: Hand gel at the start of every class.

Change number two: Organisation. We were very fortunate last term that SLT agreed to increase the number of iPads in the department to a full class set, with a charge/sync case. This has made the organisation and distribution at the start of classes a whole lot easier. All iPads were previously numbered, and allocated to individual students in each class, but what was numbered was the screens, so we still had a faff and a half opening them all and giving them out. Now, the sync case has numbered slots. Students know which iPad is theirs immediately, and where to put it back to charge at the end. 30 second procedure, including getting the ipads on. So far we are less than a minute into the lesson and students are ready to start. As opposed to the old Windows machines on the network which necessitated at least 10 minutes of "Bell work" before they were up and running and logged on. (The inverted commas around "Bell work" are there so you will recognise what I'm talking about, because I've re-christened it "Waiting for my f***ing computer to load, connect to the network and log me into all the correct drives work"). So, iPads definitely winning in the organisational stakes.

Change number three: Flipped learning: I'd always been a fan of flipped learning, the idea of setting learning for homework, and its application as a class activity which could be easily differentiated on the basis of how well the homework had been understood. The iPads have made this incredibly easy. The learning is set, and as soon as the students come in, the Socrative room number is on the board. The students now know to simply go to the Socrative app, enter the room number, and their quiz for the day will come up. If you haven't seen Socrative before, it is a web-based app which can be used on any device which can connect to the internet. Frankly, it's one of the most useful AfL tools I've come across. Look, I've even done a video tutorial for you here, and to the right, so now you have no excuse.

A few seconds after they've finished, I get email results telling me who has done well and who needs a bit more help (and who didn't do the homework at all!), and I can set them differentiated tasks or personal interventions to help them progress from whatever stage they are at. For example, yesterday we were analysing the front pages of magazines to see if we could work out what persuasive devices were used on audiences, and thereby identifying target audience characteristics. The class responses on Socrative clearly indicated that the class feel into four groups: The first set of responses clearly hadn't done the homework, so their first task was to do it to catch up (they re-take the quiz to prove it). The second group had not grasped a lot of the technical terminology in the homework, but understood the basics, and therefore they were given a cue sheet with definitions via dropbox to look at, to refer to during the analysis task. The third group did fine with definitions of key terms, but had struggled with the more open questions I'd set to test their application of the terms in analysis: They were also given a cue sheet of definitions (in case that was a problem but they'd guessed the vocabulary correctly in the test), but these definitions were a little more complex and used more media terminology, and also asked some key questions related to text analysis. I put these students in a group together to see if they could answer the more complex questions, and would then intervene more personally to answer their questions if they weren't sure. The final group had clearly understood their homework. They were given a set of additional questions to extend their thinking about the magazine techniques and get them to relate these explicitly to the target audience, and the sorts of gratifications they might get out of the magazine.

Although each group has been set off on different tasks because of their different starting points, this makes it easier for me to give them more individual attention without stopping the whole class, but essentially they are still working towards the same analytical task, just at the pace which is appropriate to their level of understanding. For the task itself, every group was then sent four documents: The mark criteria we had annotated into student-friendly language the lesson before, one model answer we had ripped apart the lesson before with the "What Went Wells' and "Even Better Ifs" we had written next to it, and another model answer we had looked at which was a WAGOLL. The final attachement was an Explain Everything project pre-populated with the keywords they would need for analysis. When they got to the analysis task, students had to find a hi-res google image of a magazine cover of their choice, and import it into the Explain Everything Project. They then re-arranged the key words with arrows to point to the features they could see, explained the connotations of each techniques and its effect on the reader, and finally wrote a summary on a second slide explaining why these techniques might attract the audience the magazine was targeting (below).


About half-way through the lesson, I stopped the students who were on the analysis activity, and put them into random pairs using the app RandomMastr, an easy to use list randomiser which the students are used to: They can see the results on the board through the AppleTV, so they know I'm not fiddling the pairs. The students swap iPads, and then leave feedback for their partner: Two WWWs and two EBIs. They had the mark criteria to refer to, and were told that their EBIs must be improvements which would make the most impact on the other student's result. If they wish (and several of them often do), they were allowed to use the mark criteria to guess what grade the piece might currently be on. The students often take advantage of this as they know I won't issue grades until the piece is finished. Another great feature of Explain Everything which some of them use is the voice-over recording: Some aren't great at expressing their improvements in writing, and so for the feedback I allow them to record their points verbally for their partner to listen to later. Once feedback is given, the students returned the iPads to their owners, and got on with improving their own analyses. And apart from directing the traffic, it sometimes seems as if I don't do much "teaching" in the traditional, stand-at-the-front-and-educate-them fashion. I just intervene on an individual level, and students seem to think this is far more effective, personalised, and suited to their individual pace of learning.

At the end of the lesson, I take a quick pulse check using Socrative again. We sometimes spend a bit of time talking about individual weaknesses or areas for further research, and that will form the basis of the students' homework, but the Socrative pulse check allows me to work out what areas they should be focusing on, based on a single hinge question. Students also have the opportunity to ask me a question through Socrative, which I can answer if the hinge question hasn't quite made it clear to me what a particular student's area of difficulty is. The students are set up for homework, have set their own tasks, and hopefully know what they have to learn ready for next time. They will then export their project to Evernote or to email so they can see what they have completed so far, to remind them while doing their homework, and that's pretty much all there is to the lesson.

This is the sort of lesson which can be endlessly fiddled with, modified, and combined with other techniques. For instance, we have started using SOLO Taxonomy as part of the peer feedback mechanism with one class, who are getting into it slowly. Similarly there are different ways of giving formative feedback to each other, including some of @Headguruteacher's brilliant "Closing The Gap" strategies. The one thing I hope you'll notice is that I haven't really mentioned the iPad that much throughout the post, and that's as it should be as far as I'm concerned. The whole debate shouldn't be about the technology (which is why I won't be drawn on the iPad/Android/BYOD debate): The technology merely facilitates the learning, and for that, you use whatever works best. I have a couple of students who really struggle with Explain Everything, so they are allowed to do their analysis work on Evernote. I don't have a problem with that. It's just a tool after all...

Leadership and wisdom: Why us and them?

I'm in serious mood today. None of the usual frivolities. OK, you might get a cartoon at the end, but until then, I'm talking business...

I don't know about you, but I often have decent ideas which I'm developing at some bizarrely insane time of the day, when suddenly I will read someone else's blog which just, mortifyingly, turns out to be the perfect expression of what I've been struggling to articulate for so long. Today was such a day, when I read Kev Bartle's blog on line management, and the need to build a relationship of trust between manager and line managee (he made that word up by the way, not me). This line caught my eye: "And I trust that they (the people he line manages) are in this job for all the right reasons, as I hope they trust that I am in the job of senior leadership for all the right reasons." An admirable attitude.

However, this line highlighted a problem I have perceived, which has puzzled me throughout my career as a teacher and middle leader: The divide between SLT and "staff". If we just flip his statement on its head a moment, we perhaps start to see what is at the root of many a disjointed relationship between SLT and staff. Everyone always assumes teachers are in the job for the right reasons, but very often line management relationships break down because those being managed don't quite trust that SLT are in their jobs for the right reasons. Sound harsh? Think about it: How often are people sniping behind the backs of SLT members in your school? Is it only when the senior leader in question is not up to the job? Or is there a natural tendency amongst teachers not to trust SLT?

This isn't a problem middle managers suffer from as much, I don't think. While staff within a department can resent being managed by particular subject leaders on a personal basis, in my experience this is rare, and often down to a clash of personalities or perhaps rival ambition. Essentially, becoming a subject leader is about having ideas of how to teach better within a subject, and wanting to create a system through which this can be organised more effectively day to day. The fact that Subject Leaders still teach a hefty timetable shows the people they are managing that they are still 100% committed to the day to day nitty-gritty of the chalkface. But move towards SLT and suddenly things might change. Teachers seem to have a natural suspicion of people who are promoted to leadership positions, and it might be because they can't fathom why anyone would want to leave the classroom, which was after all the reason they came into the profession. The only reasons people seem to come up with are reasons such as greed (more money) or wanting to get out of the classroom (less work). Neither is a particularly positive reason for wanting that promotion.

One thing you'll pick up from the last paragraph is that I'm already using "they" to refer to staff, which posits a "we" of senior management (and I'm not even senior management yet!). I don't like that at all. However, it does seem to reflect the way staff think SLT view them, and it's a very real obstacle that must be faced, acknowledged and overcome by SLT if they are to be successful. I work with some superb colleagues in my faculty whose trust I have fought hard to gain over several years, and whose interests I have very often put way before my own, even when my own were important to me. But I am aware, and I don't think it's paranoid imagination, that having been seconded to SLT recently, there is now that degree of suspicion towards me and my motives. 

As SLT members it's vital to communicate our mission clearly to teachers, to make them see that our role is as much about people as teaching is. We may be part of a "system", we may have a grand title such as being in charge of "Teaching and Learning","Community" or however your school chooses the nomenclature of SLT, but those roles are still fundamentally about people. They should be about getting the best experiences for every single student, and should be equally about getting the best professional experiences for every single teacher and associate member of the support staff. They deserve to be happy and fulfilled in their lives and roles, as much as the students deserve the best educational experience possible. Our role in this context is about serving the needs of these two communities, and everything we do, say and set up should be transparently and obviously about facilitating that, and releasing people to fly. As @KevBartle said in his fab blog, "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free". Although I think he may have nicked the expression from someone else: Attribution is one of Twitter's main problems!

How you convince the people you manage of this is a matter of personality, I think. There are no hard and fast rules. Our ASLDP course, for instance, discussed whether Heads should go to the staff party a while back, with clearly this question on their minds. Some said they should, and they should be seen to be able to "get down with the staff" as I believe they say on da streets, innit. They should even be willing to get drunk in front of their staff, some said: Shows they don't take themselves too seriously. It's a bonding experience. Others said quite vehemently that they should remove themselves and allow staff to get on with the fun without feeling they were being watched. I could see both sides (typical Gemini, apparently, whatever that means!). I don't see any good reason for Heads not to be involved in staff do's, but not because they feel they have to play a role. That is the most phoney thing we can do, because people see straight through it. You have to do what comes naturally to you, and lead in a way which aligns itself with your character. For me, that would include attending staff quizzes, nights out etc, but the line would be drawn at drinking (not something I wear well), singing and dancing in public, which have always embarrassed me, way before I was even a teacher. I'm not going to be able to change those things just because I suddenly have to lead people or want them to see me bonding with them. But ultimately I do need to convince them that I ought to be treated as a person, rather than a manager, and the best way to do that is to do likewise back.

Finally, I would like to draw your attention to another interesting argument I heard on TED a while back, and one which supports the assertion that we should foreground people over systems when leading schools: The idea is that whatever we do, we mustn't make systems or procedures the whole answer, because the unintended consequence is to take away our wisdom to decide human issues on a case by case basis, and the virtue and morality to treat people like humans. This might seem like a bit of a non sequitur in the context of what I've been talking about, but it says more or less what I've always thought about how we lead people: We deal with them as individuals, we highlight their strengths, we look to help them fly if they need help, and we get rid of any obstacles if they don't. And rather than trying to "catch them out" (credit to @SimonWarburton for this expression), we work on their weaknesses in the same context as they would, knowing that they will want to deal with those weaknesses as much for themselves as for anyone else. They don't need us on their backs in addition to dealing with them, they need us on their side. That level of trust and integrity is important to have between you and the people you work with. And it might just make them less inclined to think of you as "them": Credit to Pink Floyd for that line...

2012 - What a year!

2012 was the Chinese Year of the Dragon. By reputation it is a stormy year, literally and metaphorically, with change as its only constant characteristic. Think of 1916, 1940, 1976 and 2000 and you get the idea. For those who can ride the storm, it's an exciting ride full of opportunities. and such has been the case for me this year.

Specifically it has been one of the most inspiring years I can remember for a long time. It's been the year of Twitter discovery, the year of turning the iPad pedagogy dream into reality, my first year of Outstanding teaching (apparently), and the first year I've begun to accept I may have something to offer at a level higher than middle management. The encouragement and inspiration I've received this year have been overwhelming (a lot of it from Twitter), and have pushed me along at a rate somewhere between uncomfortably hard sprint and mach 2 with lips gibbering comically. So I thought I'd finish my first month of blogging with a reflective one, looking at the things which have inspired me most this year, and hoping they inspire you too...

1) Teachers were heroes, and presidents were real people (whether this a real person with courage still remains to be seen, but I imagine 90% of the world's population will be willing him on in the New Year).

Felix Baumgartner - The mightiest of leaps

2) Science equated to discovery and inspiration: 

Higgs Boson, the Mars Rover, Felix Baumgartner's colossal jump from the edge of space - A year when Science re-discovered its cutting edge and inspirational qualities, but a year in which the real science (of saving our species' place in this planet's history) was once again subsumed by the interests of those with profit as their main motive.

3) Teachers innovated: Teachmeets and Tweachers came of age, and teachers reacted to an ever-growing chorus of criticism from government and the media with professionalism, integrity, and continued strife towards improvement. But these testing times, when politics and ideology rule over education, are also beginning to sift teachers and leaders into two groups: Those who acquiesce to the demands and play the game, and those who have the moral courage to stand up for what's best for their students. The latter group is in the ascendency I think.

4) The little people stood up for their future: Pussy Riot in Russia, democracy protesters in Syria, Libya and Egypt - A year when the little people stood up to be counted, and gave their lives for a better future. And the web played a pivotal role in that process, allowing people to communicate freely with each other across social and geographical barriers: On a lesser scale, we saw the growth of crowd-funded Kickstarter projects, and in the teaching profession we saw the formation of HeadsRoundtable and its massive online petitions, consultations and deluging the DfE with over 5000 tweets in one hour to protest against the EBacc "consultation" (if such it can be called). There's your moral conviction...

5) Gay Marriage Bill: Even though the church continues to object to gay marriage, this was the year that the rest of us saw it as a complete non-issue. For Heaven's sake, if the Conservative Party are advocating a more liberal stance than the church, what is the world coming to?! I just loved the picture opposite, which showed a grown man as though ashamed of his own message, and a young lad with courage and love in his heart. Who says the next generation is going downhill?

(Do love this video response from the gay community on what might happen if we don't let them marry each other: Hilarious!)

6) The Olympic legacy

I'll admit to being a nay-sayer when it came to the Olympics, and then it changed my mind, for so many reasons. The inspirational performances were just one aspect of the whole thing to be honest. I loved the fact that we saw immigrants as accepted parts of our society who wanted to help make this a great country rather than simply a racially homogenous one; I loved the way we came to see 

Paralympians and disabled people as heroes rather than as scroungers, benefits cheats, or a drain on the nation; And most of all (as a media specialist), I loved the fact that the people we idolized were for once not over-paid ponces (footballers, looking at you here!) or people with little talent who'd made it through "reality TV" and been told they were the next big thing. The Olympians were people who excelled at their sports, achieved their success through incredible hard work over a long period of time, and when they'd finally achieved it, had the humility to admit that they were only part of a team, and that their achievements were only a blip on a much larger scale. People who are often aware of their own lack of importance in the grand scheme of things are often the ones who achieve and give most in life. That's a true legacy.

Finally, I had to leave this year's review with two of my favourite videos of the year: You're going to tell me they're the same: Same tune, same theme, same Olympic footage. But there is a subtle difference. While the first is a celebration of the Olympics and its trials, tribulations and successes, the second I think is more powerful.

Because it's about more than the sportsmen and the sportswomen who did us so proud. It's about us as well, and our role as ordinary people. It's about everybody who made it happen, made a difference, and made it such a special time for Britain (not just London). It's about ordinary people clubbing together to show how great a nation's people are, without jingoism or feeling any need to be better than anyone else...

If we're going to do anything to leave a legacy in 2013 (and seeing as yesterday went off without a hitch, and Mayans are still investing in pension funds, we can assume we do still have a future on this planet!), it should be to realise our potential as a species within the great ecosystem which is our planet.

It should be about looking out for each other.

It should be about looking out for our resources, and sharing them equitably.

It should be about realising with humility that our survival depends on working in harmony with this beautiful planet, and not simply in our own selfish interests.

A final quote, to leave you with this year. It's from a book I read years ago that is unique in its ability to constantly remind me of how tiny my place in the world is. As my Christmas gift to you all, may I recommend "Tuesdays With Morrie", and may we all continue to strive to make this a better place to live next year... Merry Christmas!

You’re not a wave, you’re part of the ocean.

“I heard a nice little story the other day,” Morrie says. He closes his eyes for a moment and I wait.

“Okay. The story is about a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time. He’s enjoying the wind and the fresh air–until he notices the other waves in front of him, crashing against the shore.

“My God, this is terrible,” the wave says. ‘Look what’s going to happen to me!’

“Then along comes another wave. It sees the first wave, looking grim, and it says to him, ‘Why do you look so sad?’

“The first wave says, ‘You don’t understand! We’re all going to crash! All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn’t it terrible?’

“The second wave says, ‘No, you don’t understand. You’re not a wave, you’re part of the ocean.’”

I smile. Morrie closes his eyes again.

“Part of the ocean,” he says, “part of the ocean.” I watch him breathe, in and out, in and out.

Extract from the book Tuesdays with Morrie 
By Mitch Albom
All rights reserved.
New York : Doubleday, c1997.

Leadership Philosophy: A first stab

Week three of my ASLDP course, and I had my first chat with my coach afterwards, the venerable @Plestered, and a number of themes are starting to emerge from these sessions, to whit:

1. I will never get the course acronym right
2. I will never remember my ID badge to sign in with
3. Leadership is about moral purpose. And data. And not necessarily in that order.
4. Leadership is about vision, and knowing how you want to run your organisation
5. Ok, I only thought of four, but the whole numbering thing got the better of me...

I was discussing this with my coach, as well as talking about the various blogs we're both reading on leadership at the moment, and a recurrent idea seems to be this need to develop one's vision for leadership. At which point he told me I should write mine before my next coaching session.

Let's rewind here: I should write mine before my next coaching session.

OK, rewind a bit further...
I should write my vision for leading a school before my next coaching session.
While I'm still a middle leader.
Before I've learnt anything substantial on this course (and there are those who've rightly expressed doubt that I'm capable of that alone!).
Before I've even started my leadership secondment.
For a theoretical job as a potential Assistant Headteacher.
Before all that, I should try and formulate my vision for how I would lead an entire school.

"Excellent idea!" I said. 

Sometimes I can be a pillock...

This is what I've come up with so far. With virtually every blog I read and every conversation I have nowadays, I learn more and more, and I'm certain of nothing if not the fact that this wil change drastically with that learning. But every journey starts somewhere. So here are my thoughts on the tools I would use to run a school well:

1) Authenticity and integrity, from top to bottom. From leaders, staff and students. We will not produce a generation of people who have genuine integrity if we don't have it ourselves, and model it day in, day out. It's about people, stupid. And those people need to be valued and supported. If you are not able to value and support the people around you, and the students, and have that principle at your very core, why would you work in this profession?

2) Teaching and learning, curiosity and discovery, should be at the heart of everything we do. We should be a discovery community, staff and students alike. We should be learning from everyone around us, and we should create a system where that is systematically facilitated and celebrated. We should be learning from each other, we should learn from external sources, from business, from the community, from anyone who has something to teach us. We should create time within the curriculum where staff development, research and collaborating on best and next practice is not only prominent but a professional expectation.

3) High expectations. It's not OK for a student not to try their best in your class, is it? But teachers get paid to do their job, so why would it be any more acceptable for us not to give our students our best? I agree that you can't hit Outstanding every single lesson perhaps, but we need to find a sustainable way to give at our highest level as much of the time as possible. And make it sustainable for a whole school year, rather than having people break down due to ill health at the beginning of every holiday.

4) Use the strengths of the people you have. Good managers should manage, good teachers who are at the chalk-face day in day out should be listened to, and should have every possible obstacle to outstanding lessons put aside. Use the talents you have well. I'm sure someone even wrote a parable about it, it's that important. I think it was probably Jesus.

5) Openness and open doors: If anyone fears me coming in to their classroom, they will get more defensive. Staff and students have to know that failure is a crucial part of the learning mix, and that they should be doing it together. Failure is fine, as long as you learn from it, and progress from it. Consequently all feedback should be developmental. The same principle applies to those at the top of the teaching ladder, with large amounts of expertise, and a desire to experiment and hone their teaching skills, sometimes even try something outlandish. They need to be trusted. They need to be given the freedom and autonomy they need to develop. But that freedom is always coupled with accountability. One is the Yin to the other's Yang. Or vice versa. I can't remember.

6) Curriculum: We are in an unprecedented era of political interference in education, but we are also in an era of considerable freedom. If we allow our freedoms to be curtailed by our response to how others will perceive us, based on league tables and spurious measures of what constitutes a rounded education which we don't agree with in the first place, then we have lost our moral purpose. We need a curriculum which allows every student to find their light, to find the spark that sets their futures alight, and is right for that individual. If we don't provide that, we fail the students. By consequence, we need to be clear with parents what the rationale behind our curriculum decisions are, and we need them to support us in our attempts to give their children what's best for them, rather than what responds to flavour of the month. The students who leave our gates should be as ready as they can be for their futures, whatever that might entail.

7) OK, I know what I'm like if I get a list that goes beyond seven, so let's not push this. There's bound to be more to write in the future, and I'm likely to be changing my mind very soon about all this anyway, so let's stop here. Treat number 7 as your video at the end of term. And as an explicit statement that anyone who retweets to me any more "1047 new ways to enrich education with a pencil sharpener" will be shot! Malice aforethought. No early release from prison.

You've been warned...

(And as for Michael Gove...)

My iPad journey - Updated

Cards on the table: I've been teaching 17 years and have always been a huge fan of computers and their potential for learning. I'm not an ICT teacher, nor am I any more than a gifted amateur in the ICT world. I am not a geek, except insofar as I watch The Big Bang Theory. And love it. OK, I'm a bit of a geek. But I have some semblance of social skills, so I'm not sure it counts really.

My journey with ICT began with computers, always Windows, big Apple hater to be honest. Then the iPad came out, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. But it bugged the hell out of me the number of work-arounds I had to find for functions which would have been simple for a PC. As a media teacher, it irritated me that I had to wait until iPad 2 for a camera, but once I had the camera, it didn't take long before the iPad gradually rendered my computer almost obsolete. The iPad started as a replacement for computers, in the classroom as well as at home.

And so the iPad began to replace many PC functions in my classroom, as a simple swap. There were limitations, but more advantages than I'd thought. the "switch it on and it's on" facility (revolutionary, I know: Who thought that one up?) was a huge time-saver, meaning I didn't have to plan whole lessons around computers just to make switching them on and the 10-minute boot-up worthwhile, or introduce lessons with 20 minutes of board-work just to kill time so the damn things were ready to go. (Honestly, all the tasks were really useful, promise)

At the same time I started on twitter, where all my best ideas came from. More or less all my ideas, if I'm honest. I am not one of life's creative thinkers, it's fair to say. But I do have a much under-estimated skill of being able to look at things which are beyond my creative capacity and give them a slight tweak to improve them. This was more or less how I treated most of my PLN's contributions: "Like that, how do I make it work for me?".

Our school has been on a three-year drive to improve AfL, and this was brilliantly served by Socrative quick tutorial here if you've never seen it before), which had the advantage of being usable on computers and phones as well, useful for classes where we didn't have enough iPads to go round. In fact, it's the ideal tool for any BYOD environment too. I started realising that the iPads had loads of advantages, but these were often negated if you didn't have a device per person, so using web-based apps helped as I could supplement the ipads with conventional PCs. This was enriching the learning in my class, with a greater variety in my students' educational diet which was keeping them on their toes.
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By now I was starting to see the creative potential of the iPads for making movies, podcasts, comic strips, posters etc. It started out as a solution to my attempts to "flip the classroom", buy allowing me to create simple tutorial videos I could set as homework preparation for lessons (Our Youtube channel gives you a few examples which you are welcome to share). I could even put them into Playlists so that the videos became more advanced, and students were able to go as fast in their learning as they wanted to, which was really useful at KS4 and KS5. Using the camera on the iPad and iMovie enabled me to make these short videos within half an hour sometimes, and as they are all online now, they are permanently there for students to refer to. Which means I've stopped repeating myself in class, a lot. Apart from the phrase "Do you know where to look for your answer?" which is getting trotted out more...

My own forays into creativity also showed me the iPad's potential for increasing the number of ways my students could respond creatively to tasks rather than just using them to find out information, browse the internet and write notes. Creation is perhaps the one area the iPad really has it over other tablets, as it has a huge amount of potential. So my students would be using creative apps to illustrate their learning, and this, I realised, was enhancing learning dramatically, by deepening the way the students were thinking, and really getting them to synthesise and apply the information in new and creative ways. Twitter and @Gripweed1 added more apps from a fabulous website of the week feature he does, eg Explain Everything, and the ways in which my students were able to demonstrate their learning continued to grow.

Explain Everything has been a great case in point, one which I am developing my use of consistently. At first it was me making tutorials, or explaining concepts for students. But after a while I started asking the students to use it to explain the concepts themselves. The beauty of it was that it allowed them to use pictures, labels, extended writing, but also make these into movies which they could produce verbal commentaries for. A lot of my students with special needs have benefitted from this new way of accessing and showing their learning, or boys especially who never quite get round to writing things in any more detail than the absolute minimum they can get away with. Tell them they can explain it verbally or make it into a movie and they're mad for it. Tell them how brilliant the answer is but they now have to write it in ten minutes for an exam response, and they suddenly realise that succinct writing is a skill they also have to learn. Importantly though, those who always thought they were not much good in class because their written responses got low marks now realise that the knowledge is more than adequate, and that the only obstacle to good marks is writing. Somehow, that seems to make the task of improving slightly less daunting to them.

Then the enhanced learning led logically into sharing our work. Students were so proud they wanted to be able to show their work to everyone, through the Apple TV, and to their parents. Students sharing their work with each other on Twitter has increased the collaboration in class dramatically, for a start. QR codes, tweeting, Creative Book Builder (another easy tutorial here for those of you who've never tried it), were my first steps into this curating work and bringing it together. Again, @Gripweed's app of the week showed me countless possibilities for doing this, such as Wallwisher, Edmodo, Scoop.It. And my eyes began to open to the number of different ways I could do that.

I ignored virtually all of them, because if there's a down-side to Twitter, it's that it can deluge you with too many ideas. But I had enough to fulfil the functions I was after, and it was clear that sharing work was having an additional unexpected effect: It was extending learning. What students were producing was changing, the way in which they were doing it was changing, and they were now learning outside the classroom much more. I'd been toying with flipped learning for a long time, but suddenly these tools made it not only possible, but also driven by the students.

So the next stage was to stop exploring too much, and sit down and rationalise things. I spent time thinking about the functions I wanted my students to be able to undertake using the iPads, and created a list: Mind-mapping, AfL, writing and recording, researching, demonstrating learning, sharing learning, creating posters, word clouds, videos, demonstrations, podcasts, revision, online accessible storage.
Here are the tools I used, for those of you with an unhealthy interest:

AfL - Socrative
Mind-mapping - Popplet, iThoughtHD
Note-taking and recording - Pages, Evernote, GoogleDocs, Keynote
Research - Safari, Skype/Facetime, Khan Academy, TED and TED-ED
Word clouds - TagCloud, Word Collage
Demonstrating learning - Explain Everything, Skitch, Timeli, VideoScribe, Creative Book Builder, iBooks, Apple TV
Creating - CeltX, Cinemek, Pinnacle Studio, iMovie, PS Touch, PS Express, StripDesign, Phoster, Flipbook
Revision - Quizlet
Storage and sharing - Evernote, Dropbox, Cloudon, iBooks, Twitter, QR codes

Way too much info, huh? Up until the list you were busy thinking "Wow, great, cool, I should try this!" And then this turned into those, and I can feel your enthusiasm waning with the immensity of the task! I've been there. I sympathise. I call it "My inspirational Twitter PLN hell". But here's the thing: To quote my favourite philosopher Lao Tzu, "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". There is no minimum speed limit on this journey. There is only DO or DO NOT. So pick one app. Try it. When you've got it wrong a few times, try it some more, get the students to help you out, or find work-arounds, and get good at it. Embed it. And then add another, and so on.

And add in your other learning styles: Flipped learning works brilliantly with iPads, as does SOLO Taxonomy. As, I would imagine, does co-construction. It's only a tool after all, and there are a whole load of ways it can help you do your job more effectively. The final thing you'll discover on this journey is that, beyond changing how you do things, varying your educational activities, deepening the learning of your students, and extending the ways in which they learn, you will ultimately have empowered your learners to take charge of their own education. Which is technically, I reckon, Outstanding, is it not?

The process so far has taken me a year. I now have four classes using iPads most lessons, for a variety of tasks, and constantly coming up with new ways to learn. Sometimes I feel like a spare part, but it just gives me a precious second or two to sit back and smile to myself. Before I get back on their backs expecting even more!

Thank you. Once again, you've made it to the end of the post. Here's your cartoon... At least I'm getting more consistent with my rewards system, eh?

Keeping teachers healthy

A while back I read a rather brilliant blogpost by the equally rather brilliant John Tomsett entitled This Much I Know About... Staff Well-Being. It was so inspiring that, like any good professional, I nicked it and tried to pass the ideas off as my own at our staff well-being committee the following week. Unfortunately, my DHT who chairs the meeting was trying to do likewise. Fortunately for us, if rather ironically, everyone else was too sick or busy that week to be there, so between the two of us we quietly buried the whole plagiarism thing and just decided to focus on the merits of the ideas therein.
#dodgedabullet

I've written elsewhere in a post on Leadership and Integrity that the teacher is the most important tool in the education process. Technology is great, supportive management are too, but at the end of the day, the teacher is the tool which crafts the final product, the holistic education of a child: no tool, no product. The logical corollary to this is that teachers are the most prized asset a school has, and should therefore be looked after and enabled to do their job as best they can, rather than prevented from doing so. Staff well-being is a critical issue in this respect, but I can't help feeling we're often our own worst enemies.

OK, so, cards on the table. I'm not one of these teachers who gives everything in the service of the students and the profession. Don't get me wrong: During the hours of 7.30 - 6.00 while I'm in school, I'll be giving my best. And when I'm marking work and doing the other bits and bobs at home in the evening and at the weekend, those tasks too will have my undivided attention. But here's the thing. When I get all my To Do list done, I'm done for the day, and that's that.  I'm damned if I'm going to be one of those teachers who martyrs themselves for the job. Because you know what I've noticed all martyrs have in common? Their deadness. The fact that none of them walk away happy, or indeed walk any further at all. For them, it's all or nothing.

Now I know teachers who are like this. And believe me, there is a point up to which I admire their dedication. But here's my question: Who do you think you're helping with this sort of attitude? Are you seriously trying to tell me that your über-dedication and consequent constant exhaustion are the best way to help your students? And if you're busy having a jolly good laugh at those martyrs, ask yourself if you've ever come in to school despite the fact you KNEW you were too ill to do so? Cover too much hassle to set? Kids can't do without you? Feel guilty about the cover you're causing? Leave it out! Someone ought to seriously try calculating the knock-on effect of that valiant act. For starters, how many other people did you infect? And how many days of work were lost through that? How many students lost time because of the same thing? (And we're never exactly enamoured of the fact that students miss our lessons, no matter how legitimate the reasons) and how many of those lessons you did deliver were actually good lessons? I can imagine the looks of horror on people's faces as I criticise their devotion to duty, but I can't tell you how misguided it is.

If you're dedicated to your job, you have a duty to look after your health. And to be honest, you've got a duty to look after your health full stop. If your life is one of giving to your students, then they deserve your best, and you cannot give that unless you take care of yourself. If you actually have other centres of interest in your life other than teaching, heaven forbid, like loved ones who need your time, then you owe them too. That means disciplining yourself to stop with enough energy left for those people too. The ones you love. Remember?

Anyway, I hate my own tendency to be critical, so here are my own ideas on how to achieve that balance which might be a bit more constructive. They are by no means perfect, but they really help me.

• Reserve early mornings for yourself. Bit of exercise, deep breathing, meditation, whatever you want, but give yourself you time. It's not about "allowing yourself", it's about disciplining yourself. It's not an indulgence, it's a need.
• Learn to cook. Properly. I love lots of sweet indulgences, but they don't love me, so I ditched them and tried to fill myself with good stuff, and find other things I look forward to eating just as much. Check out this banana cake recipe for starters!
• Set time aside: I set aside two evenings a week for friends and exercise at the same time. My friends are great at keeping me motivated to keep fit. Surrounding yourself with good, positive friends who want the best for you also goes a long way.
• I started learning t'ai chi the week I began teacher training, some meh years ago, and it really helps. Not just with staying calm under pressure, and giving me bags more energy than I've ever had before, but also with awareness of when I'm over-working my system, and when I need to slow down. It ended up doing me so much good I started teaching it. Now, several years down the line, those people I taught are keeping me from spending my energy unwisely, because they're now teachers in their own right. How cool is that?
• Professional guilt: Get rid of it. Sacrificing your health for short-term gain isn't worth it, and is actually helping fewer people than you think.
• Time for loved ones. If you can't spare your children an hour a day minimum, and more for your partner, that's not making you a good person. Why should they have to sacrifice their energy to make up for your lack of it all the time? Dinner times are sacrosanct in our house, and cooking together is an even better way to get time with the people you love. My brother even has a fab "cocktail Wednesday" which he and his wife never deviate from. Oh, and quit trying to multi-task. When you're dealing with people at school, you wouldn't be checking your phone or answering emails at the same time, so don't do it to your family.
• Weekends: I know working at weekends is inevitable, but try to put aside a full day for yourself, your family, your friends and yourself: You deserve it.
• Sleep. Lots of it, especially in winter. There is less energy around at this time of year, so you need to conserve what little you have if you're going to stay fresh. The rest of nature hibernates for good reason. If we, the so-called "superior animals", think we can ignore nature's cycles, then we're not as clever as we like to think. Try switching off from work at least an hour before you go to bed, and don't go to bed after eleven. Statistically it is far more difficult to get to sleep thereafter.

And if you look at the actual amount of time you're taking off work by completing the above, it's not too much to expect is it? Assuming you want to have a life, at any rate.

In conclusion, to paraphrase the greatest taoist master of them all:

Get a life. Do not get a life. There is no try.

This post is dedicated in memoriam of the greatest teacher ever, Trevor Edney, who taught me not only to love learning, but also to love the health I'd been given, and to enjoy my time on Earth. RIP