Why Teachers Resist your Great Ideas | A Conversation with Christopher Youles

And I feel if you can be in there making these little tiny changes all the time, just keep chipping away or there's little micro changes constantly. I think actually there's little changes can really start to add up and all of a sudden you realize actually now it is going in. We are heading into the right direction. We're making some really positive change for our students here.

Hey everyone, I'm Shane Leaning. Welcome to Education Leaders, the chat-topping leadership podcast for school leaders just like you. As an organizational coach, I've helped thousands of leaders worldwide lead with greater confidence, make better decisions and create winning teams. And on this show, we explore the strategies that are going to help you achieve your goals and transform your leadership.

This episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association and the Teacher Development Trust. Stay tuned to learn more. My guest today is Chris Yours. Chris is an assistant head.

He's got 20 years of experience. He's worked as an English lead, writing a moderator, and a specialist leader in education. He's delivered workshops on improving writing standards and is the author of teaching story writing in primary. He currently lives and works not too far from me in Taiwan where he divides his time between blogging and writing about by his own admission, failing to go to the gym.

Now, what I love about this conversation I'm about to share with you from Chris is his honest reflection on the messy reality of implementing change. He's someone who's literally written the book on teaching writing, yet he is the first to admit he struggles with implementation in his own school sometimes. I think many of us are going to have a lot of resonance with this episode. So without any further ado, let's jump right in.

The book's called Teaching Story Writing in Primary. And I think what first led to it was I'd always enjoy teaching writing. And I remember that I was teaching a year six class and we'd done setting descriptions. And I saw this girl in my class, this student, and she said, yeah, I just wish that we could write setting descriptions all day, every day.

I was like, OK, that's really interesting. Like, why do you say that? Because I know how to write a setting description. And as soon as I get to the story bit, I haven't got any idea what to do.

It was like a sledgehammer to the head because I thought, yeah, because I've never taught you and it's my fault. I think that sort of sat at the back of my mind for a long time as I was sort of thinking about this. And because I have an interest in writing outside of teaching, it's like a hobby, it's something I like to do. And if there's a book on writing, I've read it.

I'm a writing geek and I found by reading every single one of those books has successfully meant that I've managed to do no writing myself, just read books about writing. And as I kept reading all these books about writing, you know, Stephen King's on writing, which is my favorite one. And probably I'd guess maybe like 20, 30 more. And looking at things like Pixar's Rules of Writing and Dan Harmon's Story Circles and all this geeky knowledge about writing, the more I realized that we don't teach it and we never explore with the students actually how story works.

And then I also realized that, although I was blaming myself, that it's actually the curriculum because the curriculum has this really like vague phrase, like write an effective story. And then you have all the other assessment frameworks and criteria that people are writing, planning their lessons, delivering the lessons and teaching and assessing against. But actually that effective part, you know, write an effective story needs to be unpicked with really, really good subject knowledge that goes way beyond actually my sector, which is like primary teaching. And then you start to get into like point of view and characterization and structure and what actually means about, you know, these attempts and frameworks and all these things, the stakes and struggles and conflicts and obstacles.

So essentially, after all that sort of thinking, I was talking to Bloomsbury who published the book and I said, look, I've got this idea, which is, let me see if I can condense all this vast information about story writing into a format that hopefully teachers will find practical that they can use in schools because I think there's a big gap here because of our curriculum. And then I spent hours and hours writing. Well, it's great to hear. By the way, firstly, it's really great to see specialist books being written from a primary perspective.

You see a lot of books about writing or about reading or about any topic. And it just kind of has a generic title. Like it might be called teaching writing or teacher's story writing. But what they actually mean is teacher's story writing for secondary and maybe it'll apply to you in primary.

It's nice to see a book that's straight for it, right? Yeah, except for when it comes to the sales. I've had several people who've bought it for secondary school teachers. And they said, this is really good for secondary school.

And I was like, yeah, damn. So yeah, but yeah, no, I'll think of it your way rather than the fact that I'm missing out on half the sector. Most secondary teachers would say, yeah, my stuff's applicable to primary and us poor primary teachers, we should go a bit beyond our boat too. Absolutely.

So when we last were chatting, Chris, we were talking about something that I think is very interesting to me. Your book is a practical book. It's going through processes and giving teachers lots of ideas and frameworks as well. But driving actual change in schools, we talked a little bit before about this disconnect.

And I would really love to explore that with you today, if you don't mind. Of course, we live the pain. Sorry, I'm sorry to take you there. But I think this is interesting because I think this is going to come to something that a lot of people think, it's all well being in a book and written down.

But does that mean it's actually getting implemented? What's been your experience, Chris? Yeah, let's get back in the painful days of trying to implement change, which is messy and hard and complicated, as I've discovered over the years. I think what I found really interesting was the idea that, especially in a primary sector where I'm not devaluing some of our subject leads, but in the primary sector, you can end up with the geography lead because you have an A level in geography, or the design and tech lead because no one else wanted to do it.

And you do have some fantastic subject leads who that's deeply their passion and they genuinely know a lot about it. But you also, you know, I remember I got made the PE lead once by finding the PE shed key on my desk, just left by the head teacher, just basically, there you go, mate. Classic. And, you know, I was thinking about this when I started at my school and going from that bar, I feel like I have a relative expertise in this one niche area, which is writing.

And what I was noticing in my own school, just no shade to my school or the structure of the organization I'm in. But I started a spot that I was having more effect on schools in the UK or Academy of Trusts that I work with or a school I work with in West Sussex. And through feedback I was getting from my book and my previous book, Sentence, Models for Creative Writing, and I think, wow, like, I'm actually feel like I'm having more effect and helping more people in other schools. And they're probably reading my books or my advice, you know, give online to do with writing, think, wow, his school must have absolutely sorted.

I'm thinking, you know, the messy reality is that it's hard and I'm struggling in the same things that you're struggling with, but for a variety of number of reasons. Yeah. Yeah, this just brings back trauma for me too as well. In fact, I think a bit of a group therapy session today.

So my background was English as additional language, also a primary background, but I used to do a lot of training across Asia, like, you know, going to schools, differently than a lot of training while I was still working in the school. So kind of similar to you, I had this drill facing and I also found the irony sometimes that people assume because I was delivering this training on how good it could be. Therefore, my situation must be that good. And of course, there was a messy reality back home that I was having to deal with and that's a strange feeling, right?

People talk about the imposter syndrome in terms of like, worrying about your own knowledge and we all have that, I think, to some degree, but that was like my imposter syndrome of helping you in schools here and I'm still struggling with some practical elements in my school. I share a story about when I started at my current school in 2022 and one of the first things I did is I went around, had a look, see what was going on in terms of writing and I spotted that we're in Taipei, Taiwan and I saw the spelling list, the spelling homework and it was the spelling menu which had, you know, write the word out in many colors and bubble writing which I knew all the research said was nonsense and in one of the spelling lists for my class was the word Skabra. Right. Very relevant to Taiwan.

I think useful if you live in Skabra. Other than that. Where my mum and dad are, for later. Oh, there you go.

I'd hope your mum and dad know how to start Skabra, right? That's an essential thing that will help them in life. In Taipei, not so much. You can probably guess because it had the OUGH pattern so that's why it was lumped in there.

So actually, I thought, what do you call it? Low fruit, easy pickings. I'll just change the spelling. I'll present the research.

I'll present it to SLT and I present it to the middle leadership team. I put together like a parent workshop, student information, lots of staff meetings and three years later, here we are in 2025 and my son brought back his spelling homework and one of the things I talked about was like different forms of the word is a good little activity you can do rather than bubble writing. And it said, write a different form with this word and the word was therefore. I was like, oh, okay, right.

So there is no other different form for therefore and I'm thinking three years later and there's the messy reality of still trying to make that change. What I thought was the load hanging through the easy one, yeah. So why is it that you felt like you're having more success with people elsewhere than in your own school, even though you're the one with the expertise and you're there? Like what might be going on there from your perspective?

I was thinking about this is a great Dylan William quote, which is everything works somewhere, nothing works everywhere and that used to mean something to me and I don't know what Dylan Williams meaning is, but that meaning is completely changed for me now in that I feel like there are things that work everywhere. So phonics, if you're in an English speaking school, phonics works everywhere. I think someone pointed out in a workshop I talked about last week, kindness that works everywhere. You'd hope.

Yeah, but to me instead, now what that starts to mean is depending on your context, nothing works everywhere because something's going to be much harder to implement or to structure and get the change that you're looking for across in your school because of your context. That's what it started to mean to me. I don't know if that's what he originally meant and I started to list. So I did a workshop on this recently at the Phobisia conference.

So I'm going to come up with the top 10 reasons that CPD doesn't work. I got to about 50. And I scaled it back down to the 10 again. And I think actually the reality of your own school is that which is a common problems that we all have, right?

When does CPD happen after school? Normally a staff meeting if it's internally led. There's always somebody else says, do you mind if I just give this message for the first few minutes and ends up being 15 minutes and everyone's brain power is already used up. Whereas like when I was working with schools or academy just if someone's reading my book, they've actually probably dedicated some more time and some more bandwidth to those ideas.

Whereas I'm in school all the time they hear me waffling on about writing endlessly. And that's the reality of where our PD is happening at the end of the day. I won't go through the top 10 but people bring their own I'm going to call them scars from bad CPD or bad PD. Oh yes.

I got my mum to WhatsApp me. I hope she doesn't mind me sharing this. She probably won't listen. I won't tell her that.

She was working for redacted council as a teacher and she changed like nursery nurse teachers. And for the CPD they took them out into the woods made them open suitcases dress as clowns and then chase each other through the woods. Okay. Now if you've had that experience sounds terrifying, right?

I mean that's quite extreme and people bring these with them, right? These bad experiences. And then also you've got the other big one for me is so I call it the year of maths. So I was working in a school and my head teacher said, right, this is it.

It's the year of maths. Everything we do is going to be about maths. Three weeks later with science. I've seen that.

You've seen it, right? You get whiplashes. The priorities change so quickly and I think people bring this with them then they did in their own school of, well, okay, fine. We're talking about spelling now or writing now, but I'll just wait.

It'll blow over at some point and then we'll move on to something out. So it's all those little things that the reality of your school compared to the wider world. I guess we're trying to help other schools. It's funny that isn't it?

I really resonate with the idea of past trauma of CPD and I mean, I work with a lot of schools. A lot of what I do is my day to day job. I was in a school today. I was in a school yesterday delivering training.

And one of the things I had to learn very quick is that just because you're going in does not mean that people are ready for you to be there or ready for that. Like you can have this assumption and that's a kind of hard lesson to learn actually. But it's one that I think many trainers need to learn very quick because schools have a culture and a lot of the time that culture is complex and because of the teacher's backgrounds, even just the word PD, which to some people will mean great professional development. I reflect on my experience when I first went into leadership, I was at a great school who were really invested in good quality professional development and I did my master's with them and I did a lot of different things.

And for me, professional development are just such wonderful connotations. That's kind of why I went into it. I couldn't really grasp that for some people. The word PD is like a PD.

Okay, here we go. There's also the fact of your English traditional language is your specialism, right? Is that correct? And writing is my geeky obsession.

I'm the writing lead here as well as assistant head. And I remember one day I was delivering something on reading and the learning assistant afterwards. She said to me, well, she said, yeah, but you might like it, but I couldn't give a toss. Ouch.

And I was thinking, okay, my passion is someone else's. Oh, really? And you think everyone who comes up, you think of all the people in your school from the counselors to the nurses to everyone who wanted a piece of the pie to come and deliver this PD. And we've probably all sat in that PD session ourselves.

We've sat and thought, okay, well, I'll listen to it. But you're not the only voice, right? There's many voices all trying to get a little bit of the attention. You forget that sometimes when you come in.

That's right. Do you think that the reason maybe like that we seem to get better reception sometimes to people from the outside than inside is because maybe those people are the ones seeking out and they've got similar views towards PD issue. Do you think that's what it is? Yeah, probably.

I have chosen not to take it personally. In my own school. That's what I decided. That's wise.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, for example, when I'd had really nice feedback on one of my books, someone has paid the money to buy that book has taken the time to read it and digest it. So therefore they sort that out. Whereas in your own school, you're one voice of many and you're up there and everyone's shooting for a little bit their attention and change and it's hard.

I remember sitting there and the staff meeting thinking, God, like there's so much information I've got to take in. And even when I'm sitting there thinking, yeah, I completely agree with this. And the knowledge you've given me fits my vision. And I'm going to do this.

And then you get back in the washing. One of my colleagues described it as the washing machine, which is back in the class. Things can quickly drift away. Can't they when suddenly it's your science three weeks later.

This episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association. Now I've been working with the ICA for quite a few years, but they've been around for 30 years and they've been around championing quality, unlocking potential and improving learning in international schools right around the world. I really, really love that at their core is a model for improving learning. And this model is focused on the learning experience and they have tons of great curriculum materials, PD resources and even an accreditation pathway for schools just like yours.

So if you're interested and I really do recommend you check them out, head over to internationalcurriculum.com. Today's episode is supported by the Teacher Development Trust. TDT's associate qualification in CPD leadership is so perfect for international school leaders.

It's fully accredited and it's delivered online over 10 months. In it, you'll create an actual CPD, that's Continuing Professional Development Strategy for your school based on research that shows well-planned PD improves pupil outcomes and teacher attention. And I actually did this program myself and hands down, it's some of the best professional development I've ever done. So much so that I am delighted to be co-delivering this special Asia cohort which starts in November.

If you want to learn more, go to tdtrust.org or click the link in the show notes. Firstly, Chris, congratulations for being so reflective because I think most authors wouldn't be as reflective as to say, do you know what? Sometimes people can implement my work not very well.

Actually, that's really hard to do. I've meet a lot of people who go, here we go, follow steps, one, two, three, easy peasy, done. But you're hinting to a complexity and change, right? Huge complexity and I think there's a couple of things that I think you can change that really helps in terms of staff, any staff working in school.

One is to reframe your core value or what every decision that you're making as a senior leadership team or middle leadership team or as a teacher is about. So we worked hard this year on reframing rather than I want to make this change because it's something I like. There's lots of things that I like in education. We don't do them all here in my own school.

We've reframed everything now to say we've got all these different stakeholders we're putting the students first. And I know that any school say, well, of course, we put our students first. But for example, when I started here and I asked like, how do we teach reading in our school? So, well, you can choose reciprocal whole class guided reading some carousel activities, but you decide.

Now, is that decision come from a student first centered approach or from what teachers fancy doing or what they're more experienced in? And actually one of the things we could say was, okay, if we want to put our students first and get some consistency across our U groups and then allow teachers to reflect with each other and embed good practice, then we really need to make sure that we're going to pick whole class readings for what went forward for Christopher Such's sort of fluency reading and deep discussion. If we do that all together, that's putting our students first rather than the teachers. It's like parking our ego sometimes to the side and actually being reflective and say that I can, it's something that's not the Dylan Williams quote is about like every teacher can get better.

And we'd say, everything we come to is like, this isn't because I want to do it because this is the best thing for our students. And actually, that really helps teachers, I think, get on board at least with the PD you're trying to offer the changes that you're making. I think that's a really good point. And it's a tricky one in a way because while I agree with the kind of putting an ego to a side, the challenge of picking something can be quite difficult because you can look at different evidences and it's like, well, sometimes it can be like, well, what to pick, which is the best way.

And especially if you've been scarred using your words, scarred by previous changes in education or fads or whatever it is, you might feel a bit resistant, right? Absolutely. Sometimes when you do need to deliver in PD, you have the people in the room that, you know, like, no matter what the school changes and the thing that you're aiming for, they're going to go back and implement it in the classroom straight away. Yeah, you have the people there, which I'm sure I've probably been guilty in the past that were not think that's going to carry on doing thank you very much.

And then sometimes you have blockers, people that actively saying that I don't want to do this. And I think actually all have equal value and we should be listening to all of them. I do think at least they can see with the ethos of like, let's put our students first. So we have some consistency and then to be honest, all teachers can have autonomy and how they deliver in their own classroom.

They can add their own personality in their own style to that, but within a consumer consistency that we can work together on. Yeah, that makes sense. I wonder, Chris, a lot of listeners of this podcast are from schools around the world. And there's definitely a lot of listeners who are leaders in international schools.

Now, international schools, I always feel it's like complexity and then some, like, because you've got a lot of things happening, diversity, different practices. A lot of what I work with here in China and Shanghai is teaching styles between Chinese locals and foreign teachers as well. Like, that's just one thing. Do you think that's got something to play and also just making these ideas work?

Yeah, absolutely. If I reflect on our teaching in the UK, generally, most of the teachers there had been through the same system, had gone through similar training programs wherever part country they're in. Same context, same common sort of shared vision of what teaching should be. I think I found, I think, for working in international schools, which is great on one hand that you have this wide variety of views on education.

But then also, you have these wide variety of views on education. And therefore, it's tricky because actually you might have someone here who thinks, well, everything should be completely inquiry led. I'm the guide at the side. I'm going to stand back and you have people that believe in more dialogic teaching.

And then you've got someone else over there who wants to use CAGIMS principles and Bloom and all of a sudden you think, blind me, there's all these different ideas here. As a leader, you were talking about earlier, like which one do we pick? I think sometimes you just have to make the decision. Yeah.

Look at the research. Look at what you believe is your ethos and go for it and make sure that we're all on board because actually not only with the student first, but it's going to be easier for us because actually when I started and everyone, suddenly my wife was working here and she was delivering whole class reading in one class and there were guided reading next door. They couldn't even share the resources. So even just from a workload point of view, from a point of view where you can get together and you can reflect like, I've just taught that lesson, how did it go?

If you're all doing something different, you're swimming on your own there and I find that's quite a lonely place to be I think in schools. I guess it speaks to a similar, when schools you're working with have got a behavior challenge and it's not usually the behavior system, it's about just choosing the system and being consistent. It sounds like it's pretty similar for teachers as well. And sometimes also I feel like teachers' thought or perception of what autonomy means is different in terms of what we really mean in the messy reality of a school.

So what a teacher means actually is that I get to choose the things that happen in my classroom and how I deliver them. And the truth is, no matter how much senior leadership team or middle leadership team or we try to be in each other's classrooms, for the majority of the time, you're on your own in that classroom when the students come in through to the end of the day and you have complete autonomy over how you deliver your lessons and the pace and the structure and the content. So for example, I bought in a writing system at my previous school, Jane Constantine's The Write Stuff. It's an excellent system.

It was good for our context of where we were in the school in the UK. And I had a teacher speak to me and say like, I could sense actually they weren't too happy with the change because I sat down and looked, talk me through, what are you worried about? What's the feeling here, the negative feeling you have? I said, well, you know, what I used to be able to do was pick a book, any book I wanted to, and then talk through it and then teach them how to write.

And then I could do this, this and this and this. You know, you can still all do that now. It's just doing it in this structure. So in a similar way, so the students have the same experience and we can just talk about it and get better together.

So sometimes that perceived loss of autonomy isn't even real because they can still choose all the content, which I think is the exciting part. We're just talking about some little structures or some shared things, some shared things that we can work on together. It's funny as you say that about perception. I was speaking to a school earlier this week was working with some middle leaders and we were talking about developing culture in a school.

And we were talking about how when you're kind of creating culture, you will see things. We might call them like the artifacts of the culture, the physical things. But what your brain is doing is you're using your underlying assumptions, your values, your beliefs, your systems to make an interpretation on those artifacts that you see. And I think that can cause a problem because when I was discussing this week, we were talking in the idea of offstead inspections and an offstead inspector might come in and see something.

Maybe they see people being really noisy down a corridor. And in a previous school when they had that, that created a whole behavior issue and that all of a sudden perception is that's bad. And I think that can happen with almost like the teacher you're saying is that they saw this thing and they go, well, that means I can't do what I'm doing. But that was their assumption about that, not the actual reality.

How often do we do that? All the time. And actually, it's funny that just triggered a thought that I'd been having recently about the international school context is that we don't have offstead, right? I know there's other organizations and bodies that will come in and evaluate your school, but I think it's very different if you've worked in the UK system to have that offstead breathing down your net, which I feel led to every core educational decision that we ever made as a school or every streamlining or streaming down or cutting out the content that we wanted to teach.

And actually, we don't have that in international schools. We have much more freedom to try things and experiment and get things wrong and not in this time frame of we would like to try to make this change, but we're in the offstead window. So we'll have to wait till afterwards. So actually, there's a real bonus there, I think.

Yeah, there really is. Chris, you know, this has been great just exploring some of your ideas. I wonder if you've got any strategy or a practice that you think has been effective. Like, look, you're an author, you know, multiple books who is self-admitted that some of his great words, wonderful words, are not necessarily being interpreted on the ground or being rolled out in every setting.

Like, have you got any tips or keys to actually make good change happen? If someone were to pick up your book and love it, which they will. I mean, you can apply this to the idea of writing, but any change or PD that you want to make in school. I think a lot of our PD sessions become the knowledge building part and actually then it's that follow through, isn't it?

How do we actually then make the change, stick, embed it? I know I've heard you speak before and talk about remembering the continuous part. Actually, like, not just the PD, we've got to keep coming back to this. I think I've added to what I've heard you speak about before and I've renamed it in my mind.

I'm not going to write this down anywhere, but I've said it, so maybe they're death by a thousand blows, which doesn't mean I'm going to be running around attacking my teachers. But what I mean by that, so, for example, today, I've been pottering around. I mean, I've been very seriously and studiously observing the students in my classes, but I like to get in, just talk to students and I saw some little tweaks or ideas or I had some questions for the teacher. Fantastic writing.

And actually what I do is I'll try and just get in the habit of having that conversation. Sometimes the teachers come and ask, right? They'll come. There's three types.

One, you walk in a room, we'll stare and pretend you do not exist whatsoever. I'm not going to acknowledge your existence whatsoever and then maybe you'll go away. So you've got the teacher who'll follow you around the room saying it's normally much better than this. I don't know what's happening today.

It's Monday. It's fine. Chill out. It's okay.

And then the third teacher is that person is like pretty reflective and say, hey, look straight away. Have you got any tips or any things you've spotted? And I feel if you can be in there making these little tiny death by a thousand blows changes all the time. So that's what I'm constantly trying to do with writing.

They know I'm a geek about it. So they'll often ask me have you got any ideas and say, oh yeah, have you thought about doing this or why did you do that? And just keep chipping away where there's little micro changes constantly. I think actually there's little changes can really start to add up and all of a sudden where you get that feeling as a leader of, oh my God, nothing's going as I hoped it would.

Everything's skewed off in the classrooms. When you get in the classrooms and you can see the great practice and you can hear that rich conversation with the colleagues you suddenly realise actually it is going in. We are heading in the right direction. We're making some really positive change for our students here.

So death by a thousand blows. Do you know the beautiful thing about this conversation with Chris? It was his honesty. It takes real courage for an author to say actually, implementing my own ideas is harder than I thought it would be.

But that is the reality in education for so many, isn't it? And a few things really stood out to me. First, that past trauma from poor PD. It really genuinely affects how people receive new ideas.

We all sat through those sessions that felt pointless, patronising and we carried those scars with us. Second was that importance of reframing change around student outcomes rather than just our preferences. When Chris talked about choosing whole-class reading, not because teachers preferred it, but because it was best for students, that really resonated. But I think most importantly was the concept of that death by a thousand blows, making tiny, consistent changes rather than expecting massive change overnight.

These little micro conversations, those small tweaks, those gentle nudges they really add up. If you're leading change in your school, remember that consistency beats perfection every time. And if you're feeling frustrated that your brilliant ideas aren't being implemented perfectly, well, you're in great company. You can find more about Chris and his brilliant work using the links in the show notes.

Education Leaders is hosted by me, Shane Leaning. Big thanks to the show editor, Pete McGill, and for the original music by Guillerme Silva. And thank you so, so much for tuning in today. If we don't speak before, I'll see you here next week.

If you want to learn more about the brilliant work of the Teacher Development Trust and the International Curriculum Association, you can find them using the links in the show notes.