How to Trust Your Teachers | A Conversation with Sam Gibbs

We say we trust teachers, but do we actually? When scrutiny becomes about finding fault instead of supporting growth, then something has gone terribly wrong. And today we're asking what it really means to build professional cultures that help teachers stay and thrive. Hey, everyone, I'm Shane Leaning.

Welcome to Education Leaders The Chat, topping leadership podcasts for school leaders just like you. As an organisational 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 International Centre for Coaching in Education.

Stay tuned to learn more. Now, today I am talking with Sam Gipps. Sam works in the UK at the Greater Manchester Education Trust and has worked with schools across the UK on teaching, learning, curriculum and PD. She's also the deputy chair of the Trust Wide CPD Leaders Forum, a network of under 250 trust focused on PD at scale.

She's co-authored two books. The first one was on English, a practical guide to designing concept-led curriculum. But a new one is all about why teachers stay and what we can learn. It's coming out soon.

Now, Sam and I have had lots of conversations about this topic before, and we are going to dig in to what it actually means to trust teachers as professionals, not the fluffy stuff today. Let's get into it. I wrote a piece about this recently for Tess, but I was quoting Gareth Conyard from the Teacher Development Trust, actually. I mean, an amazing keynote that he did where he asked that question, are we any further on to kind of honestly trusting the profession after all these years?

And it really made me think, I think one of the things we're tending to do is to confuse trust with accountability or to kind of get them caught up in each other. So what we don't mean by trusting teachers is they could just do whatever they want. It's not choose your own adventure. There are professional teacher standards in the UK and elsewhere that we need to respect and to follow.

And obviously, we're all paid public money, and this is all about children and improving their life chances. So it's not kind of anybody can just go off and do what they want. We have to have accountability. But I think my sort of sense of it in the last sort of 10 years or so in the UK, and I think there's elements of it being replicated elsewhere, but you'll be the expert on that, Shane, is we've moved into an era of toxic accountability and control in some spaces.

And I'd go so far as to say, really quite tight control, I think, in some. And I think that's a mix of a whole load of complicated factors, not least the way the school system has kind of evolved. Well, I don't know if everybody will say evolved, but has moved in the UK around the International Quality Academy Trust and that kind of question of how much we centralise things or don't centralise things. So I think to take it right back, what do we mean by trust?

It's starting from the assumption that teachers are professionals. I don't see any other profession where professionals who have worked as hard as teachers have to and got the range of qualifications that they have to get and go through all the training and the induction, which is even longer now and more rigorous, to then be scrutinised to such a level. And again, a lot of this is semantics. I've got no issue with scrutiny.

People that work in jobs that are paid for from the public purse should be scrutinised, but it's just what's that line where the scrutiny is not about improving and it's not about developing. It's just about finding fault. And I do think a lot of this comes down to the way that we measure things and what we value, what we measure. And when the way that we measure teachers and their performance and their outcomes is flawed, inevitably, that sort of filters backwards into the way that we think about, you know, how we work with colleagues and their improvement and their development.

So to me, to get back to the kind of the focus of the question, we have to start from a place of trust that teaches our professionals that they come into the profession because they want to do a good job. They want to do a good job for children. They want to do a good job for each other. And then I think we need to base our assumptions, our behaviours, our practices, our policies on that.

I think sometimes the tendency is to focus those things around the one percent. You know, there will always be in any sphere of work a tiny, tiny minority of people on which, you know, sometimes they're not always as deserving of that professional assumption. But we can't base everything around that. And I am a strong believer that you focus around the 99 percent and the other one percent will come along.

Trust me is the starting point for everything. Do you know what I really like about what you've just said is that knowing you and your role, I mean, you work in a role across a group of schools. So you're in that kind of system level position. And I don't know if you've noticed in some system level conversations, not necessarily in where you are, but I mean, you're involved in lots of system level groups and conversations outside of your trust as well.

Sometimes there can be and I think I may have fallen into this sometimes, you know, accidentally to you are outside of the school context. So you go into a school and you see things that don't quite line up to your vision of excellence or your version of what good should look like. And the very easy thing to jump to as a leader is they're not very good at what they do and you kind of go into this deficit mindset. And I've definitely caught myself in previous roles and at times going in and end up a leader telling me this is not very good.

And and I'm agreeing with it. And you end up almost forgetting what you talked about is that teachers are professionals and they've come with so much experience. You kind of discount that based on this one little thing you've just seen. I wonder if something like that plays into it.

Yeah, there's loads to unpack there, isn't there? Because I think the reverse can happen as well sometimes where leaders do the absolute opposite and, you know, paint a rosy picture or reverse. I mean, it's about the lens through which you're looking, isn't it? And we've talked about this a lot.

And what does it take to go into a school and to really see and to hear and to understand what's happening? How do you get to that point of really your thinking, your decision to be informed by that really deep understanding of context? I think it's really difficult to do that or virtually impossible to do that if you're working with a school, you know, for a really, really short space of time. So you're going in to deliver, you know, a one off keynote or a couple of sessions and then you sort of going away.

But it comes down to that. Yeah, the lens and I agree that it's really easy to fall into a deficit lens or to be quite biased or now reminded of new thinking and to have a set view of what you think excellence is. I mean, to go back to sort of what I was saying before, that's one of the things that's happened from my perspective, sort of in the last 10 years in the UK is that we have moved towards this really narrow view of what excellence looks like. Now, to caveat that, when I trained to teach, I think there was very little of a sort of a line view of what excellent practice was.

I certainly didn't get a sense of that in my training. There was a lot of sort of work out for yourself. But the pendulum to me has swung now so far the other way that everything is sort of codified to with an inch of its life. And sometimes that can lead to us having this quite narrow lens of what it is that we're looking for.

The danger then is what we see is surface level. So we go in and we're looking for compliance. We're looking for strategies. We're looking for teachers to kind of do rose and shine or if somebody's done retrieval practice in the first five minutes, tick.

So again, it comes back to that lens. What are we really looking for when we go in and look at teaching? You know, we look at practice. And so for me, like you said, in the sort of position that I'm in, where I have the privilege of going into classrooms all the time, working with teachers, but across a number of different schools, keeping that in check is really important.

All of our schools in our multi-cademy trust are in the same geographical area in Greater Manchester in the north of England. They're really different in context. One of our schools has got a high 70th percentage of children that come from some of the highest areas of deprivation in the north of England, nearly all white British. We've got in our trust two all-girls schools, you know, a whole variety of things going on in our schools.

So for me, even in the same day, to go into two of our schools and to go into two classrooms expecting to see the same thing and pushing to see the same thing would be absolute madness. So you're right. It's kind of keeping that in check. It's asking yourself, you know, as an observer, if that's what you're doing.

Yeah, keeping those biases in check, being aware of that tendency to fall into deficit model. But to go back to your first point about excellence, it's having that agreed and aligned understanding in your school or across a group of schools about what we mean when we talk about excellence. Excellence is one of our trust values, actually. So we've done a lot of work over the last couple of years, co-constructing the idea of what excellence is, which has resulted in what used to be called our teaching charters that's now called our framework of excellence.

And that is really helping us to define that lens, and that it's not just about me in my role, it's about everybody in our trust developing that shared understanding and having that, I struggle with the word consistency because what I don't mean is all the same. I don't mean consistency in terms of taking things off, but that kind of deep shared understanding of what excellent practice looks like in our schools. And then we use that as a basis for our professional growth model, but also to kind of sharpen that lens around when we're going to classrooms. What is it that we're actually hoping to see?

And then again, that makes it sound like it's a one-way process, which it should never be. It should always be co-constructed with the teacher. If you're going into somebody's lesson and they're giving you that privilege of observing and looking at the teaching and learning their classroom, it should never just be, I'm going in and making a judgment and I'm walking away. There needs to be a conversation where that's unpicked as well.

I think there's a really helpful framing when we're thinking about defining excellence. Actually, not starting from a point of this is what I think is good, but actually have we created a shared understanding? I prefer that to the word consistency too. That makes a lot of sense and it's something that takes time and I assume iterates.

But also even once you've got that shared understanding, what you said is then when you're then working with that teacher, you're still co-constructing. You're going from that shared understanding to a co-construction together of how it works for them in their practice. And that involves coming back to your original point, a lot of trust. Yeah, those two things are intrinsically linked and I think they are reciprocal.

So the more you co-construct, which is a respectful dialogue that's not hierarchical in that space, then you build trust over time and you build that sense of professionalism and then people will be open and people will be honest. And it's only when you move into that space people really develop, I think. Yes, I would totally agree. And something else we've also talked about before, Sam.

Well, it links to what we're saying in that how if you're going from a trust-based place with your staff, do you interact with the new evidence that's coming out or the good evidence about what does work in schools? How do you start to balance that expertise with internal capacity? And I know this is particularly important to you, especially you've talked about in that article you mentioned about dependency on external providers sometimes. Yeah. And again, I do worry

that we've sort of tipped into in the UK sort of evidence first, implementation second, and then we've moved towards a narrow view of what evidence is. I mean, again, to caveat that loads of amazing stuff has happened in the sector over the last few years in particular. Not least, you know, the impact of the Education Endowment Foundation here and the availability of evidence there's amazing people working in that space. It's more accessible than ever.

But for me, we're at a point now where we need to ask the question about what we mean when we talk about evidence. And, you know, we talk about this a lot in our trust. Peer-reviewed papers, evidence that comes with the EF, all of that is incredibly valuable, but equally valuable, and I possibly say more valuable, is the lived experience of teachers. And then the sort of the sweet spot for me is where those two things interact.

So I see the crux of my role why I'm in this job, is to make that evidence that's available digestible and easily accessible to really busy teachers who don't have time to look through it all, because they're busy in the classrooms getting on doing stuff for kids, putting it in front of them and then creating spaces for professional dialogue, for co-construction, for unpicking, for kind of creating that shared understanding and then going away and trying that stuff in their own classrooms. But then the feedback loop, what's working? What's working in our context? What's working for our children?

What have we learnt? And then we feed that back, and that's then the evidence. And then we go around and we do that again. What it isn't and shouldn't be is a drip feed sort of hypodermic needle effect.

Here's the evidence. I'm going to insert it into you and then you're just going to go and deliver it, then we're done. It's got to be this kind of ongoing professional conversation about the efficacy of the evidence. Because no matter how many peer-reviewed studies say x-adaptive teaching strategy works, the teacher tries that with their year nine nurture group on a Friday period three at one of our schools in Greater Manchester and the kids have just come in from a windy break time and there's kids in there with all sorts of different needs.

And it doesn't work. Then the interesting bit is we need to talk about well why and what could we do differently? And let's go back to the evidence and look again and what else could we try? That's where learning happens.

That's where co-construction happens and that's where when you bring in the teacher's lived experience into that discussion that's also where trust is built and where buy-in is built. This episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association. The ICA have been around for 30 years now championing quality, unlocking potential and improving learning in international schools. And what I really love is that right at their core is the model for improving learning.

This is a model focused on the learning experience and they have got tons of great curriculum materials, PD resources and even an accreditation pathway for schools just like yours. If you're interested head to internationalcurriculum.com. This episode is supported by the International Centre for Coaching in Education and I am actually on their current cohort.

I don't recommend anything I don't believe in and I am genuinely exciting to be strengthening my coaching practice this year. The ILM Level 7 Certificate in Executive Coaching is built specifically for senior leaders in international schools. It's fully online, really practical and honestly learning alongside other school leaders who get the context we work in as being brilliant. If coaching is something you want to develop properly not just dabbling head to theicce.org

or click the link in the show notes and listeners to this podcast get an exclusive 5% discount using the code SHANE5. That's SHANE5. It's reminding me of a time where I worked with a school and they implemented a new phonics programme and the new reading leader was reviewing their phonics programme. They had one, they were using this programme and the teachers absolutely loved it, this programme but they looked at another more rigorous programme.

It was a British programme read write you might know it. Everyone was on it at the time. There was a time where everyone was going for that and there was a lot of research behind it and a lot of studies that had been done on that particular programme. So they decided to bring that in as a more rigorous programme but whether it was more rigorous or not and I think when I looked at the programme it probably was.

They missed an important massive part which was the context of the school the approach of the teachers their feeling what else they were also implementing at the time but also just their feeling towards what they loved teaching at the minute and the joy that they got out of their current system and when they ended up changing and luckily they didn't do too much change before they realised that it just wasn't working for the team that they had in front of them and they ended up going back. It just to me just really highlighted that like you say evidence or the lived experience and it's trying to find that balance but ideally maybe it would start where you really have to know your lived experience the evidence comes in and you're going to kind of trickle and go in some kind of loop otherwise you're just going to get lethal mutations all over the place which we know happens as well right like otherwise you just implement retrieval practice or whatever it is spacing or whatever it is and teachers just do it without fully understanding or buying it and then you've got a terrible time. Yeah I think that's such a good example Shane and it really resonates with me and I think it speaks back to something we've talked about a lot on what you talk about in your brilliant book Change Starts Here as well about where we start with the product and I think you only have to look on any social media at the moment we are absolutely awash with products it's so noisy you know school leaders looking out and then going right okay Newtonproof teaching and learning where do I even start? Now that speaks to an incredible amount of fantastic work that's happened in the sector there's some brilliant stuff out there but how on earth do you filter through all that and go where do we start?

Now even where that product like Read Writing is a great example of that and other phonics programmes where it's heavily researched heavily evidenced it's a really good bet it still all comes down to the implementation doesn't it and the example you've just given where there's a lot there around buy-in was it the right time? What else needed to be taken away? Had the culture really been built in order to implement that effectively and then are people going into that with the right adaptive mindset so not just here's the product implement it and all will be well but have people really talked about before they start what happens if this doesn't work? What happens if it goes wrong?

What would be the early indicators of it working or not working and if it doesn't what do you do about it? So for me that's where dependency starts because you are everything of the success of a product and we can be really prone to then sunk cost bias so we've bought in Read Writing or x-product it's cost a lot of money it's taken up a lot of CPD time therefore it just has to work at all costs and then we could just blind ourselves to any signs that it isn't working because then to change course would have a huge cost not just financially but we see this don't we with teachers all the time? The kind of another thing we don't want to then let people down and say do you know what this doesn't work so for me starting with a product is just the wrong way in we need to start with the problem or the issue or the challenge and then leave space to ask how do we know this is the priority? How do we know this is a problem if you're walking across a group of schools like I'm lucky enough to do is it a common problem?

So is there a benefit to working on this collaboratively and together across schools or is it something that's so deeply contextual it's within a school? Then what have we tried at Ready that's worked that's often missed I think and how do we know it's not and has it worked for us and has it worked consistently and is there anything we can build from that or is it just not worked at all and we need to try and attack how long is it going to take how are we going to know when it's worked what are we going to know if it doesn't work all of that I guess in the EF sort of implementation cycle which schools heavily use over here or look to that explore phase is so often missing and we just go to let us implement it and then we're surprised a year down the line when it hasn't thought about the change that we're looking for and I really really understand as I know you can how that dependency has started to evolve because we're so time poor we want these things to work we need them to work we kind of hang everything off it because there's no time there's very little money at the moment while we do invest the money we want to see the fruits of our labors but it's going to be difficult to loosen that dependency I think because when you start to become dependent you take your eye off what's happening internally and the answer of course the antidote to dependency is building internal capacity and internal expertise and that's often less palatable even though it's free well it's not free in terms of time but we're not throwing money out at the school I think maybe we need to move to a transition point recognising that we've moved too far towards dependency building capacity internally and expertise is going to take time but we need to start to move in that direction and it's not going to happen overnight and I know the way that you work with schools Shane and lots of really good others do is you're conscious of that so the way that you go into schools is being conscious I don't want you to be dependent on me I'm here to help you build that internal capacity and I think that's one way in schools and trust we can be a bit more discerning about who we work with and who we bring into our schools is to have that discussion how are you going to support us in our school or group of schools to manage without you over time how is this going to help us to build our internal capacity and expertise? Yes I love that I think that's such a useful question like there is no doubt we need people outside of schools who have got expertise that you know we can't necessarily develop within schools within our time so drawing on that but I always say to leaders look work with an external you know no problem but they should be doing a number of things for you one they should be getting to know your school really well before they even touch it with CPD or with a product that comes onto your school because if they don't know your context really well it's going to be laden with assumptions so what are you doing at the start? I was with a school last week and we spent four days just observing talking together meeting with parents meeting with students just to get to know before I've even tried to train any teachers on some techniques or some strategies and the value of that is that we were able to identify loads of stuff that they were doing already and certainly areas where I didn't need to go but also areas where they taught me a few new things about their context and their experience which I think we can bring to life so I think that's really important and then co-construction just in the same way that you do and then not disappearing are you working with an agency a consultant a product that is invested in the long term and ensuring success their KPIs cannot just be I've delivered my program thank you very much it needs to be that we've created change together and that can be hard for a consultancy or an organisation to live to but I think it's vitally important I think that's such a great point I love that phrase about creating change together that really speaks to what I really believe and that reciprocal learning and then it's kind of what you do with that so again one of the huge privileges of my job is working across our group of schools that I very often will go into a school and work with a group of teachers and say oh that person would really connect with that person in the other school or actually the real opportunity there for these groups of staff to work with these other colleagues to develop this and to have that sort of overview because the other privilege of my role is going into other schools outside of our trust and working with people across the sector there's opportunities there often to bring things back in as well to sort of see ideas and honestly everything we've done in our trust around professional development over the last few years has been inspired by somebody else or another trust having done it first or a thought of the original idea and by people sharing generously that work that we can then bring back into our trust and ask what can we take from this and that's just a model for what I would want the sector to look like built upon that professional generosity and sharing and yes as you say bringing in external expertise there are definitely areas particularly at the moment I think for us around SEND and children with really complex needs that's a growing challenge in the UK a minute and I'm sure elsewhere we don't have expertise yet so we're relying reasonably heavily on external support with that at the moment but at the same time we're thinking about what are we learning from this hopefully they're learning as well from us we're developing that relationship and then we're looking to when we don't have this support anymore what we're going to be left with so what groups of staff and colleagues have really learned from this that can then become the people that facilitate that learning for others so as you say we've always got more to learn and when we go in and help others to learn we are also learning I think that's so important I love that so it's like a humble approach and a shared approach you're valuing the community that's in front of you I wonder maybe that's a nice place for us to finish this conversation if we kind of go inwards into a school so you said that some of the best CPD happens in the school in staff rooms departmental meetings and often school leaders when they think of professional development can just think of who do I need to bring in and maybe that's because that's been our experience of what PD is PD is workshops from outside PD is going to a conference PD is online training and you've got a slightly different view on that so I wonder like have you got any thoughts for leaders who are thinking you know of how to bolster their internal PD this year?

So to me everything comes down to culture and intentionally creating a culture where teachers can genuinely think, reflect, collaborate, learn and develop and it links to everything we were saying at the start of this conversation doesn't it around trust and building that culture where they're not expecting to be caught out and they're not on edge all the time because they think if they don't do that thing in the classroom next week that you didn't see PD last week somebody's going to tell them off so how do you intentionally create that culture? Partly for me it's about having the right systems and processes and ways of working so we have a newly developed professional growth cycle which we use across our school which is founded on a really simple assumption that everybody is doing a really good job a really hard job as well as they can and they just want to get better at it and we've created a process and some systems and some digital stuff to help them to do that and they focus on one thing for that year that they want to get better at and we try to make it really easy for them to access resources and to me yes that is a kind of system way of going at it but it's a culture building thing at the same time what's kind of made a difference for us I think when we started doing this I absolutely won't say this is perfect in our organisation because it's quite new work definitely some colleagues felt like they were concerned that we were asking them to spend loads of extra time you know sort of doing research and mindful that when you're trying to change a culture and move towards one that's more trusting and one that feels more developmental and one that's less noisy and we got rid of performance-related pay and traditional appraisal people aren't going to buy into that straight away it's going to take time to build that culture so one thing we've started to talk about is this idea of mindful practice so we've said to them you know learning is not an external consortium coming in sometimes it's that but it's not just that it's not just CPD it's not just going on a course it's not just doing something online learning might be having a chat with a colleague over the kettle when you've got 10 minutes of a break and you're making a coffee and you're just talking about the lesson that you taught today and how well it went and when you are focused on just one area that you want to develop that year and you have time and space to think about that deeply and you're going into conversations over the kettle through that lens of I'm really focusing this year on my adaptive practice you know me and Shane having a chat over the kettle about a year-long lesson we both just taught and it's really interesting what Shane's saying he's doing with his pupils it's making me think about my focus for this year and what can I reflect on that conversation we've just had that for me is mindful practice and again it's building that culture of thinking and reflection over time so to leaders there's an investment therein thinking about the structures and processes and systems that are going to facilitate that way of working that way of being but it's thinking first about culture with intentionality and what we mean we call our process professional learning and improvement what do we mean when we talk about learning how do teachers best learn and what do we mean by improvement and I think you've got to have those discussions and then how we're going to build the culture that's going to really move us towards that and then what systems processes products do we need in order to facilitate that and those conversations need to happen inside the school with leaders with teachers with colleagues later down the line we might say well we recognise in order to learn one of the things we need to learn about is send and we need some help with that but it's then how is that consultant or that product going to enhance the work we're already doing not they are the answer and they're going to do the work for us. That's really helpful like start inside and then leverage the system if you like leverage the system to your needs rather than going oh crikey we should be doing that thing and then going how do we fit that on top of everything we're currently doing? I really like Sam how you talk about starting PD it can be really helpful to think of this as a culture exercise that's a really nice way to think about it like not just like what PD initiatives can I do but how are we creating a culture of great quality conversations or mindful practice as you put it that can really drive our practice forward and you mentioned very quickly like and I had to write them down really quick because I thought is this the Sam Gibbs model for you said how do we get people to think reflect collaborate learn develop and they words that come to you a lot because I like that just even if as a leader we can think about how are we getting teachers to think how are we getting them to reflect collaborate how are we helping them learn and ultimately to develop their practice that's really useful questions to ask yourself I love that I love that you just put that into a model for me I think we've just co-created our own teacher development model I wondered I thought it must be the Sam Gibbs model because it just sounded so coherent to me I love it think reflect collaborate learn develop but that will resonate with you because I think you also think in terms of principles and values and ways of working not processes and sort of linear structures so to me yeah those things they definitely do reflect the way that I think about teacher development the way that we try to work in our trust but yeah maybe be interesting wouldn't it to have like you do in your book a set of questions under each of those things so if we say we create space for teachers to collaborate then how do we know we're doing that what does collaboration look like what do you mean by that how do we know it's happening do you have a shared understanding across the trust or the group of schools of what collaboration is and really check ourselves on that but yeah I think that could be a model let's do it this conversation made me think a lot the thing about the pendulum swing really really resonated with me Sam's right isn't she when she trained to teach there was almost no clear view of excellent practice and now we've swung so far the other way that everything's codified within an inch of its life and somewhere between those two extremes is where we need to be I really love what Sam said about trust being the starting point for everything not some woolly concept but a genuine assumption that teachers are professionals who want to do a good job when you start there your systems your processes they look different because you're not building things to catch people out you're building things to help people develop and that idea of mindful practice that's brilliant it's the conversation over at Kettle when you're making coffee it's reflecting on a lesson through the lens of what you're focusing on this year when you give people the time and space to think deeply about one area of practice those everyday moments become learning and I love this so three things you can maybe try first ask yourself honestly whether your systems assume the best or the worst of your staff second if you're going to bring in external support start with the culture work in your school first and then work out how that external support enhances what you're doing rather than the answer and third think about what mindful practice could look like in your context how do you create time and space for good thinking you can find Sam's work and it's a lot of brilliant work using the links in the show notes don't forget to check out her book when it's out Education Leaders is hosted by me Shane Leaning thanks to the show editor Pete McGill for production assistant Skyler O'Sturman and for the original music by Kiime Silva and thank you so much for tuning in today if we don't speak before as ever I'll see you here next week if you're interested in the work of the International Centre for Coaching in Education or the International Quiklam Association check out the links in the show notes