LIVE | January Reflections

Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, Chris. Sorry, that music was a bit loud, wasn't it? How are your eardrums? I'm all invigorated, but now that was a bit rock

and roll for me, but there we go. If you tuned it in live, welcome to, if you're on LinkedIn live, you might be on YouTube. You might be at educationleaders.live. Welcome to this live stream, which is our monthly

live stream, the companion to the Education Leaders podcast, where myself and my good friend and co-host, Chris Skora, go through some of the themes in the week. And most importantly, it's not about us, it's about you. This is your chance to tune in live. So maybe you're tuning in in the podcast in the bonus episode, if you are. Welcome. Lovely to have you here.

But come along. Last Thursday of every month, we get together online, main place is LinkedIn or YouTube, and you can have your say. We would love to have you here. If you're listening online, say hello in the chat, we will read out those messages. Chris, how are you doing, my friend?

Good. It's a little bit dank and dreary here in Newcastle, but yeah, very excited to be here. Great month of podcasts. Quite a lot in there that resonated with me personally as well.

Triggering. Yeah, yeah. So, all excited to be talking about some of that, really. Yeah. So we have had a little while since we last spoke actually, Chris, because we

last got together before Christmas, it was. So since then, we had Tam Potter, where she taught about school character and culture, which was a great episode. She took us into the new year. And then we have had the brilliant James Mannion on the podcast talking about making change stick and some of his work. We've had Jett Wolper come on to talk about the tab tacks

and why we keep cutting off the ends of ham, which I loved. Then to wrap it all off last, last week, I had a bit of a meltdown at the beginning of the week. And I thought it might be useful to share that with a few people as well. And I'm sure we'll touch on a few of those themes today. But for those, as a reminder, who's tuning in, I'm looking

at the screen now so I can see that we have already got people tuning in on a few platforms. It's amazing to have you here. Please, as we're talking, ask any questions. Maybe you've listened to one of the episodes. Maybe you haven't listened to an episode, but you're interested

in this theme. Bring your questions along. We'd love to have you join us. And do you know what, if you're feeling super brave, then you might even want to go to the website educationleaders.live,

because you can even request to call in to the show if you're feeling mega brave. And we maybe open ourselves up to spam there as well, but we'd love it if you joined. Okay, taking back to my childhood with like multi-coloured swap shop and things that. Wow. Did you ever call into a radio show when you were young? Did you ever manage to do it?

It was a dream, am I? I think it was probably just a dream. I don't think I actually got through, ever. Good. And no Blue Peter badge either?

No, I wasn't really the right calibre for Blue Peter badges as a child, because there were far more work for the applicants tonight. Okay, we won't go there. Chris, tell me, what's been, what's kind of come up for you when listening to the pod over the last month? Well, I'm going to go to that moment of vulnerability that you shared the podcast about self-doubt and how to cope with it and things like that. And I guess that this resonates with me quite a lot. There's all sorts of things

that I've done in life where I've sort of gone beyond my comfort zone and occasionally, or often questioned, you know, am I worthy of being here in all seriousness? Am I worthy of this kind of role or am I just faking it until I make it sort of idea? And it's really interesting because if you've got a professional curiosity, that's going to take you beyond your comfort zone as it should. And I think as educators, particularly curiosity is one of those fundamentals that we should be sort of modelling for our pupils and the people around us. But that curiosity

puts you in those uncomfortable positions. And when you've overstretched yourself or you're under pressure, you can feel that self-doubt. Now, I'll sort of listen to the things that you said. It's that old chestnut, I guess, that I think it was Charles Bukowski or Bertrand Russell. I'm

not sure who it's attributed to. The idea that, you know, the knowledgeable amongst us are cursed with a questioning mind and therefore we reflect and we worry and we're full of doubt. Some days, you know, maybe it would be more peaceful to be a little more ignorant in the literal sense of the word, to not be worrying about some of that stuff. But I suspect that as educators, we kind of need to care enough to worry about stuff. And if we don't, we become

cynical and detached and not really the right person to be in front of children. That's a limited comfort at two o'clock in the morning when you're sort of battling insomnia and watching the, you know, putting a TV on or reading a book just to kind of close your mind off. I'll tell you what, Chris, you're absolutely right. And you mentioned two o'clock in the morning.

It was incredible. For those who are listening and haven't listened into that episode, it was based off a little LinkedIn post that I did last week where I just had a really difficult morning for no reason, just woke up with that, you know, that debilitating imposter syndrome that many of us have felt and so put an episode out. But it's interesting. The amount of responses I've had has been quite overwhelming. Not just kind of public responses, which has been interesting,

but lots of private messages from people. A lot of the comments online of support, there was, I would say, mainly women who were making this kind of public statements of support and saying me too. It was fascinating to see the private messages that I were getting from men who hadn't said anything publicly, but said, I just wanted to say private Shane. I felt that too. And I haven't

had the confidence to share that because I worry in my position, especially leaders who are reaching out, that that would not come across well in that particular position. Isn't that sad? It is. And I think it's probably a symptom of a sort of wider, I don't know whether it's a cultural issue or whether it's specifically with an education, but we're increasingly intolerant of failure. And we rarely see it as a developmental opportunity. I think we're often focused on the

accountability side of things rather than the developmental side of things. You just need to look at the way offstead is set up. It's an inspection regime that gives you a judgment and your school lives or dies by that judgment, as it went quite often. As a leader, your job might even be on the line with that. And along with that job goes there, the security and well-being

of your family and all of that kind of stuff. It's really high state. And I sort of wonder if maybe that ultimate accountability could be sort of tied into something a little more developmental and for that developmental side of things to happen, we need to be kind of open, honest, and sharing. It's one of the big challenges that I found when I went in the school leadership was getting people to be honest with me. And then the second one was

me being honest with them. Honesty was a really tricky one because people were a little guarded about sharing that vulnerability. And I think hats off to you for going public with that and talking about it because it is something that most of us feel at some point or another. Yeah. It's so interesting, isn't it? That confidence thing that you bring up about

feeling an accountability on our roles and positioned. Do you know, I have this feeling that we're still far too obsessed with accountability of how people show up rather than the quality of their work. Like the idea that some people, and this could be from an extreme of saying, well, I think you can only work in an office from nine to five, like in an office with other people, and that's the only way you should work. Or, yeah, we can't really trust people to go home early if they've got a free period at the end of the day because, you know, actually they should be here. Or I feel that you should be in the meetings always kind of giving or maybe

there's, you know, you need to be very proactive in this area and actually not just measuring the quality of work. I've got a friend who comes to mind in this quiz quite a lot who is an incredible teacher, literally one of the best teachers I have ever observed in my life. He may be listening and he'll know who I'm talking about, that I'm talking about him, because I tell him all the time, absolute brilliant teacher. You'll tell him the words, won't you?

I will tell you. But he winds up, and he won't mind me saying this, he winds up leadership teams like there's no tomorrow. He has like specific tendencies. He struggles with certain areas that he hates being in staff meetings, like doesn't like to start the day with a staff meeting, for example. So there's many things that can trigger him, set him off.

He's a quirky kind of character. I love the quirky kind of characters and why we get on so well, Chris. But he's that kind of character, rubs people up the wrong way, incredible in the classroom, brilliant with students, doing all the right things. And I often feel like he keeps getting judged on this character trait that is maybe affecting the social interactions that he's having with his leaders. But actually, his zone of genius

in the classroom is just exceptional. And I just sometimes feel like, can we just get over the how you show up and actually just focus on whether we're doing the good work. It's interesting that you say that. There was a good friend of mine who sadly is no longer with us called Cameron Swan, and he'd be delighted to know that he's being mentioned on a podcast, by the way. He was an inspiring teacher, but he was a rogue. He was a rebel. And he

rarely followed sort of protocol. Kids listened to him when they went into his classroom. There was a spark of fire. Something magical happened. And I'm not entirely sure what it

was. I would struggle to replicate it myself. But he spent the last few years of his sort of teaching career being told by those that were observing him that he was a poor teacher and he wasn't at all. He was a different teacher. And then at the same time, I've gone into lessons

that were deemed to be top quality lessons. And what was happening with the teacher and what were happening with the pupils were totally different separate events. And I just think that we have eradicated some of that eccentricity out in the sort of drive for standardization and control. And I think that if you get hung up on the process, you miss the outcome. And I think

like any human dynamic, the process is so variable to get it right. Yeah. That's just being human, isn't it? Sorry, Chris. I'm getting hot here. I'm just going to

take my jacket off. Get hot under the collar. That's the right way to address these things. Interesting though, I did get to the end of your podcast and you were sort of referencing the various frameworks that existed and so forth to try and deal with this. And

a little shiver went down my spine, not for the right reasons. And I thought frameworks, this is all about feelings. This is all about sentiment. And I always worry that frameworks become this kind of administrative burden, as it were. And I'm going to give you sort

of a salutary tale from my own personal life. It's no secret that when my son was about four, five, we had some struggles with him and his behavior was challenging. We're well past that, fortunately. But one of the things that we learned to do when he was struggling in having a temper tantrum or a meltdown or whatever you want to call it, was not to try and reason with him and not to try and... It was just to give him a couple. And it was hard because you

were angry, you were frustrated, you were often in very high stress situations because it didn't always happen in the comfort of your own home. Airplanes were a particular one. No, I always feel for that family. Yeah, not everyone does. Not everyone does.

Yeah, I know. But just giving my son a cuddle, holding him tight, brought those feelings back down. And that was kind of one of the solutions that we came up with. And I do worry when we're dealing with feelings, whether just sort of tapping into that need to be heard with people and getting it out there, that catharsis. The fact that men, particularly men, message you privately,

tells you that there's a need for them to get that out, but they're not ready to get that out generally. Exactly. I agree. I think that's why at the end of the pod, and I love a framework.

And I do love a framework because they have served me well in, not that I think in frameworks, I definitely don't. But I feel like as I learn new things, a framework, for example, the first difficult conversation I had, I followed a framework and it helped me to reduce my cognitive load so I could listen into that conversation. So I find frameworks quite useful at just reducing my cognitive load. But I agree. Sometimes all we need in a moment when

we're struggling is not someone to tell us how to fix it. It's just someone to listen, isn't it? Just someone to be there and say, I hear you. Yeah, but you know what? As a leader, we're kind of conditioned to try and be

all knowledgeable. And the expert in the room, when we kind of expect ourselves to have the answers very often, it's a very brave and enlightened leader that just sort of parks that and says, yeah, I don't necessarily know what the answer is, but let's work through this and see where we can get to. Yeah. I agree. Do you know, I was coaching

someone only earlier this week and they were saying to me, Shane, I'm having a really difficult day today. They sent me a message, I'm having a really difficult day and I'm just trying to hide away. I'm just going to hide away in my office. And I feel bad about that. I was

like, well, I don't feel you should feel bad about that. And they're like, but what if I know some people want to meet with me today, so I don't know what to do. And we ended up just coming to the idea of, well, can you just be upfront with them? You know, it's that Bernie Brown talks about it in a relationship setting, but I think it's really good where she talks about you're always on a scale of a one to 10 somewhere, like in your energy levels. And sometimes you just have to say, just so you know, it's after four day to day,

I'm at a number four and that's where I am. And, you know, if I might be in a better place tomorrow for us to have this conversation or I'll listen to you now, but I just need you to know, this is the number that I'm starting with today. So I might not be at my best. Do you want to keep that conversation? Yeah. You know, I find fascinating about this.

It's the fact that if you as a teacher, you went into a classroom, you read your classroom as you're working through, and occasionally a pupil will be out of sorts. They'll be under the weather. They maybe didn't sleep. Something's happened at home or they're just not in the day that day. And you would work around that. You would accommodate that and you would manage that.

I think not because you want to just sort of be a bit slack around it, because you recognize that the outcome will be poor and possibly long lasting beyond the scope of that moment. See, you kind of sidestep it and play the long game. And I wonder why we tend not to do that in the sort of grown up part of schools where we're working with each other and recognize that human condition. Yeah. There's so many problems, isn't there? Like show up culture in schools,

showing up. And I think that pressure that we've talked about, because you should be in it for the right reason. So that means you feel a pressure to be at the top of your game. But I also think it's mixed with kind of this hustle culture that people are obsessed with at the minute of hustle, hustle. I'm a part of some business groups just because I've been an

entrepreneur for the last couple of years. And some of the rhetoric in those groups have just hustle harder, hustle harder. If you're not successful, it's because you're not hustling enough. Yeah. I worry about that because yeah, we wouldn't treat students in that way. We wouldn't

treat our children in that way. We hopefully don't treat our family and friends in that way. Why are we holding this weird accountability system in our work? Gosh, it's interesting.

I guess that ties us into the work with Tamara Yul Proctor. Dr. Tamara Yul Proctor. That's right.

That's like a human condition. Yeah. So we did, we had, this was back on December 23rd, this episode. So it was like just before, just before Christmas. And Tam, she's works at like UWC, United World College for

anyone who's into the international school world. They'll have probably heard of these schools, the wonderful mission-driven schools. But she's done some wonderful, interesting work in New Zealand before this. And we kind of unpicked some of that framework that she's developed. So you enjoyed listening in.

I did. And New Zealand itself is an interesting place. You can tell by the backdrop and the name that I've got links with New Zealand. And in some senses, New Zealand is a very conservative society. And you get that sort of that strand within

schools and things like that. But equally, it can be very forward thinking. And it's kind of small enough as a country to be a little bit daring do with some of the things that it does. And it appears that Tam, Tamara, is part of that avant-garde strand trying to take things forward, which I really like. That appeals to the sort of the radical thinker in me,

if you were. And yeah, she talked about that sort of range of, I suppose, all change feeling, loads of change feeling. And why was that the case? And I guess ultimately, that's what you delve into on a day-to-day basis, when you're coaching and working with leaders.

Yes. That's what I loved about this conversation, because Tam's been doing this work for a while. And I was lucky enough that she actually came into my office when she visited Shanghai last year. And we kind of first had this conversation. I was like,

this is really interesting. She's doing this interesting work about creating sustainable change. But at the very heart of her work, her doctoral work and things, was this idea that the character and culture has to come first. And she did a lot about kind of, in the early stages of change, about building relational trust before anything can happen.

And I also love that she's just a realist, in my opinion. I think so many of us are so fallible to the optimism bias of change. So many of us are just so optimistic that this is just going to work how it is. And Tam says, well, one of those things she said is, it's going to take six months at least. Everything's going to take at least six months.

That's just her minimum. Anything we do, at least six months. I love that. So realistic.

Absolutely. And again, it goes to that idea that you wouldn't try to take your class on a journey to where you are immediately. You sort of, you pace where you go with them. You kind of plan what you're going to do with them. You think about that voyage of discovery. You recognize

that you can't just tell them stuff and they learn it. Because if that was the case, all they'd need was a book or YouTube rather than a teacher. You take them on that journey. And I think that we often forget. When I was first appointed to a leadership job,

I was a little bit full of myself, possibly a smidgen copy because I was relatively young. This stuff made sense to me, so it should make sense to you. Well, I kind of didn't recognize the idea that I traveled that road already and others had yet to travel that road and see the sense and possibly take a slightly different route too. So as I sort of listened to this, you talked about change failing. I suspected a lot of

change never actually starts. Yeah. And I think that's a slightly different thing, but the outcome's broadly similar. Just that idea of it will pass. This will pass that

was mentioned quite a lot in there. That idea that it's just another gimmick coming and going and going. So yeah, there was a really interesting thing. She talked about the blockers in the podcast. And one of them was that idea of uncertainty and that fear of uncertainty.

I thought about this and there's probably a lot of people that listen to this because of the international nature of it, that have embraced that uncertainty through a curiosity. And I think uncertainty and curiosity are kind of almost two sides of the same coin. I wonder if we should embrace that uncertainty a little bit more than maybe we do. And Chris, it's every episode with you. So uncertainty, you would think the opposite of uncertainty is certainty. And I think maybe

that's what so many leaders try to get to a place, right? But actually, in the real world, I think it shows up as curiosity. You don't have to be certain. You're uncertain, and you can be curious at the other side because there's very little certainty.

Can I tell you where this came from? Go on then. Yes. It's this idea of being, because the podcast went on to talk about being the expert in the room.

It was about those sort of shared practices and the cross-curricular practice that was going on, which I came to quite like. And it was about that idea that there's a nervousness about not being the expert in the room. And I've done various workshops around the world. You've been around some, I think you've actually been in one of them, this idea that our schools fit for purpose. And I kind of wonder if this, the fact that it was teachers were wedded to this idea

that we've got to be the knowledge expert in the room is coming at it from the wrong direction, because knowledge is ubiquitous now. In the 19th century, there was a need for the teacher to know everything and impart that to children. That need has gone. We don't need that. We've got endless

avenues to acquire knowledge. And I wonder if maybe we could change our system in such a way that the teachers would take going on that journey, that curiosity journey with children, whether that might actually be a better model for children going into the future. We acknowledge that change is constant, new information is coming through all the time. And I just wonder if we need to focus on this idea of uncertainty and curiosity and build it into what we're doing in schools with our children. I definitely think that would help so many things such as the

craziness of our politics in the world and things like that, if they were approached with curiosity and we had more practice in that. I guess my worry with that is that, although I agree knowledge can come from so many places, one thing that I see great teachers do that I don't know, maybe it can be replaced, is their pedagogical content knowledge. So that science teacher who not just has a good knowledge of science that they can share with students, but they understand the kind of misconceptions the students are probably going to have. They understand where people trip up, like me as an English teacher, if I'm teaching metaphors, I know that one of the common things, maybe they could read about a metaphor and learn about it and look at a load, but I know one of those common misconceptions that I usually have to fix is the idea that students just think it's a fancy way of saying something and not actually looking at the actual layer of meaning that's in it. I worry that we go towards the space where teachers become

just facilitators and lose that pedagogical content knowledge where they can help to know where students are going to struggle and help them. I guess my perspective on that is that if you're on the journey with your students, then you're going to see those things happening as you go and be able to guide students with it. I guess part of that is borne out the fact that I taught economics for a large part of my teaching career, but my degree is actually law. So for the first few years of my teaching career, I was reading economics books at a frantic pace.

I was usually a chapter ahead, sometimes a little bit less, but it kind of kept me on my toes and it also kept me fresh. I could encounter some of the same challenges that the students did, that's true. No one's ever going to employ me again after this episode, are they? But I think that's true. I think there's something about content being new to you

that allows you to bring an extra energy and an extra curiosity. Like you said, that is quite infectious. I think curiosity is quite infectious, isn't it? I know when some of my most curious is when I'm speaking with my co-author, Ephraim, who I was on a call with earlier today, because he's just one of the most curious people I know, and he just brings out my curiosity. This is why it took us so long to write this bloody book,

because we just ended up down a million rabbit holes and learned a lot in that process. So yeah, I get it. Yeah, probably explains a little why you and I are friends too. Exactly. I would say so. I would say so. Yeah. I think Ephraim would be fair to say, I think

like me and you, Chris, work a little bit faster than Ephraim and I don't even know how we managed to get a book out of it because we're both the most wonderful procrastinators on the planet. Brilliant. So I can see just as a mention, I can see we have got a good number of people joining us on LinkedIn live. I see you there. Send us a comment. I would love to hear what

are your thoughts on what we're talking about. Do you have any questions, provocations that you might want to launch into the chat? I can also see that there are people joining us on YouTube and we've even got someone in Riverside joining us. So it's wonderful to have you all with us.

Do bring the comments in. Chris, I wonder, did you get to have a listen this week, last week, to the episode with Jett Wolper on the Teach Tab tech? I did. And this really struck a chord with me as someone that's worked in ed tech and I thought ultimately has left the sort of the sales side of stuff because there can be a tension between educational integrity, that commercial drive that inevitably exists in the background. They don't pay for your airline tickets just for fun. They're expecting

someone back for it, which is entirely reasonable, I guess. And I love this idea. I think the thing about it was Jett that talked about the ham, wasn't it? Yes.

Yes, go on. Tell us, repeat the ham story. I could hear this a million times just so if you haven't listened, it's great. I think it was Jett was watching his wife prepare a Christmas ham or something and she chopped the ends off to put it before she put it in the oven.

And he was like, why are you doing that? And she said, well, I don't know. I'll ring my mum because she taught me how to do Christmas ham. So ringing a mum and she was like, I'm not really sure. I'll ring grandma and find out. And it turns out that grandma's oven

was too small for the ham hot, so they had to chop the ends off. And that habit had echoed in eternity throughout the family. I think teachers are really, really, really guilty of this, the idea that we do things because we do things. I think part of that is that we're just so busy that we don't really get the time to think too much. Arguably,

I've got the opposite problem. I've got too much time to think and see those issues at play. But I think that if teachers had a little bit of space and time to just sort of lift their heads up out the water and breathe for a moment and see stuff, a lot of the things that we do in the schools might not actually make any sense at all. But we don't have time to question that.

The systems are very ingrained and so on. So I kind of like that idea. I think we get tied into stuff with our tech systems, particularly filling out trackers, doing X, Y, and Y. Yeah. Do you know, Jet said something to me that was so powerful. And for those of you who hasn't

listened, Jet is CEO, founder of an organization called CC, who a small organization in the kind of ed to ed, very difficult to get into that space, but they're doing things quite ethically. And the idea is that they're trying to just combine a lot of school systems into one, but they're starting from a principle of user experience rather than buyer experience. And this is the thing that really blew my mind in that because you will know, Chris, because you used to be in these tech companies that when you're in the companies, the person you have to sell to is not the teacher on the ground or the student who uses the product or the parent who uses it. It's the leader who's buying it. It's the person who is going to be

managing it. And then when Jet was like, we've got these systems that are designed for them in mind, like when they're like, oh, I want to be able to track this. I want to be able to track this. I want to be able to do this. And they go, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you get these big,

bloated school systems. I'm not going to name names, but people will know the big learner management systems that are just like, they've been designed Windows 95, and they're still like that today that are just bloated. And there's so many tools and so many tabs. No one uses even like 1% of the system. And it just exists there because it's been designed to sell

into a pain point of like a school at a leadership level, but they're not the ones using it on a day-to-day basis. And so it just wastes people's times on like a phenomenal scale. Yeah. Many years ago, I was sat in a cafe in New Zealand with a, I had a PDA, I had my phone, I had a digital camera, and I had my laptop in my bag.

A PDA? Yeah. PDA. Yeah. And you'll have to explain that for some of our audience, Chris.

An electronic diary. It's kind of like what you've got on your phone, but without the phone, I suppose. It's like one app from your phone, but in a device by itself. With a little stylus band, was it?

Yeah. And I was sat there and I said to my friend, I said, God, I wish someone would just invent something that did everything because it's such a pain carrying all of this rubbish around with me. I am convinced, I am convinced that Apple guy Steve Jobs was sat on the table next to me because like six, 12 months later, pitching, iPhone pops up on the market. And the iPhone's all about the user experience. It's all about making it intuitive and comfortable.

And that has a resonance with me with some of the economics that I've taught with behavioral economics, Richard Thaler, nodes, that kind of line of least resistance, if you like. And I think that if you do, if you take that out of a commercial context and you look at it in a sort of change context, then you got to facilitate that line of change and that line of behavior. You've got to make it easy and comfortable. And that's only going to happen if you listen to what people need and want and develop stuff around those needs.

And doing it for buyers doesn't necessarily work, but you're absolutely right. Commercial companies do this thing called qualifying the person that you're speaking to. They qualify the buyer. Do you have decision-making autonomy? And if they don't, the companies have very little

interest in speaking to you. They want to get to the budget holders position so that they can get signed off on that product. In fairness though, one of the companies that I did work for, they spend a lot of time and energy training and supporting schools directly, staff with their products. I have to come in on that though, because this is another thing Jet said that also blew my mic, Chris. He was like, we shouldn't have to train staff to use these systems. He was

like, when did you ever get training for Instagram or Facebook? Or when you buy a new iPhone, there's someone like, does your full training session? He's like, no, because we understand user experience so well now that we can design these things to be intuitive. And yet school systems, I know some systems where you need to literally have four hours of training. Every staff

has to go through four hours of training just to use the basics of the system and you think, and I just took that for granted. Like, oh, that's normal. It's a new system. So of course, it's going to take training rather than thinking, Crikey, actually, yeah, you're right. I have all

these apps and stuff and I'm not going through training for them. There's a really funny conversation I had with a statistician some years ago, did the stats for a well-known assessment. And the stats reports didn't really make a lot of sense to anyone unless you're a hardcore statistician and love your standard deviation and things like that, which for the most part, no one's really that bothered about. They just want to know what it means. It's suggested that we maybe could

redevelop these reports so that they made sense to everybody. The response, my God, was very black and white. Well, they should learn what the statistics mean if they want to know what the statistics mean. And I thought, well, there's merit in that, yeah.

But perhaps as a commercial organization, we could do things a little differently and help. It could absolutely zero ice at all. And those stats are still presented in a fairly harsh fashion. It's funny that. And then it makes it, then that data or that area becomes quite exclusive,

doesn't it? And then you've got like this exclusive club of people who understand it, like maybe just a couple of leaders, they go, yeah, but I get it. They feel good about themselves. Maybe they go to the conferences, like this in-group that develops. All the

Dempsey's joining us as well. Hey, Ola. Ola was one of my, Ola was on the podcast last year, one of my absolute favorites. She was one of the top five of us into podcasts last year, where she coached me on my interview skills. And she's an incredible interview coach, like amazing,

like you should check her out, Ola Dempsey. But Ola says, oh, I see this disconnect in school websites too. The mindset is for the teachers instead of the parents sometimes. I think you're right. I think you're right. Like there's a lot that, that kind of

not really putting themselves in the parent mindset. And often that happens in the way conversations happen in schools as well, doesn't it? Like you, people get moaning about, oh, the parents, this, the parents, that they're complaining again. And you think sometimes it's like, well, have you listened? Like have you truly listened?

One of the things that we did in Italy that worked really well, they reduced and stopped parental complaints, but it was, we had the day of book ended where there was like this sort of malaise space in the playground where the kids got dropped off and the parents were kind of free to mingle. It was a safe space. It was monitored and things like that. They'd come in the gate, but parents would often talk to staff and SLT about stuff. You would resolve

things very informally. You would address issues when they were first happened without the sort of formality of an appointment and things like that. And even if you weren't addressing issues, you would just talk to them, perhaps, you know, about the football, about whether they'd been on holiday or whatever, building up warmth and trust, so you could address some of those trickier issues when the need arose. I kind of really liked that sort of, that interaction of building that trust.

It also meant that you understood your parent cohort in a way that you never could by just meeting them in a formal setting. Yeah, there's so much to be said for those informal moments. And yeah, I guess some people struggle because you can't measure them in the same way or whatever, but they can be just so incredibly powerful. Emma also joins us. She says, they say if it's not

broke, don't fix it. What area of leadership would you not touch or seek to change because it works? That's very context specific, isn't it? I think as well, I think that sort of binary choice, broke, not broke, is perhaps not necessarily the way we should be approaching things. I think that

we can look at sort of developmental ideas. And I think that broken, not broken idea is kind of synonymous with the sort of high levels of accountability, but I think we might into development and growth, then actually it's a much healthier approach to things. Yeah, I think so. So I've always been like a developmental person and that's a lot what Ephraim and I talked about in our book, Change Starts Here, is just about kind of building on things, digging in what's already there, what does your community already know, kind of working within that context and kind of contextualized leadership. But I guess like Jet's episode

challenged me in a way because what if that's all you've ever done is kind of this developmental approach. But what that developmental approach has actually been, let's say it's a school system, is adding this on there, chunking this on there, putting this on there. And like, because you're not willing to pick everything up and kind of give it a good shake and maybe sometimes the right thing to do is to kind of put things to a side and say, or at least ask the question, if we were starting again, what would it look like? Like at least ask that question.

There's a really, there's a chap called James Miller from Royal Grammar School in Newcastle upon Tyne. I interviewed him on the Coru podcast about stuff that they'd done and about the data that they used. And he talked about Sat's tests. And when he was a point at his head, he just looked at what was impacting kids and what wasn't. And if it wasn't, they got rid of

it. They just got rid of it, stripped it out. And I think that actually that process of sort cleansing your data landscape allows you, you need to do that before you move on to kind of unifying your systems, building something that works because all the time, very often schools have that fragmented data or tech landscape because someone's come in head of year nine that's used one system and the head of year 11 has used another system. So you get those kind of broken systems running through the school or what have you. And it doesn't really fit, but

there's not enough goodwill to move on because they're all busy trying to deal with the processes that they've got in hand. And I think if you can strip stuff out and clear the woods, if you like, so you can see the landscape, you can start to build the landscape around what you actually, I think that's probably a fundamental, if you're going to look at building a sort of unified system or a user experience, the first thing to do is to look at what you don't need and get rid of it. It was a fairly gutty move by James Miller, I've got to say, because it's a very conservative school for the most part. Yeah, I love that though. And listeners, if you're listening in and you wanted to kind of

think about your data practice and overhaul them, you should definitely get in touch with Chris at Coro because there's no greater expert in this area than you, I would say, Chris, in kind of looking at that landscape and knowing what to do with it, that you would be my first choice. Chris hasn't paid me for that. You make a big blush. We've got Travis also joining us today.

He says, and I'm just going to read this out. I haven't read it yet, but I trust Travis. Another form of useful info gathering can be from staff parents, as they are different perspective as a parent and a staff member. I wonder if they're utilized for feedback as much as they should.

This is especially common in international schools where you've got parents who are also staff. I think a lot of leaders, I think including myself when I was in a school, can be quite scared of that actually, scared of staff parents, like maybe purposely avoiding them through fear of insider knowledge, if you like. I think as well, it's easy to discount what they say because they're staff and parents, so neither of those perspectives kind of work. They're not impartial, so you can kind of almost throw that perspective out, but arguably you'd take that impartiality and look at it as just an educated approach. Yeah. It's a good one, Travis. Travis, when you join us, make sure

next time come to educationleaders.live and phone in to the show so we can get you on here and hear your voice. I would love to unpick some of these ideas with you. They're fantastic.

Yeah, that's for sure. Chris, have you got any final reflections maybe for today or thoughts for people? Yeah. I think it's all about curiosity and the human condition. I've listened to those podcasts.

We're certainly in Newcastle. The weather's been miserable for a while. It's still dark quite early, and it's hard to keep your head up and be jolly with what's going on in the world. I think that probably one of the ways to do that is to dig into that curiosity, dig into that human condition and recognize those things in yourself kind of going forward. Certainly

something that I try to do. I'm not always successful at. I have the occasional 2 a.m.

moment, much to the fury of my wife. Yeah, so try to sort of keep focused on those things, I guess. We've got a lot going on at the moment, and it's a very busy time, so it's all quite exciting. Focus on what's happening with the kids in your classes and nothing more. I love the ideas. How can we, as we go into February, be a step more curious,

a plus one more curious about what we're doing? Does that help us with our challenges? Thanks for that, Chris. Thank you so much for all those who have tuned in. We've got a lot tuned in,

and I know some are just kind of listening through. If you're listening on LinkedIn live, if you're listening on YouTube or you're listening, education.leaderslive, thank you so much for joining. It's lovely to have you with us, but maybe you are joining on the podcast feed, on the Education Leaders podcast, and you're listening to this live stream.

It's also been great having you join us too, but we'd love to have you here live with us. So last Thursday of every month is when we get together, me and Chris and you, to talk about the podcast that I know you'll love to tune into. So come and join us. It's wonderful to have you here. It's a community experience, and come and let us know how your

curious February went. But for now, this has been Education Leaders Live. I have absolutely loved this, Chris. Thanks ever so much for sharing this hour with me.

My pleasure as always. Thanks, folks. Brilliant. See you in a month's time.

See you later.