Education Leaders LIVE | May Reflections

Well, hello everyone. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Education Leaders Live, our monthly companion to the Education Leaders Podcast with me, Shane Leaning, and my good friend, Chris Skora. Chris, how are you doing this week? All good.

It's been lovely weather here in Newcastle, not wordy often here in the same sentence. It's been a heat wave, right? Yeah, 30 plus degrees in my back garden. Yeah, so it's been great, loved it.

Nice one, nice one. So it's one of the only times of year where people from Newcastle are dressed appropriately then. Because I hear, you know, it's t-shirts even in the winter right there. Yeah, absolutely.

Crop tops, high heels, mini skirts, and that's just the blokes. Very good, very good. It's really good to see you, Chris, and it's really good to see people who are joining, maybe you are listening to this on the podcast we released. This is a bonus episode.

Welcome. It is so good to have you here. Or maybe you are tuning in live because we broadcast this live on the last Thursday of every month without fail. I can already see some people joining in on LinkedIn there and YouTube.

Welcome to the show. Please post your comments, your ideas, your thoughts, reflections, even just say hi and tell us where you're coming from in the chat. We'd like to make this show about you because this is the community companion to the Education Leaders podcast. So you might listen to the podcast, listen to all the great ideas from the great guests I have, for example.

But this is your chance to reflect with Chris and I on some of those themes to bring them to life, to agree, to disagree, to debate. That's what this space is for. And we usually get into some good, good meaty conversations. It's definitely my favorite time of the month.

So as we get into it, Chris, where do you want to start first? We've had, um, we've had quite a month with podcast episodes. Some, some really great episodes this month and shout out to you for getting Sam Crohn and Chris Passi in the, in the, in the same room. I've seen, I've seen both of them speak at various times.

I've read some of Sam's work. There's a, Chris had a book out this year and I hung it in my, it's in my to read pile, Chris, so if you're listening, I'm sorry, I haven't got to it yet, I'm sure I will. But that was, that was a, a far better episode. I loved the idea that, that when the episode around Nancy Weinstein, she was talking about that sort of how student brains have changed and what's important to them, and there was a lot of sort of cognitive data in there, which kind of tapped into some of my work history and insight, if you like.

And then I guess the whole thing from, from Claire, Claire Gary about sustainability. Probably one of the things that we get a little bit bored of talking about, but perhaps one of the, the really big issues that is important to youngsters particularly, you know, and maybe something we should be doing a little bit more about, so some pretty noble, big stuff this month. There really was. It's been for listeners tuning in.

And if you haven't listened to the episodes, let me give you a bit of a taster. So yes, Sam Crone, Chris Passi, really interesting episode called Heads Who Lead Beyond School, because these two guys are new to headship this year, and as Chris said, he already knew them because they've already got a pretty brilliant public profile. Chris, with a book out this year, succeeding as a deputy head and many others as well, coming as Sam Crone, the guy who understands the power of teams and has a book of the same, and they both decided for different reasons to kind of take that leap into headship of a school. And I just thought, wow, how fascinating, like, and what, what does it feel like to cross that bridge between education researcher or, um, education kind of, you know, media star in some ways and, you know, being in, in the seat, I thought that's really interesting.

The other episode this month was, um, a solo episode from me where I just reflected on why saying no feels so hard, something that I'm still trying to- I didn't review that one, Shane. I'm sorry. I know you didn't. I know you didn't.

Chris always misses my solo episode. That's good, but I'm proud of you, Chris, because I struggled to do that. And this episode was an exploration of why some of the science actually behind why saying no does feel hard and some of the cognitive ideas that stop us and some of the ways you can kind of get past that as well. Then we had brilliant Nancy Weinstein.

I knew you was going to like this one. Chris can't wait to chat about that because Nancy's done some brilliant research on student brains, student thinking, not only students, but teachers as well and what happened since the pandemic. And I know the pandemic was a while ago, but it's still relevant people. And this week was with Claire Gary, which was actually an episode recorded at the international curriculum at the international leaders conference, which took place recently.

And Claire came and joined me at that conference to have a discussion about sustainability in education, specifically, you know, what schools get right, what schools get wrong with, with her experience. So a lot we could chat about Chris. So I wonder where would you like to start today? And I'm keeping an eye on the chat at the left here as people bring in their comments, questions on LinkedIn and YouTube.

I think we start with the Chris Passley, Sam Chrome episode. And I think it's probably worth noting that I've, I'm connected with Sam on, on LinkedIn and watched his last year and some of his very honest and quite vulnerable appraisals of, of that first year of headship, I feel like. And, and kind of hats off to him for that, because that honesty and that, that willingness to be open about those challenges, you know, the pressure to have all of the answers when you're in that role must be huge. And that willingness to accept that, you know, not everything is going to go right and talking about things when they go wrong is really valuable, but I, you know, quite a difficult thing to do, I suspect.

So shout out to you there, Sam. And I think we've got the same front from Chris and similar sort of ideas that vulnerability, that openness and that recognition that despite being in that role, you're a human being with all the frailties that come with that. And yeah, so I think, I think that's the first shout out I would say. I like this episode.

It was, there were, there were kind of three themes that came out for me in this episode. And the first one was that idea that as we climb the ladder or particularly enter the space that you and I live in now, Shane, there's sort of slightly ethereal, theoretical kind of thought leadership space we like to call it. You know, some people might view it as a self congratulatory atmosphere, a little bit rarefry, all of that kind of stuff. And it does take us away from the daily grind of schools.

And I've said a few times that, you know, a lot of the thinking that I do is only available because I'm not having to face 20 kids, four times a day. And so getting in that grind, doing all the marking, dealing with the problems at playtime, et cetera, et cetera, all of that kind of stuff. And, you know, that was one of the things that came out in this, that that workload of day to day work does compromise your ability to really think about the bigger picture stuff and finding that space and bringing it to you together. And I think Chris Pasi talked about being six feet under most of the time.

Yeah. And yeah, that idea of, you know, with your priorities is huge. Yeah, I, I, I totally agree with you. That's what really resonated with me.

And it got me thinking, Chris, about, you know, I, I, it's huge admiration for what they've done. And I think we need people like Chris, like Sam, who can straddle both. But also the, that doesn't negate from the fact that for our sector to be thriving, we need people on all sides as well in different places. And just like you said, I think that's what came to me as well.

When you're in the seat and you know, feeling, you know, buried under the weight of that day to day work, it can be hard to step into that thought space for reflection time. So I, and, and for research and for, you know, for writing a creation. But so I think there's space for both, but like listening to people like Sam and Chris is very humbling. And for me, just brought me straight back to where we should be, which is really envisioning that school.

And I'm lucky. I get to, I mean, I get to go into schools a lot, but you know, sometimes there can be a few weeks where I've not even been in a school. And in that time you can slowly just disconnect in a slight way. You can sometimes slightly forget what those corridors are like or what having an office with an open door within a school actually feels like to do work.

Yeah. Yeah. I get a little too comfortable in your shed, that kind of idea. I've got this, I've got this slightly radical perspective on this though.

That's not like you. No, no, not like me at all. And it kind of comes from, I remember when I got my place on my master's course and a colleague said to me, Colin, who was, he was my boss at the time. He said, excellent.

You can go and do a load of research that no one ever reads. Yeah, great. I suspect that a lot of my research hasn't been read, to be honest with you on a really wide basis. But I kind of think the idealist in me thinks that the teachers and leaders, but also kids should have that reflective space built into what they're doing, because if you do that, you're able to improve.

And quite often the reason we don't improve or change or develop and grow is because we're just so busy trying to deal with the workload that's on our plates, that we don't really manage the bigger picture stuff in that strategic direction. And I suspect that there are people out there, maybe one or two sort of conspiracy theorists and so on, that think that the workload that teachers are under and leaders are under are perhaps a way of keeping descent to a minimum so that, you know, I'm not sure that's necessarily the case. I think it's probably just an unfortunate set of circumstances. Yeah.

But you need time and space as a teacher, as a student, as a leader to raise your head above the parapet, take a breath and see that bigger picture. And I wonder if maybe we're missing a bit of a trick with that in our industry. I would agree, but I would also add an and to that. And in that, think 100%, how are teachers supposed to engage in, you know, even just wider professional development or nevermind wider discussion and thought leadership in the space when you're on a, you know, at 80% timetable and the rest of the time, you know, is spent planning and you take your work home, all those standard things.

Then you've got leaders doing the same things, you know, you know, some teachers have this opinion that leaders get to just sit in their office and have an easier time. I disagree with that. Like there's a very different set of things that are coming to you all the time as a leader, but where I also would add an and is I don't even think it is I, I struggle with the kind of martyrdom narrative within education either, because I think there are many sectors, many industries where people are just overworked and their day drains them and they take work home. I know my wife's a journalist.

She has the same. I know doctors who do, you know, the same. I know nurses who do the same. Like I know, um, many, many sectors where people are just working to the, to the, um, you know, to the bone.

And I think education is the same, but what it does mean is that we're not getting time to think. I don't think that's the same. That's just education. I think it's a problem across general work and our approach to how much time work is taken, which makes me excited when I hear of countries really thinking about four day weeks, really thinking differently about flexible working on a, not just a sector scale, but actually looking across the workspace so that people can, yes, live their lives and feel like connected to their hobbies and stuff.

But also people might have space to think professionally within their within. Yeah, for sure. So when I was teaching, I found it really hard to read in term time, for example, cause I was reading so much for the marketing, et cetera, et cetera. And it was only in the holidays that I really got to delve into my reading list.

I found that a little bit easier being self-employed. I booked a little bit of time out for my reading and things like that. But I can see what you say exactly about other industries and arguably that might go to the level of private equity ownership with various industries and businesses today. You know, like you, my wife holds down a job and there are elements of what you've just said ring true with that.

And, you know, I've been in the commercial world too. So I probably seen it firsthand. And maybe dare I say, even being party to that very thing, you know, where I've maybe pushed others to drive towards those kinds of things. And maybe I've been part of the, part of the network, pushing that agenda rather than necessarily fighting it.

So I think there's merit in that. I think ultimately we all do need a little bit of time. I'd argue that maybe education is, is one, one of the most important industries for want of a better phrase in the world. And I think that on that basis, if we're able to shape things there, perhaps that would shape the world in due course, because people would come out with that right attitude, valuing that reflection period, and they build that into the workplaces of the future.

It does make sense when you put it that way, really, like if we can get it right in education, would that naturally start to reflect how in societies in the way operates because everyone's connected to it in some way? Especially, I think, especially if schools, I was speaking with the brilliant Tamara's April Rolfe recently, who does a lot of systemic work, systemic team coaching within education. We were talking about community. We want to set, we're setting up a community project about community leaders and about bringing schools back as hubs of the community as well.

So that you can get things right in the school and work it outwards. Something that has been, but I think in many ways has been lost in many parts of the world, the idea of the school as the community center, if you like. Yeah, it was an interesting, so it went on in this podcast. And it moved away from that.

These, both Sam and Chris have clearly had time to think they've had time to write books and their thoughts have been coalesced in various places and their ideas are fantastic. And I think that the next phase of what I picked up on this podcast episode was how they, how they brought those ideas to bear and tried them out in the school environment. And I think that schools quite often are very risk averse environments and parents particularly don't want the kid to be part of an experiment. And, and arguably that's, that's fair enough.

But I love the fact that they've taken these things through and tried new things. And I wonder again, if that's kind of part of that, that conservatism with a little C is maybe part of the reason that schools are slow to grow, develop and change into places that work for the youngsters that we're caring for. Yeah. I liked the reference to XP and I've not looked at the XP trust before, but after listening to that episode, I had to dig into the XP curriculum and I loved it.

I thought it was, it was very avant-garde and very daring do. And quite how they've managed to sneak that past parents. I've got no idea, but they've done a great job and are obviously delivering very well on it. Yeah.

Fabulous sort of curriculum. Yeah. A brilliant, a brilliant episode. If you, if you get the chance, go back and listen.

Heads who lead beyond school. It was right at the back at the start of the month, Chris Passy, Sam Chrome, and also follow them online. They're on LinkedIn and all the different places and they post really good, honest stuff. So if you're a leader feeling a bit lonely at the minute, you couldn't get better than them too.

Yeah. One of the things I'd really like to hear from them is a little bit more about maybe, maybe they've encountered some really contentious resistance or struggles or, or battles that they've lost, if you like, just here, maybe, maybe a little bit around that. That's a tricky one to articulate. If you're in a position like a hardship, I get that.

So I don't know, maybe they need an anonymous avatar or something. That is actually, I'd love to talk about that, Chris, because that is something that I'm really curious about because a lot of times people say, you know, why aren't, you know, at conferences, there should be more teachers on panels or more working leaders on panels or they're doing this or on social media. We should be hearing more about the experience, less of the people outside of the school more in. But there is a legitimate barrier for them because many times they feel beholden to the school and to the brand of the school.

It's, you can't quite share openly about your day, your day to day in the same way you or I could about what we see. So I wonder, you know, this, I wonder if that plays to the, you know, the fact that there aren't so many voices sharing openly about what happens. I think you're absolutely right. And I remember when I first took a role of deputy head, suddenly people stopped being honest with me.

It was an internal promotion and suddenly people kind of stopped talking to me quite as openly as maybe they had done previously. And it was a bit weird and it was like, what's going on here? And suddenly the stakes and the power dynamic changed. And I think that it's absolutely fair to be a little bit guarded.

But I also think that it's quite tragic because I think if we can have those honest discussions in some kind of safe space somehow, then it really does work well and it helps us grow and develop. I think probably Chris and Sam have pushed it as far as the day with their honesty and whatnot, and they're a long way ahead of the others, other people that post about their sort of experience in head chip and things. It probably helps them both that they were already kind of public figures in the education space before they were, you know, taken on for this job because I imagine the schools obviously know that they talk about things, so maybe by nature that their organizations are more open to that. Whereas I imagine some, well, I've heard, I've heard people tell me that they've been banned from talking about their job on social media, and I've heard it as explicit as that.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess because they have such a public profile, the organizations that hired them knew what they were getting. Yeah.

And yes. Well, but equally with teachers within schools running CPD trying to get that kind of safe space where people feel comfortable being open and honest, it can be quite tricky too. So it's not just that leadership situation where that exists. I think that more honesty and openness is helpful to help us grow.

But there we go. I'm sat in the shed. I'm comfortable. There's no high stakes for me in talking.

Which is why we get such good conversation, Chris. I'm grateful. Is there, is there anything else? Yeah.

That's why I'm sat in a one meter by one meter square booth. The glam, the glam of it. Is there anything else on, on, on their episode that you wanted to touch on or do you want to move on to another part of the month? Very quickly.

I liked, I liked what they talked about in terms of curiosity and I think curiosity is often something that's lost in, in, in the modern school. I think we're so busy dealing with curriculum, workload, marking, getting this done, getting that done exams. We lose that, that curiosity. And I think that we probably need to bring that back in.

And it was really interesting. I think that Sam be very eloquent around that coaching journey where, you know, he felt that he had advice to give, but he needed to hold back and just understand more. And I think that the more we can do that, the better. I think curiosity is an underused tool in, in, in schools today because we're so busy and it links into that workload issue, I suppose.

To quote, Sam Chrome, he said assumptions of the death of good advice. Yeah. Yeah. Very good.

Yeah. Profound indeed. So yeah. Love that episode.

Great stuff. Thank you, Sam and Chris. Yes. It was awesome.

So the next one was Nancy Weinstein. Now Nancy, mindprint, isn't it? Yes. So I was curious because for listeners, she has, she's co-founder of Mindprint.

She's now also Chief Innovation Officer at Otis and I, you know, and she's been tracking a lot of student data. And, and so I couldn't wait for this conversation because Chris used to work in this exact space or a similar space adjacent and slightly different. Yeah. Well, for, for, for those of you that, that, that maybe are unfamiliar with Mindprint cause it's quite US centric.

Yes. It probably has some parallels with cat four, which you might be familiar with from, from GL that I worked with that sort of cognitive ability profiling, if you like, it looked marginally more extensive and was delving into some, some pretty sort of deep stuff. And there was something, there was something really profound that underpinned all of the, that I've talked about a little bit on the circuit, but it was that idea that kids are so very, very different. Each individual has a whole set of issues, needs, and, you know, some teachers might refer to it as the hook.

Each kid has their own hook and you need to find that. And I've often talked about this idea that we should probably do away with the whole concept of SEND diagnosis, categorizing things, et cetera, et cetera, and we should just understand each individual in our care and kind of work with them. And, and Mindprint was, was really focused on that, understanding that. And, and it was, it was contextualized with those changes that had gone on post pandemic and how students had developed since then and how that was quite different, but arguably as teachers, we make me can't solve that, but we just need to work with it and we need to work with those kids.

And that was a big part of what I did with, you know, with GL and Cambridge, working with schools on that kind of data where you understand the individual child in your care. Yeah, I really liked it and I liked, so for those who haven't listened, basically what Nancy found, you know, big study where she tracked out over 35,000 students from 2015 and beyond the pandemic and just noticed a couple of things about students. One was that the verbal memory was about half of what they would have had five years before the pandemic, but also flexible thinking had dropped massively, and you know, that meant, you know, how students could respond to feedback and, and things is really challenging. But so, but what was so interesting is how Nancy didn't just say, Hey, interesting data.

Gosh, we've got it tough. But actually she said, we do know kind of what to do. There are best practices to really help with these things and we just need to lean into those. We don't have to kind of create any, this pandemic might have thrown us these new different challenges, but we've already got the tools to be able to solve them as she kind of leaned into some of the science and learning research and stuff, which I found very motivating and a proactive way to work with data.

Yeah, I thought that too. And I, I was interested in this because once you understand what's going on with each individual child, you can start to address that and you can start to work with it. I think the reality is if, if you're going to use that kind of data effectively, you need time and space to understand how it works, what it means, et cetera, et cetera. And you also need time to contextualize it within the setting that you're in all really, really important stuff.

But there were, there were a couple of interesting things and parallels perhaps that came out for me. The first one, climate change. We've talked about climate change for a long period of time, you know, and there was someone, someone interviewed about it and I forget their name now, but they said, you know, in the seventies, we thought the signs to fix climate change was the problem. In the 2000s, we now know that it's the desire to make the change, the problem.

We understand how to fix it, but we just choose not to. And it's that kind of, yeah. And, you know, that's, that's a huge parallel here that if we've got time and space to, to work with those individuals and we've got time to understand that the data, the cognitive material behind it, then we're, we're in a great place to do that. But I'll give you an example of where this we're being held back.

Okay. We use a model of literacy in, in most modern schools, we use this simple model of literacy to support our literacy programs. And it's, it dates back to the kind of mid to late eighties, early nineties, this concept of decoding and comprehension. Okay.

And we use that and actually literacy and dyslexia are way more complex than that. There's whole sets of levels, working memory and so on and so forth. And then you start to dig, you know, dysgraphia, that kind of thing, all sorts of different things. But we sit on this very simple model because that's what we've been using for a while and we don't have time to really think about the bigger picture and make those changes.

And I interviewed a chap last year who was one of my professors at Durham. Julian Elliott is his published name and he did this thing called the great dyslexia myth in his here day. And it was all, it was quite controversial. It was all about how we didn't understand dyslexia and literacy.

And when I interviewed him last year, he said, you know, I've kind of just, just given up the fight. We've got a working model and we've kind of got to run with it. And that's what people are doing. So we've got to make the best of it.

And I was really disappointed when I heard that from someone that had been a bit of a firebrand and I suspect that, you know, the things that, that Nancy was talking about here was this idea that, yeah, we've got the tools, but we haven't got the time to use them. And that made me really sad. So it's interesting because I think sometimes the work we want to do, you know, even just talking about earlier, like teachers engaging with PD or whatever, and we want to do it and we know we should do it. And we know, for example, on that example, having a great teacher in front of the class is the biggest lever we have for change.

So, so investing in their PD seems to be like a no brainer and yet we can't adjust the system to make the time. To really make it happen. So the system, like there's, there's just, you could probably create a whole book of examples, just like what you mentioned of things that we know about that, but that we can't adapt our system, our system is, is confined. And I don't think that's, and that's not to say that it's like, we're all trying to hold back and we're just protecting the system.

I think the system is there for good reasons. And there'll be many reasons why many of the things happen. And, you know, there'll be many structural reasons or you change one thing and it has an effect in a different area. So making big sweeping changes is not, you know, I think you're, I'm a little bit less revolutionary than you, perhaps Chris, but yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm always a bit nervous of the whole, let's just rip up the system and start again.

I should, I should have worn me sort of Che Guevara t-shirt or something for today. You are. Yeah. But if you think about schools, they're set up for administrative ease.

They're set up for administrative comfort. They're not really set up for pedagogy and that's been known for, for some time. You, you know, you go back to the work of people like Ken Robinson, for example, that kind of crushing creativity out for the need of administration. And, and, and, and arguably there, there is, there is a lot of room for us to, to totally redevelop what our schools and lessons and periods look like.

You know, that whole thing of moving, moving sort of 600 kids around the school at the lesson transition, rather than moving sort of maybe 60 or 70 teachers around the school at transition time, that's because it's administratively comfortable for the teachers and for the school rather than necessarily the best thing for the kids. Dare I say it. I've, I've done what people are saying about me now, Adam. And you've just brought me and me and my wife constantly have arguments about Ken Robinson.

I love his public speaking. I struggle with the implementation of his ideas. Yeah, I think that's probably fair, but that's that practical side of it, isn't it? Yes.

And, and arguably that's because systemically we've got a system that can't accommodate that. Yeah. It is interesting to look at, to look at alternatives and how they're playing out though, because like the one that we talked about a while ago, when we had Malati on the podcast, we talked about the green school Barley, your dream, your dream school. But even, you know, dare I say it, I'm going to get done for this, someone from a green school is listening, but I'll say it anyway.

I walked into their open classrooms and saw all these incredible things. But guess what I still saw in the classrooms? I still saw a whiteboard and what was magnetized, put to the whiteboard. Twinkle worksheets.

Twinkle worksheets still had a place in like in green school Barley. And I just, I just, I remember seeing that and thought, hmm, it's interesting how even in the most kind of free places for like, you know, you can develop a curriculum, like there's still, there are still kind of ways of being that we fall back to and ways of structuring that, you know, it can be difficult to really truly kind of pull yourself totally out and design from that point. Yeah. But maybe a little more time and a little more space and a little more sort of leaning into the research and, and, and the thinking would help with that.

Totally. And that's, that's kind of what Nancy we've got went off point a bit, but that's yeah, that is what Nancy was advocating for. And she had some, you know, science and learning principles about, you know, we know how to do some kind of retrieval practice or spacing and interleaving and to, to, to help students retain. But it was interesting how she was also talking about this flexible thinking and that people are struggling, like, you know, even, you know, students struggled kind of with changes and, and, and how do you react to that?

And that she also, it was compounded because she found in the same dataset teachers were also struggling to think flexibly, like, so, you know, we've got this great challenge and teachers are wanting more certainty and less, you know, and so we're in a real, that was a real predicament. That really kind of blew my mind. It made me think because she did a bit on, on verbal memory, that idea of remembering what is being taught from, from day to day. Um, and I've done a few, a few pieces and a few events where I've talked about the fact that perhaps we don't really need subject experts anymore because knowledge is ubiquitous.

It's available everywhere. You know, historically teachers were the, the sort of the font of knowledge within the classroom and books were where it was, it was housed, if you like. But it was interesting that she, she discussed that concept of verbal memory and the, that inability to hold onto material lost momentum in the sort of learning journey. And, uh, it made me just reflect a little bit on, on how radical some of the stuff I'd said had been and, and whether maybe I sort of needed to revisit that and just talked a little bit around retrieval practice.

I don't know. Have you, have you, have you read anything by Kate Jones on retrieval practice? No, but I follow, I follow her a lot. I love the stuff she puts out online.

Yeah, that's a good starting point. It's sort of, I, I read a little bit around that last year, I met her last year. And she signed a book for me. Amazing.

So I've got to sign the copy of retrieval practice research and resources for every classroom. Yeah, I'd recommend it. Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think that they're really good, good places to start.

And, and again, I think she has done similar to an episode that I've got coming out very soon with Zouetta Hammond, who talks about, like Nancy was talking about this kind of utilizing some science of learning to help students with these challenges post pandemic. And Zouetta Hammond, look out for that episode, she talks about as an equity driver as well, and does some, there's going to be a brilliant, a brilliant chat coming up. On a personal level, the, the sort of main print tests and stuff like that, they were, you know, the cognitive profiling. I actually do have to do a batch of the GL ones when I was, when I started work there, you sort of do them and you get an insight into your own sort of, well, yeah, cognitive ability.

It was a little bit disturbing, I'll be honest, but recommend that all teachers actually start the tests and see how it went. The big thing that thrived up for me was that my spatial scores, my understanding of 3D shapes and things like that was dreadful, which in itself, isn't that remarkable, except for the fact that in a past life, I used to pack parachutes for a... Well, that's what I was just about to say. Yeah.

Yeah. You didn't share that at the time. Well, I didn't know that at the time. There is an audit trail on parachute packing.

Okay. So I suspect everything was fine. And everyone was okay. I think so.

Didn't track that data. All we need to say, listeners, is that Chris doesn't do that anymore. You read into that one. Yeah, that part of my career is over and done with.

I had a question for you about this episode as well, innit? You mentioned about, I think it was, are you a Tragenic Effect? Yes. How many little, this was like, hang on a second, what's that?

And tell me a little bit about that, cause I want to dig into that a bit more. So I came across this term when I did a course a few years ago with some brilliant people at a charity called the Common Cause Foundation, and the Common Cause Foundation are a charity in the UK who are all about values, human values and the power of values. And so I did a course in values, literally just that it was wonderful, like really, really wonderful. And we looked at the values mapping and did some really deep exploratory work of how values show up in society, how they change decision-making globally, politically, business levels, community.

It was really, really interesting and about how you can make small shifts in those values as well. And one, this term came up as we were talking through it. And I just loved it straight away. It was the idea of iatrogenic effects.

And in iatrogenic effect, it comes from the medical world, which means simply you implement something or you release a new drug or a new therapy or something. And it has a side effect, right? It's a side effect to something like the little side effects you have on the side of packets of paracetamol or whatever. And sometimes it can just be an unintended side effect.

So you get better at one thing and something else gets worse slightly, you know, or something else changes. And the idea is that pretty much everything you do has an iatrogenic effect. Pretty much everything you do influences something else. So, you know, you can make a change in your school, for example, and you might think it's the most simple of changes that's only guaranteed to improve things because it's got good data around it.

For example, you might add in doing retrieval practice at the start of lessons, whatever, to improve memory. You want to do that. And then, and I, the problem is, is that it will have iatrogenic effects because something will be lost. Something was in its place before.

What was that? And often we run so fast into making changes that we don't stop to think every change we make is going to have other effects that we might not think about. I like often think about, you know, when I, the classic one in that, when I went, I had something called DMJ, which is like almost like an arthritis in your jaw kind of thing. And so I went to the doctors and the way they wanted to fix it was chiropractor because it's all linked, right?

So like, and they, so they did all the kind of cracking and all that kind of stuff to try and align. Essentially both my jaws weren't aligned. I came away from these chiropractor sessions feeling great. Like I was like, Oh my God, that feels really good.

I can, I can move my jaw well, but I had a really sore back afterwards. I was walking out almost hobbled and it's just was interesting. Like, you know, solving one thing created a slightly different challenge somewhere else. Yeah.

So I don't know if that makes sense to you, Chris, or you know, it's interesting you brought that up. It's one of my favorite terms. Well, funnily enough, she talked about sort of how mental health had been a priority sort of through the pandemic and how we'd maybe step back from, from critical thinking and, and, and maybe sort of pushing kids a little bit. You know, we'd found it a little bit easier to be nice at the children and prioritize their wellbeing over and above their academic progress.

And I thought this was a, this was an interesting one because there is a very, very difficult balance to strike in that. Yeah. And. Nearly impossible.

Any teacher that has got that right a hundred percent of the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's that classic, it's the classic, you know, behavior debate that just rages online, you know, when you have a student in a class who is really disrupting the learning of everyone else. And then how much attention do you pay to that student? You know, you've always got isogenic effects. And that's the complexity of education.

Like you can't get away with it in the behavior one. Yeah. You could, some people would say remove the student. Well, that helps the rest of them.

But the isogenic effect is maybe that student is disproportionately affected. And maybe there's other social things that happen. And maybe isogenic effects catch you up in the future because of integration. Or maybe you keep that student in and then the isogenic effect is maybe the ones around them get disrupted.

You know, or maybe you get an assistant next to them. Well, that's maybe going to help in one sense. And then it's going to have an isogenic effect of, you know, scaffolding and, you know, and, and, or maybe bullying. I mean, there's just so many complexities and I understand why people then get passionate and say, well, we have to choose and we have to do something, but I, I also, this is why I feel so passionately that schools on a local basis, you know, as long as we feel like we're getting the training system right.

And, you know, we've got some decent amount of quality assurance. Schools should be able to run themselves and make decisions for themselves. And teachers should be able to make decisions for themselves because they're the only ones with the context in the class and you can't mandate a certain approach. It never works for everyone.

No, but there, there is a relatively straightforward answer that will help with, with all of those things. You know, why do parents send their kids to private school? And broadly speaking, what you'll hear is that it's class sizes. That ultimately the class size is what they're paying for.

And you look at the amount of money that they pay to go to private school. It's markedly higher than the funding in the state sector. And there's, there's a resource choice to be made somewhere. And I think that if you can bring those class sizes down through resourcing and give the teachers the time and space to manage those things, then they'll be able to find ways that are, that are local, that are, that are appropriate to the children if they've got that time.

But I suspect that politically, I'm never going to secure the amount of funding for state schools that would be needed for something like that. And I recognize that, you know, pragmatic, there's a compromise to be made, but it's a, it's a resource choice that you could man off a lot of those things by creating the space, time, and applying the resource to those particular problems within schools. But yeah, that was a fascinating episode. I don't know if we've got, have we got time to go on to class episode?

Well, let's touch on the brilliant Claire Gary's episode. We, we, we must, because it's such a big topic and it's a, an important topic. And, you know, it's just come out this week. So go list to Claire.

She's based in Barcelona in Spain, actually. And she does some brilliant work from there, travels around the world, doing some great work on sustainability in school, and you know, what, what, how schools can move forward, especially like on student leadership side and things like that, which I think was quite interesting, right? Yeah, I think the, the interesting bit for me at the beginning was that I think it was three quarters of youngsters were worried and 22% were very worried about the, the impact that climate change is having on the world and, and where it's actually going. And I thought for, for that amount of youngsters to be fundamentally worried about something is one thing in one school is very good because it shows an engagement with it.

But in another, you know, your youth should be largely carefree. Those kinds of things should be taken care of and be a little bit of a get, your future should be a given really, shouldn't it? And that idea that they're worried about this sort of stuff and perhaps their hope is being eroded or tarnished, you know, their hopes for the future or being worn away before they've even become adults, that troubled me a little bit because that concept of hope is a fundamental to the human spirit. And I thought it was, you know, this was a huge episode in terms of the topic that it dealt with.

And I thought that maybe 30 minutes was, was, was woefully inadequate without making any sort of criticism anywhere. And I love the things that Claire talked about. The key thing for me was that student leadership, that bringing it from the bottom up, you know, we've talked about leadership with loads about things like that and how it's got to come from the bottom up for it to work. But that takes open mindedness at the top.

And facility and resource and things like that. It was, it was fascinating to hear that. I like the simplicity of what Claire had to say. Yeah, me too.

I really liked that. And I liked those two things that you just said there almost was connected, like the students are craving change and craving impact in a way that we haven't quite seen before. And it's probably linked to that state of the reality that they're worried that they're not going into a world that's better than their parents, which we just didn't have that anxiety. We just assumed it would be like, you know, there's an argument to whether it isn't and what's happening, but we assumed it would be, well, they started to see what people have been through and go and hang on a sec, you know, are things actually getting better?

And I want to actually make things better quicker. Like I can't afford to just wait around to kind of climb the career ladder. And so that they're wanting to have impact straight away. I think that's admirable and, you know, also worrying, like you said, but it also means as teachers and as leaders who have potentially come from different generations, we might have to kind of, you know, try to step into their shoes to see what, you know, what they're really thinking.

And then it might need to make us adapt. Even what we think worked for us at school might not work for them. And that we have to do some different, sorry. She talked about yoga.

How many yoga pots did she mention? Thousands. Thousands and it was just like, yeah, we just changed to putting it in a normal bowl, a really simple change and boom, all of that waste was, was eradicated. Um, and I think that actually was a student's idea.

Um, if I remember that rightly, so it's, it's, you know, how obvious, how simple there'll have been some kind of administrative decision that's been made to put them in single pots because then whatever, but you know, why, why not? And I love the fact that it was just demonstrable impact straight away. Kids saw it, parents saw it, schools saw it, and it just kind of made sense. I think very often we get so locked into the systems that we're in.

Yes. We don't look outside where we're at, maybe as much as we should. And I love, I love that simplicity. Yeah.

The simplicity, but also like the opportunity, right? Of scale. Like that was what was really powerful. Like, you know, she really kind of helped me move my thinking from like, well, what I do as an individual doesn't matter very much, but in a school, you have this opportunity because you've got hundreds of people within a community who, if each of them made that small change, actually together, you can quote larger statistics, like thousands of yogurt pots, not saved.

And so it makes the individual feel a lot better when you're part of a community and you see the scale of the decision you've made. And she talked about the phrase she used was habit shift, which I love. The fact that the change is not, the change is just the start. It's not the event.

The event is that change in the habit, that ongoing new behavior. Yes. And I think that we really need to get our heads around that as a society, as individuals and, you know, as someone that's used in an ordinary number of single use coffee cups in my life. I've probably, you know, I've probably got a bit of penance and a tournament to do on that score.

So if I fly the flag here for Claire's episode and say, you know, if you're a school leader, have a listen and have a think about what you can do because the ideas were simple, they were easy. And they just took a bit of a positive attitude to make it happen. Totally. Check that out.

It's also a really good one because I've got loaded up in front of me. It comes with, if you look in the show notes, it comes with a little workbook that you can kind of follow through as well with hers, as you listen to the episode, which is a really nice practical way to engage with what she said. Any other reflections before we close up and reflect on what's coming next month? No, I think that, that broadly speaking covers it for me.

There were some great episodes. I really enjoyed all of them. And yeah, for those of you particularly Sam, keep on going with those honest posts on LinkedIn. I'm sure that a lot of people are benefiting from that.

Absolutely. Well, thanks Chris. This has just been a brilliant hour of discussion around these things. I love that we get to do this once a month.

I love that we get to reflect on these conversations. I also love that we've got community joining us online, live on LinkedIn, live on YouTube, or live at educationleaders.live. Please do join us last Thursday of every month.

It's really good to have you here and your contributions. As we go into the next month, we've got some really good episodes coming up. What's the pond? To the US for a couple of people, including the brilliant Andrew Watson, who has a fantastic blog on learning on the brain and also has the Goldilocks map.

Um, he really, he's one of these people who gets the nuance of the science of learning and is willing to challenge just accepted behaviors just because the research says it's not necessarily the best thing to do. He's going to, he's got a great one. We've then got another, one of my favorite people in the world, Patrice Bain coming on the show. We talk about the power of community and the power of leaning into people to grow like around you as a leader, as a teacher, you, you will find it hard not to smile during that episode.

Her energy is infectious. And then we've got some other episodes coming up, some really powerful stuff. So, so keep your eye out for that on the Education Leaders podcast. But until then, Chris, thank you so much.

It's been absolute delight to chat today. Shane, it's been great. Thanks so much for having me today. And yeah, I will see you next month.

See you next month. Take care, everyone.