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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
To make the best decisions possible, middle leaders need to have a nuanced understanding of the consequences of their actions. In this pragmatic book, Adam Robbins aims to boost their role-specific expertise to help them achieve that goal - and offers them a preferable alternative to learning from their mistakes. Instead of relying on generic leadership theories, Middle Leadership Mastery collates perspectives from psychology and cognitive science to share evidence-informed guidance on a wide range of topics - from supporting staff and students in crisis and managing wellbeing, to quality-assuring teaching and curriculum design. Adam Robbins draws on his sixteen years' experience of teaching in a deprived area to illustrate his points with stories and anecdotes from the front line, demonstrating how middle leaders can better understand their context and deliver the best outcomes from a variety of starting points.
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Praise for Middle Leadership Mastery
Adam Robbins’ book is a superb guide and companion for any middle leader working in a school setting. Whereas most leadership books are full of generic approaches and strategies, this book is concrete, detailed and supported by a wealth of both experience and evidence. Whether you are looking for an explainer to assessment theory, a primer for budgeting and running meetings, or even psychological advice on staying motivated in a tremendously challenging role, this book has it all.
Adam Boxer, Head of Science, The Totteridge Academy
In writing Middle Leadership Mastery, Adam Robbins has produced a book for secondary school middle leaders who want to be authentic in their challenging role. It is not for anyone who is content to simply go through the motions. On the contrary, it is a book that might challenge your thinking as it raises important issues and sets them against key questions relating to middle leadership issues. Alongside this, Adam provides useful tools – and middle leaders will find things like the questions for effective book-looks and the drop-in proforma both pragmatic and appropriate. The structure of CPD insights will also be welcomed by anyone who is responsible for this area.
Bill Lowe, middle leadership specialist, researcher and author
Middle Leadership Mastery provides carefully considered, thoroughly researched and referenced advice for subject leaders, and also considers pastoral responsibilities in addition to academic ones. It draws together much recent research and helpful reading, focusing on what middle leaders can learn from the findings – which, in turn, should help enable them to lead their teams effectively.
Dr Jill Berry, leadership development consultant and author of Making the Leap: Moving from Deputy to Head
Middle Leadership Mastery will certainly be a useful addition to the armoury of any middle leader in the education sector, and I would also see a place for this book as a course reader for final-year undergraduate trainees on initial teacher education (ITE) courses – and indeed on my own PGCE course.
Mark Chidler, Primary PGCE Course Coordinator, Newman University Birmingham
Adam Robbins clearly identifies how middle leaders can harness the responsibilities and freedom of the education system in terms of teaching, learning and assessment. And, by drawing upon key underpinnings of the new Ofsted framework, he shares various Bperspectives geared towards questioning and challenging existing classroom practice. Robbins presents a range of resources for managing key areas of education and explicitly identifies how to tackle some of the difficult challenges of being a leader, from time management to delegation. Throughout the book, there are a wealth of opportunities to explore and reflect upon this newfound knowledge, which will ultimately impact upon the children and the curriculum within our schools. Undeniably, Robbins’ honest account of his experiences of leadership shine through, developing the relatability of the book’s content to the everyday classroom.
Jenny Wilkinson, teacher and middle leader, Church of the Ascension Primary School
We all know that the individual teacher makes more difference to pupil outcomes however good or bad the school is. Beyond that, the phase leader or head of department cultivates the climate in which the teacher can create good classroom weather on a daily basis. Adam Robbins’ Middle Leadership Mastery is a book to help that process. Every primary school and every secondary school department should have a copy, and discussion of the approaches contained with it at staff meetings will help teachers create good classroom weather even on a rainy day or when the wind blows.
Tim Brighouse, former London Schools Commissioner and Chief Education Officer for Birmingham and Oxfordshire
Middle Leadership Mastery is first class and an excellent contribution to the school leadership literature. It is packed with a wealth of relevant research and insights, and is brought to life through Robbins’ honesty and humility in relating his first-hand experiences of teaching and leading. The work of middle leaders in schools is complex and challenging – and Middle Leadership Mastery is ambitious in its aim to codify the knowledge and expertise of school leaders, which are often crowded out in a discourse dominated by tales of heroism and the cult of personality.
Tom Rees, Executive Director, Ambition Institute, and former head teacher
It’s often said that middle leaders are the engine room of a great school: their energy, their effectiveness and their commitment are vital to any school’s success. In writing this book, Adam Robbins has used his extensive knowledge to produce a superb and impressively comprehensive guide – covering curriculum design, assessment, teacher development and more besides – for anyone undertaking one of these all-important roles.
Tom Sherrington, education consultant and author of Teaching WalkThrus
Acknowledgements
Firstly, I want to thank all the school leaders out there, who do an incredibly challenging job. I specifically want to thank all the leaders who I have had the chance to work with during my career: you have all taught me so much. I owe a huge debt to all those who I have worked alongside and led over the years: you too have taught me so much. I want to thank all those who I have used as references in Middle Leadership Mastery. I am so grateful for your insights and intellect. I specifically want to thank those who really helped me when I needed a critical friend early on in the writing process: Ruth Ashbee, Chris Baker, Matthew Benyohai, Adam Boxer, Pritesh Riachura, Kevin Robbins. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Sue Gerread and Deep Singh Ghataura. Deep not only checked my understanding of school assessment but also took the time to refer me to extra reading and support me with my own misconceptions as they arose. Sue was willing to give her time and expertise in cognitive science to ensure that my writing was free from error and used terminology accurately. Writing some of this book during lockdown was not an easy task, and I want to thank the proprietors of The Covid Arms for their support and encouragement every time I felt a large dose of imposter syndrome. I want to thank David Bowman and the team at Crown House Publishing for their support, feedback and professionalism in helping to create this book. I am so glad that they were willing to take a chance on me.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Heather, and my two daughters, Alice and Naomi. Their daily support and encouragement has helped me in ways they will never truly know.
Contents
Introduction
‘You’ll make a good head of department one day,’ said Richard. I snorted in response and accidentally sprayed my drink across the room in disgust. I never wanted to be a leader – ever. Never wanted to get out of the classroom. Leaders were just paid more to work longer hours and do paperwork, as far as I was concerned. To be fair, to an extent, I was right. Back in the early 2000s you weren’t called a middle leader; you were a coordinator of a key stage or a head of year or department. You were paid less than middle leaders currently are, but you had a mainly administrative role. Richard, a semi-retired ex-deputy who was working part-time in our department, saw through it. ‘Trust me,’ he replied with a wry smile. ‘Sooner or later you’ll do it just because you don’t want someone else to screw it up!’ Fast forward over a decade and I have to admit that he was right. Sadly, he died the following year, but our discussions about education and the experiences he shared have stayed with me.
During my leadership career I have made mistakes. Some of them were big; some were small. I’ve learnt from them, but I’ve also learnt from the experience of others, so hopefully I’ve avoided some potential pitfalls over the years. This book arises from two ideas: firstly, that there is a lot of unspoken information that middle leaders need but are not explicitly taught. Secondly, I was worried that if I didn’t write it down, someone else would screw it up.
Over the last few years, schools have rightly placed a huge focus on the curriculum. This has coincided with a change in emphasis in school inspection, giving English schools much more freedom to look holistically at the choices they make for the students they serve. Alongside this there is a greater appreciation for the role of subject specialists in making decisions about the strategic direction of each department. These two issues put middle leaders in a position of great responsibility. In the last decade schools have often focused their attention on senior leadership, increasing the numbers of senior leaders and ensuring that they are able to access training and qualifications. Now it is time for middle leaders to take centre stage.
The current approach to improving the quality of middle leadership is to provide generic training with a focus on leadership styles, communicating vision and having difficult conversations. While leaders will find these skills useful in certain situations, they are 2 only part of the toolbox needed to be successful. Tom Rees and Jen Barker of Ambition Institute believe that we require a new approach. They set out four key ideas:1
Complexity: A leader’s purpose is to improve students’ learning, which is incredibly hard to do due to the complex nature of learning. This makes it hard to accurately determine the impact of leadership decisions.Domain-specific expertise: All generic leadership qualities need to be filtered through each leader’s specific context. This is an often-ignored area in current training. We need to know how this expertise is developed and look beyond the surface behaviours to understand why some leaders are more successful than others.Knowledge: Leaders need to use a large array of knowledge to solve context-dependent problems in an effective manner. This knowledge is not easily acquired and covers a wide range of disciplines.Persistent problems: Leaders face a series of problems on a day-to-day basis. While each context is different, categorising the problems that persist within many school situations can allow for us to effectively share expertise.This book aims to support these four areas from a middle leader’s perspective. We discuss aspects of the complexity of school systems and their consequences. We will develop expertise by sharing stories and theories which will, in turn, increase your knowledge of pertinent aspects of middle leadership. With this knowledge you will be able to create more effective solutions to the persistent problems you face within your role.
Each chapter takes a common aspect of middle leadership and explores it in depth. By providing an overview of important concepts, illustrated by anecdotes from my ten years of leadership experience, I aim to provide a shortcut for middle leaders in all subjects and contexts. So follow me and expand your understanding.
We start with curriculum, placing that most important issue front and centre. We begin with a discussion about the value of what to teach, the skills vs knowledge debate, and how decisions will be context dependent. The chapter looks at the various stages of curriculum design before finally concluding with how best to evaluate decisions and their outcomes to inform next steps.
Chapter 2 covers teaching and learning, which can be the topic of entire books, so this chapter aims mainly to provide an overview of how our understanding of the nature of knowledge and how the brain works can support teaching. Initially, we focus on types of 3 knowledge and how understanding this supports explanations. This progresses into considering how students learn by providing an overview of cognitive science’s understanding of the key processes involved. As the chapter develops, the emphasis shifts to developing teaching routines and introduces the concept of consistency without stifling creativity and teacher agency – a key determinant in job satisfaction.
Chapter 3 then focuses on the role of assessment. Often assessment is misunderstood; it is considered a holy tenet that it can tell you, accurately, what a student has learnt. This chapter tries to provide a counterpoint to this belief by discussing what assessment can and can’t tell you before providing tangible advice on assessment in different subjects.
Chapter 4 focuses on the important role of quality-assurance metrics and their various impacts on staff morale, line management confidence and the effectiveness of the policies designed as a result of the ideas in Chapters 1 to 3.
Chapter 5 deals with a key role for many middle leaders: developing teachers. Firstly, we explore barriers to teacher development and why some commonly used strategies can backfire. Secondly, we introduce the idea of the improvement gradient and consider how learning walks and lesson visits can be used for maximum impact. Finally, we take a broad view of effective continuing professional development (CPD) and look at how this can be applied within the confines of a school’s directed time budget.
Chapter 6 focuses on the brass tacks of middle leadership: decisions. This chapter looks at meeting structures and at running budgets to control costs. It pivots to discuss decision making. We explore how the best decision makers work and how to balance delegation and trust with certainty and accountability.
Chapter 7 shifts the focus to pastoral matters, beginning by examining strategies for dealing with misbehaviour in corridors and with angry parents. We explore how to build rapport and hold conversations which maintain high standards and build relationships. The chapter then covers various skills that can be deployed to support people in crisis. By introducing transactional analysis and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) I aim to give middle leaders the chance to be more aware of the steps they can take to support students in crisis.
The focus of Chapter 8 is on communication and people management. It is a broad-ranging chapter that starts with how people respond to change and explores moral philosophy. Once we know our decisions are based on sound rationale, we need to secure buy-in from staff. We also need to know how to manage our superiors to ensure that our decisions are not hampered by senior leadership. The chapter finishes with discussing an area that causes significant anxiety for leaders: challenging conversations. The sorts of conversations that are necessary but often difficult to have. We discuss 4 various models to support a conversation to ensure that it is candid but dignified and developmental.
The final chapter covers many aspects of wellbeing. Its initial focus is on the personal wellbeing of the leader, using Adlerian psychology to give leaders ways of building resilience in what are often stressful situations. We discuss ways to be prepared in the event that a member of staff experiences a crisis and how we can best support them. Next, we look at what a healthy work–life balance looks like and how you can achieve it. We then explore the concept of staff wellbeing and see why token-based systems of rewards and thanks, while welcomed, are not the answer.
To a certain extent middle leadership is highly context specific. Your subject knowledge and expertise are a vital part of what makes you a good leader. There are also certain broad skills which are desirable, such as the ability to build rapport and communicate effectively. Middle Leadership Mastery aims to bridge the gap between those two. By introducing you to such a wide range of principles my hope is to enhance your leadership-specific knowledge base and thus support you in your role.
Each chapter ends with the opportunity to recap and reflect. This is designed to remind you of the key points covered in each chapter and support you on your mastery journey by asking you to reflect on your own experiences and context.
How to use this book
I would recommend that you start at the front and read through in order, but you can approach the chapters in any order if you want to prioritise certain areas first.
If you don’t like this book, I should think it will allow a small child to get tall enough to kiss a slightly taller child, or possibly help start approximately 80 log burner fires. So, either way, it’s money well spent.
1 T. Rees and J. Barker, 2020: A New Perspective for School Leadership? Impact: Journal of the Chartered College of Teaching, 9 (2020): 46–47.
Chapter 1
Leading the curriculum
No thief, however skilful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.
L. Frank Baum1
For many years curriculum design has been in the hands of central government in each of the UK nations, not in the hands of classroom teachers. Teachers’ training and planning time has focused on pedagogy and engagement. Now that all teachers have a responsibility for curriculum design, it falls to middle leaders to ensure that their curriculum is appropriately constructed and implemented. One key decision is regarding whether we build a curriculum with a foundation of knowledge or skills, as this will frame the very nature of our students’ education. To make informed curriculum decisions, you need to see the big picture of education’s role within society. This chapter aims to provide some of that context and offer some guidance about how to plan and implement your curriculum.
Why is the first chapter about curriculum?
Leading the curriculum is the most impactful thing that a middle leader can do. Every middle leadership role has an impact on the curriculum. Heads of subjects obviously play a role, but beneath them key stage leaders help to shape the curriculum within their areas. The curriculum is not limited to subjects taught within the school; pastoral leaders also provide a curriculum based on the work they lead with tutors, with support staff and in assemblies. The curriculum identifies the entirety of the knowledge and skills students need to acquire. This permeates through all classes and through multiple years, shaping the planning and delivery of all lessons. Your curriculum is your tool to stretch the most able and ensure all students are progressing.
6Often the power of curriculum is ignored or overlooked by middle leaders as their attention is drawn more towards operational tasks. While leaders should make time for such tasks, this is not their main purpose. Another reason why curriculum often gets pushed to the bottom of the to-do list is a perceived lack of control over it. Multi-academy trusts often stipulate a degree of control over the curriculum. Governments also stipulate what is expected nationally. While there will be some trusts with incredibly tight control of what knowledge is taught and when, the national curriculum is actually incredibly vague. For example, the Key Stage 3 guidance for history comprises a grand total of 1,242 words, most of which are non-statutory suggestions of topics.2 So, middle leaders have a degree of flexibility regarding what is taught, when it’s taught and to what depth. Even where tight external control is placed on the curriculum, you as a leader are duty-bound to ensure that it is fit for purpose in your context, make changes if necessary, and ensure that your team understands the thinking behind your decisions. At the end of the day, you are ultimately accountable to your students; they are the ones you must look in the eye on results day.
Knowledge-rich vs 21st-century skills
Over the last 50 years the curriculum has been subject to shifting priorities. The idea that skills are more important than knowledge permeated education in the 1980s.3 Under the label of ‘21st-century skills’, curricula shifted away from a foundation of knowledge to one of skills. More recently, some schools have been moving back towards a knowledge-rich curriculum. I first want to outline the theories behind the knowledge-rich curriculum movement to explain why it is the best choice for our students. Later we will discuss how to construct your curriculum and how to evaluate its success.
The reasoning behind a skills-based curriculum went that knowledge will become obsolete in the future. Due to the internet and the accessibility of knowledge, freely available, to all mankind, students will not need to know facts and figures. Instead, they will need a range of flexible skills to allow them to tackle the jobs of the future. The argument goes that if a student can search for the information – for example, the process by which a bill becomes law – then they should only be judged on how they can apply those facts to a given scenario. They should be expected to show various thinking skills, like 7problem-solving and creativity, within this context. So, education should emphasise the demonstration of these traits over the acquisition of relevant knowledge.
Cognitively, this is a load of nonsense. Knowledge is the prerequisite for skills within any domain. Try teaching any skill – for example, making a cup of tea. There is a certain amount of knowledge required for the skill to be acquired successfully. Firstly, there are the declarative facts, those which can be seen as objective. In this case, these are all the objects involved, their locations and intrinsic properties. Then there is the procedural knowledge: the knowledge associated with how things fit together in a sequence. In this case, it would include the operation of the equipment (tap, kettle, etc.) as well as the sequence of techniques (how to use a tea bag, straining, the addition of milk, etc.). So, the skill of making a decent cup of tea is in fact the culmination of a large body of different types of knowledge, as Figure 1 shows.
Figure 1: Making a cup of tea
Declarative knowledge: Knowledge about facts.
Procedural knowledge: Knowledge about how to do something.
8This is often ignored by those favouring a skills-based, 21st-century curriculum because they suffer from the curse of knowledge, which impacts their ability to communicate effectively.4 In a skills-based curriculum the danger is that the teacher takes the knowledge they have acquired for granted and assumes that everyone else has already acquired it. This is a potentially dangerous choice and often disadvantages those students who have missed certain assumed experiences.
Curse of knowledge: A well-demonstrated cognitive bias, meaning that an individual falsely assumes that others have the same background information as they have.
In the example of making a cup of tea, the knowledge required might be too familiar and obvious, and you might remain unconvinced. So, to illustrate this further, consider learning to drive. In Figure 2 I’ve tried to break down driving in the same way.
Figure 2: How to drive a car
9Driving is a complex process, so it is a great analogy for learning in any context. I’ve put the majority of the most basic requirements in the diagram but have ignored how knowledge of differing weather conditions impacts decisions for simplicity’s sake. Notice how driving has a significant extra domain of knowledge: the Highway Code. I am sure that if you were asked to recall the rules of the Highway Code, you would be far from encyclo-paedic, just like I am. However, you will know most of the basic rules of the road. You might not be able to fully recall this prior knowledge, but it will be demonstrated by the choices you make in the moment.5 It’s there in the background as tacit knowledge, helping you to perform a complex task with relative ease on a daily basis.
Tacit knowledge: Knowledge that is gained through experience and is hard to communicate to others because we are unaware it exists.
Let’s consider two anecdotes about learning to drive as illustrations of the power of knowledge. I learnt to drive when I was about 17 and a half. It took me 25 lessons and two practical tests. Like a typical teen, it took me ages to master the clutch, but also many lessons to learn the rules about junctions, the size of an adequate gap to pull out into, etc. My friend Bill did not learn to drive until he was in his early thirties. Like me, his first few lessons focused on the basic controls and in this respect he was equally poor. His instructor predicted that he would need at least 25 lessons. Within 12 lessons he had passed his test. Once he had grasped how to use the mechanical functions of the car, he was ready. He already had years of experience of the Highway Code as an attentive adult passenger. He was relatively fluent in how the rules were applied as he had witnessed a large array of situations in real life. He just had an inability to physically control the car. His prior knowledge accelerated his progress in the skill of driving.
A knowledge-rich curriculum is not devoid of skills; it prioritises the acquisition of knowledge before it is successfully applied using skills. This explains why teachers often complain about students’ skills being non-transferrable. How often do teachers bemoan that a student’s writing skills do not translate from English into other subjects? Or that they can form a coherent argument in history but not in literature; they can analyse a painting and its imagery but not a poem; they can evaluate evidence from a science experiment but not climate data in geography? This is evidence of the domain-specific nature of knowledge.
A student will first gain inflexible knowledge that is completely limited to the area in which it was originally taught. As their expertise improves, they will develop flexible10knowledge that can be applied more broadly and to a wider variety of situations. The ability to execute the widest application of the most flexible knowledge is often called ‘creativity’ or ‘problem-solving skills’. When a student has flexible knowledge, they can bring knowledge across multiple domains and synthesise new ideas from existing rules and patterns. The journey to this stage is different for each person and each domain, based on a multitude of genetic and environmental factors. Creativity and problem-solving are the hardest to achieve, and often we are tempted to try and skip to the end by teaching them as explicit skills. This is not efficient, and we often end up with a shadow of the teacher’s ideas parroted back by the student.
As an example, when I was in Year 11, I had to do a piece of chemistry coursework. At the time, coursework was aimed at providing a chance for students to work independently and demonstrate their planning and practical skills. The whole class was given the following brief: using common laboratory equipment, determine the rate of reaction for calcium carbonate in different concentrations of acid. My chemistry teacher made his instructions specific. He pointed out where all the equipment was and made it clear that how we proceeded was our own choice. The whole class set to work. Five minutes later I came up to the front with a long list of equipment that I wanted to use for an experiment based on the idea that carbon dioxide turns limewater cloudy, which would affect the amount of light that can pass through a sample. He read the list and then stood up. He beckoned me over to the corner of the lab and pointed to the class. ‘Look at the rest of the class. I can get you all of this if you want but you could just do that.’ He said it in a whisper. Everyone else was using a simple change in mass method using a timer and a balance. I quickly went back to my place and copied my friend’s method. At the end of the lesson the teacher pulled me aside. ‘That was an interesting idea; you’d be a good chemist if you tried harder.’ That was the day I decided to study chemistry at A level.6
I have often thought about why I didn’t think to use such an obvious solution. Perhaps I was away when that method was covered in class or I just was not concentrating? This story demonstrates two things: firstly, that you need prior knowledge to solve problems efficiently. Your potential solutions must be based on something that you already know. Secondly, I was able to devise my own solution due to my knowledge of chemistry being somewhat flexible, which my teacher recognised as advantageous for A-level study. So, from a cognitive perspective, knowledge-based curricula are not rote learning at the expense of creativity. They are in fact about providing the necessary foundation of knowledge to allow creativity to blossom. 11
