Dr Simon Breakspear

0:05 Welcome to the Leadership Passport. I'm excited to welcome my guest today, Doctor Simon Brakespeare. Simon is an educational researcher, former high school teacher, and father of three. As a founder of Strategic Schools, he focuses on supporting teams to enhance their impact on learning through evidence, informed processes and tools. He's an adjunct adjunct senior lecturer at the University of NSW, an advisor to the NSW Department of Education on leadership development and curriculum reform. Simon holds a PhD in Education from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar. He's worked globally with over 100,000 teachers, schools and policy leaders across more than 10 countries. Welcome, Simon. Thanks. Kevin, great to be with you. Thanks for the conversation. Yeah.

0:46 Thanks for joining me. So I wanted to start a little bit on a personal note. I understand you started as a classroom teacher before moving into research and and sort of global advisory work. What it was there a particular moment or experience that most shaped that transition? Well, look, actually the transition before that that I actually started. My study in Med school, and I think I was always really interested in how evidence can impact, I suppose, how certain practitioners get to impact people's lives and in not just individuals, but communities. I decided that there was a whole lineup of people who wanted to take my place in Med school. But at that point in 2001, there wasn't necessarily that strong interest of saying, well, once someone gets well and they've left hospital, they need to learn how to live and develop. And for me, that's where schools came in. And so I made a bit of a radical decision to say I want to dedicate myself to education.

1:41 I thought education was the place to be and I wanted to start that work by actually doing teaching. I actually did a psychology degree. I didn't a four year psychology degree because even back then I understood that fundamentally education is about human development, learning and I might even say formation. And so I thought actually the discipline that could help me most get my head around that was, was psychology. I had enough science for my Med degree and other subjects I picked up to teach science. And so I taught science. But to be honest, I would have been happy teaching anything. And when I got a cover, an extra to cover someone else, I'm, I'll teach maths, I'll teach economics. I had left school, you know, five years earlier or whatever else. So I still knew the stuff and I really was very interested in the processes of teaching in the context of community and how that interplay between all the stuff you do in the extracurricular.

2:34 I was also a Year 12 coordinator, which is our final year of school here in New South Wales, Australia. So helping people not just transition through their exams, but transition into adulthood. Like, what am I going to do beyond school? But I suppose even just three years into that, I was asking myself, OK, do I want to work in one school at a time? Maybe contribute to a school for five to seven years at a time, Maybe get through 5 schools or so. And at that point I was working in a school that served, served a lot of upper middle class kids in Sydney. It was a great place to be. But I had this real sense of I, I wanted to think about systems. And I think we're just all wired differently. Kevin, I'm, I'm married to a primary school teacher who loves being in classrooms. In fact, she spends more of her time in learning support. So not even one classroom, but classes of Tier 2 and tier one support.

3:24 She's getting right down to the individual. And I was sort of wired up to think, could we move many schools at the same time? Could we move a state of schools? Could you move a country of schools? And for me, I just got interested in it. And so I, I, I went and studied comparative education at Oxford and then stayed on for my PhD. And that's been my path. So for me, it's just, I think we need lots of different types of people contributing in education. The bulk of those need to be people who are wonderful day-to-day, week to week practitioners. And we also need people who move into school leadership like you, and we need some who get their head around systems. And at this point, I'm still convinced I can make the biggest impact doing what I'm doing.

4:07 But I'm open to moving back towards a single school at some point. I know lots of people who do my kind of work for a period of time and it feels like they're pushing against the ocean. And so sometimes there's a need just to come back to the local, to be embedded in community and to serve the people you're with and to teach the students in front of you, rather than often working in more of the abstract around policy and larger scale change. So you mentioned sort of a number of transitions there and an evolving kind of approach to things. Was there a particular belief that you held early on in your career that you've since kind of changed your mind or perspective on? This one will be controversial, but I think I might have said early days as a teacher, leave me alone. I'm a teacher.

4:56 I know. I know my stuff. I'm good at what I'm doing. Unless there's complaints about me, just kind of leave me alone. And I think I've probably changed towards saying that increasingly teaching is best done as a collective endeavour, where our practice is open to both observation and feedback from other colleagues. And also open that even though I've been doing it in a certain way and it seems to be going all right with my kids, there may well be a better way. And that the evidence base around effective teaching and learning and cognitive science might challenge some of the things that I might think about, you know, how I like to teach or what I think works.

5:39 So I would definitely say there's probably 2 areas there. One, a stronger view that evidence should inform what I teach and that I shouldn't just think, well, it's kind of worked for me in my experience. So I, I'm OK, it probably working for me in my experience, because at that point I was working with upper middle class kids who got a lot of privilege and background and got read to before they started school and had a rich vocabulary and introduced to a whole range of social, cultural knowledge. And I'd probably also say I've shifted towards being much more, seeing our work as a collaborative and collective endeavour that should be quite open to learning and feedback and observation from others. Yeah. So you mentioned, you know, an evidence base or evidence kind of informed practice in in kind of translating research into practical tools for schools.

6:29 So why do you think that? Well, at least in my experience. You might disagree, but why is there still such a big gap between research and practice in schools? Well, what do you reckon? What's your What's your hunch? Well, look, I, I think, I think there is a little bit of maybe it's not hubris, but like, you know, I'm a head of school or I'm a head of department or I'm a teacher. You know, I've got 20 years experience, 30 years experience. I know what I'm doing. It's worked. You know, who are you to come in and tell me something different or, you know, or there's a, you know, a point of view this won't work in, you know, this bit of research is great, but that wouldn't work in my context or my school.

7:12 And I think a lot of people are just super busy as well. And perhaps today, you know, that's a maybe a nice to have and not a must have, but yeah. They're good. They're I, I think what you're getting to it's, it's a multi factorial problem here. And you know, one of them is I don't have the bandwidth, you know, I don't have the bandwidth. When am I meant to be doing this learning and unlearning? Another one might be I'm not even sure whether this is relevant. It's research in a certain context, but how do I know it's relevant to me? It's it's it's a study of other kids and other teachers in other places in the past. How do I derive, you know, lessons about my kids now in the future and whether this would work.

7:57 So a a couple of things. I build on your insights. One, we weren't trained as educators in a evidence informed way at university. So nurses, physios, OT speech pathologists, the other equivalent professions to us, spend a lot more time understanding the underlying anatomy, Physiology, formation of language. They have a shared discipline or for multiple, multiple disciplines in the true sense of that word. And as they understand that discipline, they understand what sorts of practices might have an impact on that underlying Physiology or anatomy or or whatever it is.

8:46 Education, for some reason really emerged where a lot of the academics who were doing what we call research were doing critical theory. They were doing forms of sociology. They were thinking about hidden curriculum. They were thinking about very important things to consider around the building of education and the building of of democracies and citizens. But there was never an agreement in teachers colleges that then became faculties of education that fundamentally the underlying discipline should probably be cognitive and developmental psychology. Now that's what I would have done. I would have said the fundamental thing, you know, the physio learns anatomy 1st and then works out a practice that can manipulate and improve problems there. The teacher is fundamentally interested in not just learning. I think it's too narrow, but human development. And we've got 100 years plus now of psychological findings, cognitive science, behavioral science, developmental theories, and rather just having a unit or two of that that should have been the foundational piece of we as educators are trying to cause a change in the trajectory in learning and development. And what we need is a shared knowledge and a shared agreement that we can know things about this area. And then after knowing things about the fundamental, you know, cognitive processes, motivational processes, developmental processes, then our practice would be practices that can be shown to accelerate or improve those things. Instead, we don't have shared

10:19 knowledge, as you know, shared foundational understanding because we didn't get, given that we got like 1 little unit in Ed psych at some point. And then I would say also we didn't get inducted as a research based profession. That is, it was never taught to us that as ideas are tested and, and, and verified in rigorous trials, that it's very likely that we might get up to updates to our professional practice guidelines. Like if a, if a nurse was trained like I was as a teacher, you know, early 2000s, she's thinking like science isn't about proving something once and for all. It's a constant iterative updating process. And as we know better, we do better. And so even though I was a registered nurse in 2005, they might say by the time it was 2015 or, you know, sometimes it takes they say 1115 years things from to move from the science through to practice in medicine.

11:11 I would expect some changes. And it's not OK to say I'm a registered nurse. It's like, yeah, you were a registered nurse, but soon you'll be an unregistered nurse because you're a trained nurse who's not using agreed practice guidelines. So I think there's a couple of things now in Australia, we've got a big push now in early teacher education to say that some of this core foundational knowledge that I think we should have all been exposed to cognitive science development and some of the implications of that for teaching and learning is now, you know, being covered in all of our courses. But I think it's going to take quite a while to catch up. And I think therefore, if you suddenly say to people you should be evidence based, since it's like, well, I haven't had a chance to learn about this fundamental evidence based. I don't understand and I haven't been given an understanding of different types of studies and the types of claims that I might be able to make on those studies. And by the way, everyone with a doctor or a professor in front of their name came and you know, spooked all sorts of spooked all sorts of ideas that weren't actually based on rigorous studies.

12:18 Then no wonder we've got people who are either hesitant or skeptical. That'll be my kind of hunch. But I would say on the OP, on the on the plus side, just in a couple of half day sessions with staff, introducing them to cognitive science, helping them understand the limits of working memory, connecting what they already know about STEAM schema formation to long term memory, reasoning out the learning challenges they find in the classrooms. And then asking what are the evidence informed practices that might help you solve some of those problems? I feel that, you know, often given that time, people move very quickly. What they don't like is some boring set of PowerPoints with effect sizes that sort of says some researcher outside says, do more of these stuff and less of this stuff. And but evidence informed adaptive teaching, making better decisions based on your understanding of science and development, learning and human development and what what Stephen Higgins calls the best bets. It's not, you know, Dylan Williams says we'll never be a research based profession in the sense of researchers can never say, Kevin, after lunch with year nine, you should do this, this, this.

13:24 But I can say these are the high probability shots that are highly likely to be useful for most humans. So why don't you at least initiate a lot of your improvements or think about enhancing your craft around those best bets. That would be, you know, a probably a better choice than just listening to what someone in in your in your faculty suggested, Yeah. I love how you framed that. And, you know, Robert Mazzano talks about like the art and the science of teaching. Like we know these kinds of things work most of the time, but the art of it is knowing when and how to use and using that professional judgement and experience and all of those things to put it together. And you kind of answered my next question, which was, you know, for school or an educator or school leaders looking to say, well, we want to be more, we want to use research better. We want to be more evidence informed in what you're, you know, I love what you said.

14:14 You kind of take a step back, maybe take a more holistic view of, you know, child, adolescent human development and, and where do we go from there? I really love this. Yeah, well, just say that as well. There's some bad ways of going in. Like, you know, a lot of systems here that I work with, I think rightly based on the evidence, but wrongly based on change narrative. I've said we're all doing explicit teaching right now. Forms of explicit instruction definitely are aligned in in the evidence that are going to that would suggest more students are going to make more progress, particularly around literacy and numeracy by using these approaches. But when you come in and say we're doing evidence based teaching, you've got to do this. It's one of the few areas where after saying we're doing explicit teaching, you've got to spend all this time telling people what it's not. And you get this whole aversion in a lot of places. And so I think what I recommend is sort of like, look, it's not about being proven right.

15:05 It's about being helpful to your colleagues. And so I would say spend like a whole term just on learning, no teaching. What do we understand about learning? I ask teachers all the time, how would you define learning? They get totally stumped. And then they'll say, oh, learning is social, learning is collaborative, learning is energizing. I'm like, no, no, what is learning when you use this term all the time? I said, well, let me take you to say the cognitive science. It's not the only definition of learning, but the small occursion of definition would be learning is a change in long term memory. OK, where would that long term memory be stored? OK, what do we mean by long term memory? Not just declarative knowledge, but also procedural knowledge. You're kicking a soccer ball in the back of the net, playing bark cello suites, having automaticity of some number facts. All of these things are really useful. OK, what are some challenges that you might find in helping students build that long term memory in attention? Who has problems with attention?

16:01 Oh yeah, all the time. Who has problems with getting students to do hard thinking? So what are the strategies that might help? And so sometimes you actually end up talking about a whole set of strategies like good explanation work, the examples of scaffolding, asking lots of questions using non volunteers, ThinkPad share, you know, asking people to elaborate. And people are like, yes, yes, yes, these are good solutions to these problems. And then you say, oh, by the way, that's what we kind of call explicit teaching. They go, oh, OK. And so it's just being thoughtful about where the battle happens. And I think people who are very unsuccessful just want to be right. And people who are gracious and, and and sit and just say, this is so learnable. And I think it's going to help you enjoy your teaching better and help you be more efficient, more effective to solve problems that are frustrating you in the classroom. To me, that's just a much more effective approach. Fantastic.

16:54 So why do you think, I mean, there's so many professional development kind of programs, companies, things out there, Why do you think a lot of those, well at least in my opinion anyway, a lot of these actually failed to change classroom practice in any kind of meaningful ways. Why? Why do you think that is? All sorts of things. Maybe I'd break it down to one, a lack of strategy on if this is the solution, what was the problem we were solving? So a lot of busy head teachers, a lot of busy directors of teaching and learning deputies who the problem they're really solving is I've got these blocks in the calendar with my team or a whole staff and I need something to fill that block. I'm flat out, flat out and exhausted running the school. And rather than spending a day or two going through the school improvement plan, understanding what the aspirations are, seeing the gap between what our current capabilities are and what we would need to be doing and needed to reach that like that, that'd be first principles thinking. And it's multiple days of work.

18:04 And the people who are charged with making these decisions do not, in the way that those jobs are currently structured, have multiple days to do that type of work. So instead, what they often do is they put their head up onto Edu, Twitter or LinkedIn and they look around and they say what is a legitimate thing that other people are doing? It's very mimetic. It's mimicry. When I'm exhausted, I look up and I say, what are people doing and what you'll notice And you've done this work for a while, Kevin. I know like over the last 10 years, you know, we won't name any because I don't want to be negative because not all of them aren't based on evidence. But you know, everyone's, let me say a really good one, but I want you all to do like Dylan Williams, teacher learning communities. That's actually got a randomized control trial saying it's effectiveness.

18:47 But everyone was kind of hot for that, you know, 2015, 2016, 2017. But then it kind of like moves. Oh no, we've done Dylan's. What do you think you've done Dylan's work? Like you could spend a decade on this and they kind of move to something else and then something else and something else. And so firstly, I would say there is a tendency for exhausted and overloaded people not to map professional learning with the school improvement strategy. And to realize that professional learning is really just about building the skills or capabilities needed for you to close the delta between what your people currently do and what they need to be doing in order to hit that outcome. So first it's strategy and what happens is you've got the school improvement and then people just go and grab a name, a product or a a process that seems legitimate because other people are doing it and they try to jam it in.

19:33 So they're not even clear on the problem. The second thing I would say is that sometimes the program isn't based on those best available bets. So, you know, Dylan's work, I think is a great combination of having the best available bets is if you were going to spend time learning something over two or three years, that is likely to improve the quality of teaching and learning. Formative assessment is probably a really good bet. There's other ones, but that's a really good bet. But often the watts are not the most important watts. And so people spend their time trying to get better at things that are unlikely to get them unlocked in the classroom. And then the third thing is the mechanism for teacher change is very weakly articulated. So things like, oh, we're going to do general coaching, Kevin, OK.

20:21 And you're gonna sit down with me and you're gonna pay for all this time 'cause I'm not teaching in that hour. And you're not teaching. You're just gonna ask me what do I wanna work on, Simon, and what? And I choose something like feedback. Yeah, my classroom management's poor. My explanation is poor. I'm not doing guided practice. And I just pick something like feedback. And I spend a whole cycle of coaching on something I've chosen. But it's actually, it's not the next most important thing. I mean, physios don't get better this way. OTS don't get better this way. They actually say we have a developmental sequence and some we've been looking at what you're working on. You know, I actually want to suggest that securing these classroom routines in a positive environment for learning is the most important thing now and then we want to move from that to lessen clarity. So I, I think on most of the strategies don't have a vehicle for what I've spent a lot of time in the last decade doing, which is thinking about instructional habit change. And instructional habit change is at the core of, do you have a set of mechanisms that Education Endowment Foundation would call them?

21:21 A set of mechanisms that might help teachers build knowledge, be motivated, understand the technique, and embed it in practice. Because if the cycle of professional learning happens and it doesn't result in a teacher embedding a new instructional habit, based on the evidence that's aligned with where the school's heading, it's very unlikely that you're either going to have an impact or even if they did a little bit of change, they're just going to return to default later on. And so, you know, I, I think there's gaps in strategy, there's gaps in what people work on. So maybe why, what, and then how. And so for me, I've spent 10 years developing an approach that's called teaching sprints. It's used by thousands of schools around the world and it helps people work in small cycles of evidence based change.

22:08 They learn about it, building knowledge, Then they identify very, very small instructional habit to adjust. They spend 2 to 4 weeks in their classroom making explicit changes to just a small part of their teaching should feel like smaller than they want to do, smaller than they're motivated to do. And then they review that with colleagues and work out how to integrate it into their ongoing repertoire. And I can say that, Kevin, because it's entirely free. We'll say it's free and you get what you pay for teaching sprints. And I think one of the things that also is problematic is just the amount of money in this stuff. And so people constantly are changing, offering the new offering on offering the online platform, as though anyone's going to log on to the damn thing and fill out your form for you. There's always this new proposition of some subscription and some login because companies are looking for some long tail of revenue.

23:04 Even they know 80% plus of teachers aren't logging in. They're not doing any behavior change. But the director of teaching and learning or head can feel like, oh, we bought that thing. And then they've often moved on three years later and someone else starts that cycle. So for me, I think things that are mostly free or adaptable, things that you build that could like Dylan Williams, teach the learning communities, you could run those for 10 years. You don't have to keep changing the structure, but you could like with teaching sprints, adapt. What's the evidence based practices you could use within it? So that is a example. It might sound like a pitch Kevin, but it's also just a it's free. So I've got nothing riding on it other than it's so interesting to me the way that people get caught in long term financial obligations on things that aren't working where there's what they need is a day or two to work out what do we need? What's the evidence that's already free and available through places like evidence Endowment Foundation or other simple ways of people summarizing it online. And then just pick a vehicle teacher learning communities, teaching sprints, gym nights, impact cycle, something like that.

24:11 If you're doing a one-on-one, don't do general coaching, do instructional coaching with a good structure. And then just help people get better at one thing every term. Do that three to four times a year and staff get much, much better. And look, I can, I, I 100% echo your, your comments there. Just at the beginning of this year, we started with Dylan Williams and, and teacher learning communities focusing on embedding formative assessment. And, you know, having that staff together in, in, you know, sort of groups of 9 or 10 working on, like you said, those very small specific things on sort of two to four week cycles coming back, you know, observing each other, reflecting. It's really, really powerful. And, and certainly I've noticed a big difference compared to other things we've tried in the past. And it's, you know, such a crowded space of, like you said, platforms and programs and, you know, companies trying to sell things that, you know, the, the simple things are usually better.

25:10 Yeah, and if you've got the time, like it's pretty simple. It's like you want to work collaboratively, not individually, because individual coaching never scales to the majority of the school in my view. And normally the people who opt into it aren't the ones that you need to improve their practice. So number one, you must have a group based approach where everyone is involved. 2 Most teachers will only improve on at most one thing per term. Depending which system in you, you've got 3 to 4 terms a year. So assume teachers will get better at three to four things a year if everything goes well. Well, well, If they're only going to get better at three to four things, choose very wisely what they're getting better at. So you know, elements like formative assessment or my dear friend Tom Sherrington's done a great job of unpacking Rosenstein's principles.

25:55 Or a colleague here in Australia, Ollie Lovell's done a great job of unpacking John Sweller's work on cognitive load. Greg Ashman's done a great book on that as well. Like you could do worse than unpacking some of those key pieces of rigorous kind of synthesis and, and using that as the focus. And then it's just about, as you said, helping people move through cycles, not looking for what are we doing now, but we're doing what we do every term. We pick something that we think will solve a problem. We give ourselves time and space to integrate that within our craft. We talk with colleagues about how it's so hard to change certain habits. We try to make it so that we can't stop doing it in the future. And that's about all we can ask of people in any term.

26:38 And if you do that over three years, you're going to get better at 9 to 10 things. I'll tell you if you've got better at 9 to 10 things from Dylan list or Roses shines list or swirl as guidance on cognitive load, you would be a dramatically better teacher. That'd be that's my my dad. And then just pull together the things that are mostly free or very low cost and own the process rather than to sign up on an external process that everyone knows. Oh, we'll do this for a few years and then we'll do something else. So. What might your advice for school leaders be in terms of balancing accountability with trust when you're trying to improve teacher quality and helping, guiding, pushing teachers through this improvement process trying to.

27:23 Sort of get at the question a little bit. So let's let's start with trust. What what is the leader being asked to trust about the teacher or teachers practice I think for? You know, I think what we would hope, whether it's parents or administrators or leaders, that that teachers innately would want to get better, would want to approve, improve their own practice or are interested in in being better teachers overall. And we want to trust teachers to do that. We don't want to dictate things too much. We don't want to say you must do this and you must do that. And we're going to do this in this way exactly. You want to, you know, give some ownership over to the teacher and say, you know, you're in a position to, you know, be able to reflect and and know what you need in your professional practice moving forward.

28:13 But not everyone's in the same boat. OK. Yeah. So if it's within that, because because there's different areas of accountability and trust. So normally I'd say trust and verify. And then once you verify, you trust more. Trust isn't just given. It's a a set of loops where you have a certain trust and a certain thing. And then if it happens, then you increase that trust and you normally increase the distance again before you have any sort of accountability loop. And that builds up. And then if you can get hiring well done well and you have a culture of that, then increasingly you're hiring for people who understand the culture that you run. And if they, you know, stepped away from some of those norms, it would be held up pretty quickly. So trusting that they're teaching from the curriculum. I know that seems small, but we hear problems every week where someones teaching something that's other that trusting that if they're shared agreements and norms within that school around what might be covered or how that that those shared agreements and norms are being fulfilled. Because otherwise, you know, as you know, and you get to high schools, students complain and teachers complain. You know, why is, you know, certain people getting this rich kind of learning and other people getting something different.

29:23 You're talking then about something that's particular, which is trust that they're getting better. And here I just know humans too much and I love humans too much to put a burden on them to say that somehow, because you're a professional who wants to get better, then you will probably structure your time and limit limited energy to get better. Like a lot of people say, want to read more and they buy books that sit on the night stand, but they don't actually actually read anymore once they get out of holidays. Why? Because it's very hard to individually make that change. But if you join a book club, you go, could we do a book club? And everyone brings their own book, Kevin. They choose what that'll be more motivating. Yeah, it might be at the front end, but then it's a really boring conversation because we're not talking about the same thing.

30:11 And so sometimes it's worth reading a book that's not your number one choice, but it's still interesting because it's the collaborative thing that I know I'm going to book club in a week. So I'm going to read a chapter or two or I know I'm going to this because it's actually the peer effects that are deeply motivating. And actually something that I may not have necessarily said was that my number one, when I got into it, I still found a huge amount of depth and things of interest. So my view is, yes, assume that teachers like I was like you are like my wife, like my mother, like my mother-in-law, my sis, two sister in laws think they're wonderful humans and also expect that they're busy and overwhelmed and that the first thing that they will let go is practice improvement.

30:52 And it's actually a beautiful thing because what they could do is not do some of their job today in order to do practice improvement, not mark something, not run something, not be available at lunchtime. But what they constantly do is that they do their job rather than carving out time to get better at their job. And it actually comes from a beautiful intent. And today, if you do your job and don't carve out time to get better at your job, it doesn't matter. You do that this week, doesn't matter. You do that this month, do that this term, that's OK. But if you do that over and over again, what you get is a premature plateau. And so for me, Kevin, it's actually about saying as an organization, we do not put the burden of getting better on you as an individual. We do not say to you, you should be self motivated and find a time to do this.

31:42 No, we say we care about you. And one of our commitments to you is that whenever you leave us in one year, three years, 10 years, we want to have given you an opportunity to have got better at least one part of your craft every term, multiple parts of that craft every year. And when you leave us in a year, three, 5-10 years, we want you to look back and say, I'm a dramatically better practitioner. Not because I was self motivated all the time to carve out time to do it, but I just turned up and did my job. And when I turned up and did my job, like with teaching experience or Dylan's work or many, many others, there's a slot every term where I've got some time to do some learning and work out what is it is I want to actually try to get better at. There's a particular period when me and others are not just doing our job, we're dramatically trying to make an adjustment. I shouldn't say dramatically.

32:29 We are intentionally making an adjustment in a very small part of our craft and everyone's doing it the same. So we're like, yeah, we're flat out, it's busy. But you know, we're all doing our Sprint, we're all doing our, our cycle of improvement, we're all doing our impact cycle. And then we talk about, oh, that didn't work. I got halfway through the Sprint. To be honest, I totally dropped it. I just couldn't stand the practice. Oh, what was that about? Oh, the students were responding so poorly to my cold calling. I hated it. Really ruined the front end of my lesson. OK, let's talk about that. So my, my view, I suppose, is it's not about accountability. It's about culture and structures and rhythms and routines and making sure they're set time and a simple process to help people get better.

33:10 And then as far as choice, I mean, my, my, my book club analogy is there because I, I do wherever possible, say we should get as close as possible to doing something similar. And if you can't choose the same book, at least choose the same genre, right? And so, you know, you may not all want to work on the same questioning technique, but it'd be great if we're working on questioning or the same formative assessment medium, medium cycle or the same retrieval practice area, something that we're working on because we've just got more things to discuss. And lastly, in secondaries, at least, I see pedagogical change as a collective action problem. And so that mean what do you, what do you teach mate? My.

33:51 Teaching area math and PE. Fantastic, great combo. So if you if you know, if they get you in the morning and they're with Mr. Fulbrook in the morning and they're getting a maths lesson and your high demand, great classroom routine, good quality retrieval practice question at the early part with the hinge question of multiple choice that makes them think they're pulling out a mini whiteboard or doing some individual thinking before moving to a structured pair share. You don't take volunteers. They know you're going to come and ask what were you thinking? A good answer comes up and you build on that and you probe and it's just a really high demand safe environment of cognitive activation. And then they look at their timetime and they go, oh great, we got breaks here next.

34:35 And they turn up and straight away they know they can sit down. I only take volunteers when I ask for pair discussion. You don't have to think first. You can just turn to someone nearby. There's this whole thing where it's a pedagogical whiplash for the student, but also you get this huge learning yield out of the strategies that you're using. And then they just kind of come down in my classroom and actually in secondaries, if everyone can work on a set of things like what you're doing in the 1st 10 or 15 minutes of the lesson, especially for me, increasingly devices down a pedagogy of encounter, good quality questioning, everyone thinking, using that back and forth dialogue for the teacher to work out where she and he's going next. If that all happens, someone, the kids all start going, the teachers have all gone crazy. But secondly, you get this huge uplift because changing practice isn't just about what teachers do. It's also how students respond in the classroom routine. And if students are resisting that change, it's very hard for the teacher to carry on the practice. But if lots of teachers make changes, particularly things like questioning, checking for understanding, opportunities to respond, and it happens across the board, maybe with different techniques and in different styles, PE versus math versus science versus English history, there's this whole uplift and everyone's job gets easier in making that change. And so I would just say a lot of the time, motivation comes from making progress and feeling like you're collectively part of something.

35:55 And I reckon we've overplayed the hand if oh, I've only teachers had choice and we trust them, man. I've had choice on the books I read or the exercise programs. And you can trust me. I don't do it because I'm untrustworthy. I don't do it because I'm busy and everything else that's urgent has squeezed out that activity. And so for me, it's about structures, rhythms, cadence, culture, and it's not really about professionalism and effort. I don't know. How does that lamb with you? Yeah. Amazing, you know that, you know that that just connects so well with, you know, what you see in schools every day and and you know what you hear teachers saying and and what you see in classrooms and you know, I think a lot of it get missed. It gets missed a lot that you talk spoke about that pedagogical whiplash, you know, and you know, it's not very often where educators or administrators would walk a day in the shoes of a student to experience that themselves because that teacher just experiences their own classroom and make some assumptions about, you know, that child's experience in other classrooms or other subjects and and so forth.

37:06 And that can be an eye opening. As such, an eye opening experience for teachers is to to put themselves in during the entirety of a day to experience what students experience in that way. Now don't get me wrong, I'd love to see authenticity differences that some teachers are a little bit more charismatic and over the top than some teachers, you know, ask their questions. Actually, you know, sometimes sitting down at the front. I'm OK if some teachers are scribbling on boards and other people are using some slides. But the level of cognitive activation and demand that there would be a set of practices that would turn up very regularly as indicators that, you know, as my friend Tom Sherrington says, like are all students paying attention?

37:50 Are all students thinking? Are all students getting a chance to retrieve? Are all students practicing that Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary? Are all students getting seen and honored in the classroom because you will say their name and you will be interested in what they say and it's safe. Are all students getting that chance to build their oracy, which we know is going to be so much more important than other sort of technical skills? In an age where increasingly last time I'm a huge fan of everyone learning to write and to think and to be numerate, we know when they get out on the other side, increasingly AI enabled workforces will do some of that technical heavy lifting for them. But that ability to communicate, to have a compelling way to to speak and to draw on your knowledge, well, who's getting practice for that in the classroom?

38:38 Is it just the seven or eight kids who put their hand up? Is there a gender difference in that? Is there a racial difference in that? And so, you know, when we talk about high engagement, high cognitive activation, inclusive kind of classrooms, I want to see lots of consistency of certain practices that would unlock certain learning mechanisms. But I love the way that different teachers with different energy and pacing and accents and body movement and other things would do it in their own way. So I just, you know, I just want to say that I'm not saying about codification to reduce positive personality variability, but I want to remove variability around demand and cognitive activation. And I'm OK mate.

39:22 If you get there differently to me that you better have a way of justifying and articulating how it is that you're getting all students to be doing hard thinking and sharing and developing. And so that's that kind of loops us back to the beginning around it. It's the collective accountability to talk about why did I do what I did in the way I did. And you need to be able to articulate that. And it might differ from others that you can't just say, trust me, I'm a teacher. I was trained a while ago and you know, I haven't have had no complaints. Now you have to. Why is it that you set up your lessons the way you do? Why is it that you allow everyone to start on technology and you say, is everyone ready just to carry on with what we're doing before?

40:02 Like explain that from what you understand about learning and human development. And I'm open to it. But if you can't, you just want me to trust you because. You're a trained teacher, then I'd just say I'm really glad I don't turn up to hospitals that run that way, OK? Couple of quick questions to wrap things up, Simon about a. Couple of minutes. Go for it, yeah. A book that has most influenced your thinking. There's lots here. I'm a systems guy, so I would say that Richard Elmore, school reform from the inside out, the late Richard Elmore from Harvard would probably be an absolute killer. And just that core idea that even if we're talking about large scale change, we've got to get right down to the instructional core content, student, teacher, and everything we're trying to do in school leadership or policy and change has to have a theory about why it would change there. And he says things like no amount of external accountability can make up from a lack of internal accountability.

40:58 So it's all these internal kind of processes. Yeah. So that's a classic school reform from the inside out. Great. A daily or weekly habit that keeps you effective this is. Newer, I used to see my body as just a vehicle that carried my brain around. And I've always enjoyed sport and other things. But increasingly I see the connection between movement and my own cognitive activation and my own emotional regulation. And I've increasingly prioritized some type of exercise or movement. I don't have some amazing exercise routine, but even if it's simpler of like going for a walk or going for a run, if I'm in a hotel, going to the gym doing something.

41:41 And I've just found that I used to always say I just got to get into the day, get into some work, get the kids out the door, whatever else. And I've just found that that basic idea of prioritizing movement and exercise early, I find has made a big impact on like this time of the day for me. It's the afternoon. I'm much, much more cognitively switched on. And I find that I like people more. Very good. A leadership mistake that you still think about. A whole range of things that come up. Obviously my context is slightly different, but I think probably the things that come up for me early days would be how to best manage really talented people coming up and through. And probably being aware that sometimes when you're mentoring and bringing people through, they can be better than you at things earlier than you think.

42:39 And I think that sometimes I thought that I was on the chess board and that I was a bit intimidated sometimes when people are coming up and through and I had to realize that I was actually playing chess. And if I had a pawn that made it to the other end, I just got another queen and that was good. So I think sometimes out of a lack of real security, I didn't manage the highest performers I had well enough to bring them up to the table and the true sense of that. And therefore you don't keep them, they go on elsewhere. So I think that sort of self-awareness of not, not slowing up other people who are coming through, spotting that talent, moving them through and making sure you move them in the types of positions that they think, oh, I'm, I want to stay and keep growing here as opposed to perhaps feeling like I'm going to go off and go somewhere else now.

43:32 So I definitely feel that is something I've thought about, particularly when you think about certain talent that you should have stayed with you around you and that your mismanagement of that talent probably meant that you didn't get them working with you for that next season of, of of leadership. All right, and finally, one piece of advice for aspiring school leaders. Human. Human human as everyone's talking about how you can outsource increasing amount of the left brain type processes. If I use that, the analytic, the writing, the, the, the data crunching, the human skills are where the big premium is, Kevin. And so I would be investing seriously in my what I call my people leader tool kit.

44:17 And this means thinking seriously. You mentioned trust before, but what are your systematic strategies for building trust or repairing trust? What are your systematic strategies for seriously getting good at active listening? What are your strategies for avoiding taking on people's problems but helping build agency in a conversation for them to own it? What are your strategies for dealing with intergenerational teams or multi generational teams where people like us got into education as a full contact sport and we assumed it was going to ask everything of us? And you're now managing people with a very different social contract about what they understand teaching is and should be.

45:02 And so I think that people Leadership toolkit is increasingly the differentiator for up and coming aspiring leaders. And whilst, of course, I'm a big fan of getting your head around research and practice and other things, I would say systematically building up that toolkit because it it's important for your work with students, it's critical for your work with your own team. It's increasingly important for your work with parents that you're able to self regulate, be self aware, and that your interactions and the signals that you send to other humans are very intentional and that helped make them feel psychologically safe. You know, well listened to seen because I think increasingly, as many, many more people are, let's be faced face it, more dysregulated, as many people are pulling back from the full commitment that they might have given our institutions before. And as the teacher shortage means that people have got other options.

46:01 I think your people leadership is the is the key differentiator and I would systematically work on it and I would it's really hard, but actually ask for feedback about it. Fantastic. Well, that sounds like a great place to to leave things. So thanks so much Simon. I really enjoyed our our chat today. Really appreciate your time. Thanks Kevin. Great to connect talk about these ideas. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Take care. Thanks so much for listening to the episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to subscribe, like, follow, et cetera. Drop a comment below to let me know anything you'd like covered in upcoming episodes or suggestions for future guests. You can also connect with me on Instagram and LinkedIn.