Why Change in Education is So Hard (But it Doesn't Have to Be) - A Conversation with Dr James Mannion

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

We default to top-down change, not just in schools, but just in society. We just have this like baked-in assumption, that myth of the heroic leader who will sort of swoop in and save us from ourselves. There is more to change management than just having a small group of like-minded individuals at the top of an organization who are calling the shots.

Hi everyone.

My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs.

This week we're thinking about how change happens, or more often doesn't happen, in formal education and schooling. It's an old cliché, but a very true one, that change is hard in education. But what are some of the reasons why? And what are the practical approaches that education leaders sometimes miss when they're trying to initiate change management and innovation processes? I'm happy to welcome back Dr. James Mannion onto the podcast this week. To talk about this with me. In light of the recent publication of his book, Making Change Stick, he's done a fabulous job of synthesising a lot of the change management literature and techniques and strategies from across many disciplines so that you don't have to. James is the director of Rethinking Education, teacher training organisation dedicated to improving outcomes for children and young people through implementation science, self-regulated learning, and practitioner inquiry. He's also a fellow podcaster at the Rethinking Education podcast. Among many other things, James is an associate of Aura C Cambridge, the Hughes Hall Centre for Effective Spoken Communication. He's also the author, with Kate McAllister, of Fear Is the Mind Killer: Why Learning to Learn Deserves Lesson Time, and most recently, Making Change Stick: A Practical Guide to Implementing School Improvement. You can also check out the first conversation I did with James in episode 34 back in 2021.

All right. Brilliant. Thanks, James. Very good to see you again. It's been a while, couple of years, I think. And certainly initially spoke on the podcast a few years ago about your Learning to Learn work. Amazing stuff.

Yes.

And good to have you back.

Yeah. Thank you very much. It's good to be back. It has been definitely a while. I've been in the writing bunker for longer than you would care to recall, but I'm emerging into the blinding light. Like I always think of Like that scene in Shawshank, you know, when he, when he goes through the tunnel of Andy Dufresne. Andy Dufresne. Yeah. And came up smelling of roses.

But well, I'd say, I mean, certainly from what it sounds like you're doing a lot more than just writing, right? Out there with the Welsh government and all sorts. So hopefully we can, you know, touch on some of that work.

Yeah. Yeah. Lots going on.

Still podcasting as a fellow podcaster with Rethinking Education. So maybe that's where we can start. Start, just because I was thinking about that as I was preparing, just in relation to how you're holding the things, because you're doing a lot of work in this kind of school improvement space with implementation science and Making Change Stick and the book and really powerful work with schools. And then at the same time, you're rethinking education wholly through the podcast and other work. So I just, yeah, maybe as a way in, we can think about how are you holding the kind of tensions or dissonance between those two things?

Yeah, it's interesting. So, so that sort of slight dissonance has always been at the, at the heart of my work where like, yeah, on the one hand, the work that I'm doing is essentially school improvement, like helping schools to develop their practice around learner effectiveness is the big focus of this project I've been doing with the Welsh government that you mentioned, implementation science, change management, and so on, and practitioner inquiry as well. I do a bit of work around that. Like, so teachers just, you know, inquiring into their practice and getting better in that way. And then the, the other side, yeah, is that like the podcast and running conferences and publishing blogs and things, which is more about critiquing the system really. But, but essentially it's the way that I square the circle is that I think about it as like on the one hand school improvement and on the other hand system improvement. And, and I'm starting to focus more on like solutions-focused stuff. It's a bit of a cheesy phrase, isn't it? But you know, instead of just critiquing the system and saying, oh, you know, this is bad, or look at the absentee crisis or the mental health crisis, we 'do better' sort of, you know, moralizing tone, uh, which I think I've possibly been guilty of in the past. It's much more just about like coming up with proactive solutions. So I've been working with this group called the Education Policy Alliance for the last couple of years, and we've published a couple of papers, one on accountability and Ofsted, which has been in the news a lot in this country in the recent years, and we did one on mental health and well-being recently, and we've got our first conference later this year, which is really about— it's again about health and well-being, but it's about like, what can we do now? Like, there's this sort of hashtag like #WeAreTheSystem that we don't need to wait for some Secretary of State to pass some white paper or policy or whatever in order for us to do better in terms of promoting well-being. Some schools, some teachers are really like doing amazing things on that already. So let's just learn from each other and think about what we can already do now within the system. And so it's becoming a bit more sort of practically focused rather than just the critique, but the critique is important as well, you know?

Yeah, no, I mean, I hear you very much. It really resonates. I feel definitely I fall into that trap as well. And the podcast does. Sometimes we get lost in the dialogue around the big ideas rather than actually, that is the reality, right? On the ground that there are teachers in classrooms, there are people not in school, there are people building alternatives. So it's, I very much hear you. How can we focus more on the, on the ground level grassroots building that's happening and not just be the one sitting on the sidelines critiquing?

Yes.

While, as you say, clearly the critique is important, but it does feel a little bit self-serving sometimes and a bit aimless, I would say.

Yeah. I mean, there has to be a rationale for change, you know, like with anything, like the start with why has almost become a cliché, hasn't it? But then, so, so in the book, in the Making Change Stick book, pretty much the first 4 chapters is like a Rationale and Overview, and it's essentially a critique of top-down change, which is probably a bit heavy, you know, for like— people are so busy, like, it's a very difficult area to get into. People are so busy that they're like, I haven't got time to read 100 pages critiquing top-down change, just give me practical ideas that I can use tomorrow. And the book contains loads of those practical ideas, but without that critique, like I say, like, you need to make a very strong case for understanding why it is that we need to change. And again, that's another cliché, isn't it? Change the way we change. But that is very precisely what we need to do, because our best guess, as far as we can gather— it's not easy to get accurate data on this— but something like 80 to 90% of change initiatives in schools, of so-called improvement initiatives, don't actually improve anything, you know. And that's just a gargantuan waste of everybody's time and resources and goodwill, you know. And, and, you know, if we look at issues around teacher retention, for example, I think that that's a huge part of it. And like the fatigue that comes with sort of just, oh God, there's this nother new thing that we're expected to do now on top of everything else. And it's not really been well thought through or well communicated. And nobody's talking about what we can do less of now to make way for this. It's just always on top of, on top of everything else. And so we need to have a conversation about, you know, the way in which we implement change currently, which is quite a brutal analysis. It's like, why are we doing this? And what's fascinating about that, that statistic is that it doesn't seem to stop. Everybody knows it. If I ask a room full of people what proportion of change initiatives actually improve anything, most often people say that, that figure, sort of 10 to 20% at best actually make things better. And everybody knows that. And yet that doesn't seem to stop them from implementing the next thing and the next and the next, you know.

And where do you, because I was thinking about that as well in preparation for this, is this idea that perhaps change should be hard in education, right? So there's something there for me around, yeah, what I suppose the question is, why do you think it is so frequently unsuccessful. So there's kind of common pitfalls of change management kind of approaches, but there's also the bigger question of are we even clear about why and how we're trying to change the system, right? Or just even just some basic aspects of pedagogy or curriculum, or it sometimes feels to me that at a very high level, there's probably, there's probably some agreement on one side, but then there's significant pushback, I think, which you highlight really well in the Rethinking Education podcast, engaging with the different sides of the debate, even at a country level, it's really difficult to get any kind of consensus about why and how we should change. So yeah, I don't know what your reflections are about why is the change hard and, and actually maybe it should be.

Yeah. I mean, there's no question it's really hard. I don't think that we should beat ourselves up too badly about the fact that the, that the success rate is so low. Because if you think about just on a per— on an individual level, you know, if you want to change something about your own life, like if you want to read more novels, I'm trying to read more poetry at the moment. If you want to go to the gym, change your diet, go to bed earlier, all of that stuff, it's really hard to keep it going. Like the so-called New Year's resolution syndrome, the exercise app Strava, there's a stat in the book, Strava do this analysis every year of like how often people, when people give up on their New Year's resolutions and it's like mid-January and you know, yeah, fast forward a few weeks and months and I probably won't be reading poetry every day. I just probably won't. And that's, you know, it's not really a reflection on me as a person. It's just like, it's just, it is really hard to change your stripes, especially as you get older and you just get more sort of set in your ways and things become more automated and habitualized. And so if you're talking about organizational change, even in a small primary school, let alone across like, you know, a network of schools or a whole system, the scale of the challenge is not to be underestimated at all. And that's not to say that it's a hopeless situation, but then you raised another really interesting question there, which is like, why? Well, there's a few things in that question. One was like, why should we change? Like, what are the— there's a shiny new thing syndrome, isn't there? I think that sometimes people can see that things aren't working as well as they might. Maybe their results are low. Maybe there's mental health issues. There's absentee issues. There's teacher retention. And clearly there's some reason, or like low, you know, they've been told by Ofsted or some inspectors that something isn't good enough and so they need to change. But there's a bit of a shiny new thing syndrome, I think, which is like, let's just do this new thing rather than just like making the current things that we do, say, to promote literacy across the school. Let's just really examine those carefully and figure out what minor tweaks we need to make to make those more effective. It's like, right, we're going to buy in a whole new scheme and we're going to do this whole thing and out with the old, in with the new. And, and it's a lot more just like cognitively and emotionally It's a lot more attractive to go after the shiny new thing than it is to the relentless grind of just like making stuff work over a period of years. It's just like a lot more appealing. And so I think there's a bit of that. There's a reason for the churn. It's just that the shiny new thing always holds the promise that this will be the golden goose that will deliver us the golden egg or whatever.

And in a way, there's a kind of a— it makes me think of Daisy Christodoulou and the kind of things that stick, the things that really persist over a long time are probably the things we should focus on rather than the shiny new things that have just come in, right? That will probably— an argument for the classics and going back to the more knowledge-rich traditionalist kind of canon idea, because that's been around a long time and therefore we should resist some of the shiny technology and the shiny new innovations and actually just really reconnect with the things that have been around for a long time and stood the test of time. And maybe we should just double down on those. I don't agree with that, but I'm, you know, there is an argument there, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's not the whole analysis, is it? But there's definitely like a little more impulse control would perhaps, you know, not go amiss in certain cases. In the book, like, so I talk about these two sort of big reasons when you asked earlier, like, why is it that the success rate is so low? What's the problem here? And I think one of them is just very simply that teachers and school leaders aren't taught this stuff. They're not taught about how to implement change effectively. When you, in this country, when you become a senior leader, you do an NPQ. National Professional Qualification, and there's a few different versions now. And in the old system, the version that the vast majority of current school leaders went through, there was really not very much stuff on implementation and change at all. There was a bit— you're expected to do an implementation project across that year, but, you know, there wasn't really much explicit guidance around how to do that or how to implement change generally. And that's rather an oversight, I would suggest, given that, you know, it's basically your job at least significant part of your job as a school leader is to make things better, to lead change, right? Not just to lead the status quo, to manage it, but to actually implement, to make things better, right? And then the second one is that we— is top-down. We just, we default to top-down change, not just in schools but just in society. We just have this like baked-in assumption that the myth of the heroic leader who will sort of swoop in and save us from ourselves— and we see that in business, in politics, in, in sports, in all kinds of different places— the manager, the football manager come in and turn this. And of course, you know, like leadership, I'm not denying the existence of leadership or that you can have good leadership and bad leadership and so on. But there is more to change management than just having a small group of like-minded individuals at the top of an organization who are calling the shots. And I think that you need to distinguish there between change initiatives where you just sort of need like swift, decisive action to be taken, in which case top-down is great because they have the power to just make stuff happen. But when we're talking about these more very multi-layered, deep-rooted problems in education, that might be things like the disadvantage gap, which is very stubborn and widening, or at least remaining very, very wide despite many years of efforts to sort that out. Literacy rates are really low. Kids, you know, are not reading books. Adults aren't reading books. You know, we spend a lot of time in schools teaching people how to read, but we're not teaching them how to become readers. Like something like almost half of adults never read a book ever. And more widely in society, you might think about climate change, or in this country, the social care crisis just keeps getting kicked down the road, or like life expectancy is going down for the first time in decades. These very deep-rooted problems, very clearly, like the small number of people at the top of the pyramids who have the levers of power aren't, they don't have the answers to these questions. And so we need to have some fresh approach to thinking about how to implement change.

Well, absolutely. And I mean, that's a perfect segue really into— I found it really powerful hearing you speak about it previously in an earlier conversation, but also reading about it in the book when you yourself discovered this thing called implementation science. So maybe, you know, just in the spirit of more kind of proactive building and solutions-focused stuff, I mean, maybe you could talk a little bit about that specifically. What did you see there that you had not ever seen before? And then, yeah, how are you starting to think about that in an education context?

Yeah, great question. So, so yeah, it was a really jaw-dropping— I sort of stumbled upon this conference about 11 years ago now about implementation science, and it's a health discipline. So implement— there's an implementation science journal, it's a health journal, and it's not even particularly well known within the world of healthcare, but it's just that implementation science is essentially about scaling up things that we know to work. And so there's an example that's in the book about asthma. In Cincinnati Children's Hospital a few years ago, there was a very high level of hospital admissions due to asthma. And we know how to fix asthma. It's like you give kids Ventolin. It's really good at dealing with when they get wheezy, but also preventing more deep-rooted problems. But the kids basically weren't taking their asthma medication. And so they took this sort of slice team approach where clinicians from the hospital were involved in the decision-making, but also they brought in school nurses, pharmacists, asthma patients themselves and their families. So they're like, everybody who's got some relevant perspective on this problem, let's talk to them. And the school nurses said things like, kids are forgetful, they leave their stuff at home, or maybe they've got two houses and they leave it at their mum's house or whatever it might be. And so they were like, okay, so let's just make sure that the medication is always available in school. And those kids who have two houses, we'll give them two lots. And like, the pharmacist said things like, patients, they don't often pick up their prescription, they just leave them there in the tray because they work long hours, they don't have a car.. So they just started delivering them to people's houses. The asthma patients said there's mold and damp in the home. And so they started giving them legal aid to take on their landlords and also, you know, squirty bottles and sponges to wipe all the mold away.

Right.

So it's just like a root cause analysis essentially that's informed by this rich range of perspectives. So wherever you identify what are the causes, why are these kids not taking this medication? And then you fix those problems. And lo and behold, you know, the admission rate to hospital reduced by more than half. Led to like huge changes in reductions in workplace absenteeism, school absenteeism, massive financial savings for the hospital, right? Because they don't have to deal with all this stuff. It's like a win-win-win-win-win situation. And there's many other examples from the world of healthcare where they've taken this sort of essentially it's like representative decision-making model of slice teams. And so, yeah, I came across and they go by different names, slice teams, sometimes they call it a transformation zone. And yeah, one of the first things that I discovered is that implementation science isn't the only thing. So like I said, implementation science is about scaling up things that we know to work, like asthma medication. But also there's improvement science, which sort of comes earlier in the process, which is about iterating and tweaking and being systematic and looking at it at the, at the level of the user, whether that's an early career teacher or the parent or the student or whoever. How is this playing out on the ground? And then there's a load of other change management tools and ideas that are out there in the world, in business and politics, in psychology and sociology and what have you. So I sort of did this big trawl. I just got really geeky into, into reading all of this stuff, which is often quite dense and unpleasant to read. It's not a page-turner, you know, the change literature. But, you know, there's just so many brilliant ideas that people have worked out over the years. And so I sort of compiled them together into this program. And then the second bit of your question, you asked about how does this play out in schools. Essentially, we— the big idea that drives this whole approach really is that you assemble one of these slice teams. So in a school, that involves perhaps the headteacher or a senior leader, middle leaders, early career teachers, special needs coordinator, sometimes kids' parents, site staff, lunchtime supervisors, all the people who have a relevant perspective on whatever the problem is that you're trying to improve or solve. And that's not just a consultation exercise. Like, it's really important to emphasize that it's not just a little talking shop and then we just roll out the policy that we already had in our back pocket. This group essentially becomes the executive that's tasked with overseeing this particular aspect of school improvement, whether it's like behavior, formative assessment, science of learning stuff, feedback, whatever it might be. And it's also a given time, right? So like, change takes time. That's one of the really important things. One of the reasons that we so often see, to go back to your earlier question, that things so often don't work is that we don't think about it over a 3-year period, say. We sort of think about it within 1 year, and then it just goes onto the back burner and then sort of falls down the back of the oven and goes moldy when the next thing comes along.

Exactly. But the thing I find so powerful about it is that it really kind of resonates with what you were saying earlier about being discerning about the kinds of change we're trying to implement. So like, for example, Dave Snowden in the Cynefin framework talks about complicated and complex and chaotic and clear contexts in which leaders are working in, right? And so they bring the right approach based on an analysis of the kind of context they're working in, right? So for example, in your example, if it's a safeguarding issue, if it's a security issue, you're not gonna start assembling a slice team to get relevant perspective. You know, you just need to act at a certain point because it's time sensitive, it's pretty clear domain. You have expertise, you can just, you can move forward. And that's where top-down is really important, right? Because it's fast, it's efficient, it's clear. But what you're describing now, I think, is lots of amazing examples of really thorny, complex problems in the ecologies of schools and the associated ecosystems that they're part of. So in those contexts, you have to fundamentally respond differently, right? You can't— the top-down approach that works in the very clear domain really does not work in the complex domain. And so that idea of understanding all the, as many different perspectives as you can on that thing feels really powerfully important in that kind of situation.

Yeah, completely. I agree. Yeah. And so I have to use a slightly different framework in the book, but it's, if you think about like the sort of like the priority matrix of just like effort and impact, and if you've got like low effort, high impact stuff, then do that straight away. But we're talking about like the upper quadrant, like high effort, high impact stuff, things that are by definition worth doing, but hard to do.

Yeah. And can I ask, is the approach known as to what works, to coin a phrase that we hear a lot, in that domain, but it's just hard? Or is there a sense that we're not quite sure what works for improving literacy or for, you know, school attendance or whatever it is? But we're going to try multiple different parallel experiments and see what sticks, see what works.

Yes. So I'm not sure I describe it as parallel experiments. I suppose you could describe it as that. So one thing that I talk about in the book is like this idea of change as a complex intervention. So like an intervention with many moving parts. And so you sort of, you build your complex intervention. So let's say it's around behavior, right? So behavior isn't— you've been told that behavior isn't good at the school. Teachers are saying this, we need to deal with behavior. And so you come up with this plan and you're like, okay, so we've far too many rules. So we're going to just going to come up with just like 3 rules, right? So like ready, respectful, safe. Lots of schools have, it's got these 3 things and we've got all of the conversations around behavior are going to pivot around those 3 things. Everyone can remember 3 things. And we're also going to have a new duty rota because we're aware that lots of issues are happening at like lunchtime. And we're also going to have a peer mentoring program and so on. So you might have like 5 or 10 or however many little small sort of things that you're going to do to try to improve behavior. Maybe some training for teachers and what have you, a new recording procedure. And then you really need to be collecting data on each of those things, right? And this is something that schools often don't like. It's a tough sell, this one, because it sounds like a lot of work, but it actually, it's really not. If you use sampling, if you're strategic about when you collect data and the extent to which you collect data. But if you just do a little sample of like 5 kids, in September and then different 5 kids in December and again in April. And you're just like, what are the school rules? Do you know them? Yes or no? And if they're still sticking over that year, then you're like, okay, cool. That bit's working well and we don't need to do that. And so one of the things that we talk about, there's a whole chapter in the book called Pivot or Persevere, where once you've got this sort of stuff all set up, so you've got this, this complex intervention and you're collecting data just to take the pulse of how each of these things work. And then you have these pivot or persevere meetings where you come together with the slice team. Review that data as it comes in and you think like, what's working well here and what actually do we need to still be perhaps tweaking or pivoting? And pivot doesn't necessarily mean chuck it in the bin and pivot to something completely different. You can zoom in, you can zoom out, you can change the— yeah, it's essentially about agile organizational leadership.

Yeah, and it also, it reminds me of what you talk about in the book about building a glass box as well. It feels like there's a connection there with this idea of Do you actually know what's going on? I mean, if you're, if you've got a sense of transparency and openness about a broader conversation about do we actually know whether this is working or not, or is there so much ego built into this idea that it has to work because the leader said so, then we're not really going to look at the actual data as to whether it is working or not.

Right. Absolutely. Yeah. They're like confirmation bias, the mother of all human cognitive biases. And everyone does that. They're like, oh, that, yeah, that, I like that piece of data because it reaffirms my worldview and that one. I don't like that, so I'm just going to put that in the bin and just pretend that I didn't see it. And I think that we're all a bit guilty of that to some extent. And that's one of the reasons that this, that this approach I think is really powerful is that it helps us to challenge and confront those biases head on. And, and so, yeah, that chapter on building a glass box is really important. So I think the other side of the top-down thing, we talked about top-down change earlier, but also it's black box change. You know, there's like a leadership team is in a room, the door's shut. There is no public viewing gallery. They don't publish the minutes of their meetings. They're just having these meetings behind closed doors and then just announcing to everybody what's going to happen now. And it's like just a basic understanding of human nature. People don't like being told what to do, even when it's a good idea, you know, like even like, there's just something about human nature. We need to feel like we've been included, been, had our views respected and listened to and understood. And so when you work with the Slice team, Two things happen. Number one, you get much better decision-making because you're looking at it through all of these different eyes. And we could talk a bit, if you like, about, about what happens in that slice team and how we make—

Yeah, no, I'd love to.

But also you get buy-in because people can see that they are represented on this team, that there's somebody like them with whom they can interact. They understand that the early career teacher is going to be represented, and so is the, you know, the special needs kid and what have you, going to be represented and thought about in these decision-making processes. And so instead of having that sort of compliance mindset where it's like, oh, I'm gonna— all right, fine, I'll do this thing, but only because I'll get into trouble if I don't. But I don't actually live this policy in my bones. And once the classroom doors close, I'm probably not going to do that, you know, I'm just going to go back to doing what I normally do.

Absolutely. But also, I would say, not only a compliance mindset and a kind of a sense that people want to be the masters of their own destiny and their professionalism, but also you also talk about in the book, the ethical considerations of using behavioral science to shape habits. And I— that's something that I— it's a bit of a trigger for me because there's a strange manipulation going on there, right? I've got the weapons of the best behavioral science and I'm going to shape your habits and I'm going to do it so well that you won't even notice and you'll thank me for it at the end.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's— that's— I mean, it's so interesting, that conversation. So that's in the— there's a chapter on habit change and habits. You sort of came quite late to my thinking. But it was just— it's so important because human beings are creatures of habit, right? Something like 40%, 50%, it's estimated, of human behavior. We do the same stuff, the same place at the same time most days. We're very predictable. And in schools, even more so. Even more. This is such regimented places. And so people's automated habitual behaviors, where they stand, how they speak to kids, how they start the lesson, when and where they plan lessons, how long they spend, whether they use tech, the extent to which they do all of that stuff. Is largely just sort of automated. And therefore, if you're wanting to change— we're talking about organizational change— that's the medium through which that change needs to happen, and you need to look at it through that lens. But you immediately run into this ethical brick wall, which is like, that's like people's unconscious behaviors or unconscious desires, unconscious modes of being. We need to like get inside people's heads and rewire how they work on an unconscious level.

Yeah. And that's not a comfortable conversation to have because I've decided that habit that you have and you've kind of patterned around your life is the wrong one, and I'm going to fix it, and I'm going to replace it with the right one, if that had come as right.

Yeah, and the scary thing is that that stuff works. Like, the behavioral science really works, like nudge theory and all that. Like, you know, there's a reason that the nudge unit was part of government for a while back there. Like, this stuff gets results. Like, it really works. And so, yeah, there are ethical considerations that come with I don't think that it's, you know, an intractable problem. You use it strategically and you also use it transparently. This goes back to that glass box thing. And so you bring people into the conversation. We're not just like sitting in a back in the black box, pulling levers and changing people's behaviors. It's like, let's all talk about our habit change. And if we want to, for example, you know, like lots of schools, for example, they talk about the importance of cold calling, hands-down questioning. But I used to find as a teacher, I sort of knew that that was a good idea. But if a kid put their hand up, I would just automatically just go, yes, what do you want? And so behaviorally, it's really hard to change, to become a hands-down practitioner when it's just such a strong human instinct to respond to need or to respond to a sign of curiosity or engagement or whatever. And so just transparently say, okay, so like, how can we make it so that we don't respond to that stimulus, so that we respond differently when that happens? And how can we comes down to metacognition often. It's like having the awareness and the wherewithal to notice when things happen and to think, ah, okay, this is a pattern that I could actually step out of.

Yeah, I mean, that's interesting, isn't it? Because it's almost like a meta-reflexivity about the way that the organization develops habits, right? But then you're also asking individual professionals to become reflexive about their own habit formation and routines in relation to the broader kind of organizational strategy. So no, it's, it really interests me. I mean, just, it struck me that also one of the things that perhaps mitigates for the ethical stuff is the slice team, because again, you've got some sense of a diverse team, a representative team that is leading with transparency, the change initiative. So I don't know, maybe, yeah. Is there a practical example that you've seen or you've worked with a school on that perhaps you could just briefly talk through that would give people a sense, like you say, of what exactly goes on in that slice team and how does it actually operationalize?

Yeah, sure. Yeah. So one thing is that you don't want to fall into that same groupthink, like a part of the analysis of the top-down change issue, you know, groupthink is such a fascinating topic. Irving Janis. Yeah. So Janis was looking at, this is way back in the '70s. He was looking at like, how could like some of the smartest people in the world were sitting in rooms behind closed doors and making just terrible decisions about, in that case, around things like the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, disastrous ongoing decision-making around the war in Vietnam at the time. And he was like, well, how can this be? Like, these people have got like 3 PhDs from like Ivy League universities. How can they be just making such terrible decisions? And he, he sort of identified this phenomenon of groupthink, where when you have a group of like-minded people people come to value their role within that group even more so than the need for like clarity around decision-making. And so if Person A with 3 PhDs says, I think we need to do X, and they use very clever sounding language and it sounds really impressive the way that they put it, and you might have a nagging doubt, but you're like, oh, I don't want to have this big argument with Person X. They're really influential. And so, you know, I'm just going to bite my tongue and I'll just go along with it and it'll probably be fine.. And that sort of thing happens all the time. People don't want to contradict their boss. You know, if the head teacher says we need to do X and there's somebody like, oh, actually, you know what, we did this in our last school, really went badly. I don't think we should do this, but I'm not gonna have this out with my boss, even privately, let alone in a public forum, cuz it's not gonna go well. Might not be a smart career move either. And so people bite their tongue. And so you get this groupthink because of, you know, like conformity to that group norm, if you like. And so you want to take steps to make sure that the slice team doesn't fall into that same sort of pattern of groupthink. And you need to sort of keep it constantly in check. And so one of the things we do is to use ground rules to make clear that, and we do this in classrooms all the time in my work around oracy, ground rules to govern how you speak together in a group or a pair to make sure that that conversation goes well. Everybody gets the chance to speak. You know, we give reasons for our thinking. We build on the ideas of others, you know, all of that stuff. Essentially a version of that in the SAICE team. So we sort of say, first of all, everybody's an equal, right? So even though there's an implicit hierarchy or even an explicit hierarchy, there are senior leaders and middle leaders and classroom assistants in this room. Around this table, everybody is equally responsible for contributing to this process and also for implementing it over time. So it's not just, like I say, it's not just a consultation exercise and then the leader takes it and runs with it.

Yeah, nice. And can I just clarify, are you— is it self-facilitated or do you have someone who's actually facilitating the process?

Yeah. So the idea is that it's organized within— I mean, sometimes there's a chair for a meeting and some people might— it varies. So some schools might say this is going to be the chair for each of the meetings. Some people prefer to have a rotating chair. Personally, I prefer a rotating chair so that everybody gets experience of that because that's another thing that people aren't taught about, man, like how to chair meetings. Like how many terrible meetings have you sat in in your life Which, so many people say that in education. They're like, that could have been, it was just so irrelevant to most of the people there. Like that could have been an email. We're all just wasting our time. And so the more people can get experience of chairing meetings, I think the better. Yeah. So the idea is that it's held by the team. It's very much a collective decision-making process. And I'll share with an example of what that looks like. Yeah. To go back to the ground rules, one of the really important ones is all relevant information will be shared, especially if it's inconvenient information, especially if it's contradicting what somebody's just said. So it's like if we're making decisions that affect lots of people's lives, we need to have robust discussions where you can like check your ego at the door, be prepared to be challenged on things, be prepared to change your mind, but don't sort of just like say, oh, like just in the name of efficiency, we're not going to have that difficult conversation. Like you need to have it out. And bearing in mind, of course, that you're trying to make, get things done here. And so, you know, you want to find ways to negotiate and reach agreement and compromise where that's needed. And one, one of the nice ways that we can, that we make that happen is this, this exercise called 5-minute interviews, where early on in the process you come up with a set of questions. Let's say your initiative is around feedback, improving feedback with kids. So you might say, what do you think about this feedback initiative? You know, do you agree that this is a priority for the school at this point in time? Or actually, do you think we really need to focus on X first? You know, like, what questions do you have? What What ideas or concerns do you have, say? And then each member of the Slice team goes away and talks to other people like them, right? So the classroom assistant talks to other classroom assistants, and not just the ones that are their mates that then they know will agree with. We want to talk to people who are skeptical, you know, neutral, and keen beans alike, and really get a sense of what people are thinking. And then when the next time they meet, the Slice team members share their feedback, but they also roll in their own views with the, this anonymized feedback. So it provides this nice safe mechanism by which people can share their honest views.

Yeah, nice. Because there's something there as well, isn't there, in the dissenting voices are often the ones that don't speak up for fear of putting their head above the parapet, etc., you know?

Yeah.

And if it's something about the tone of the whole exercise, if you can encourage the dissenting voices, that feels like a really important aspect.

Absolutely. Yeah. And those schools that I work with often say it's surprising who applies to join this slice team because there are some people who might be a dissenting voice, and people assume that they are just like jaded and cynical and just not into it, but actually they really deeply care about stuff, but they just are frustrated about the way that, you know, all these change initiatives that don't actually improve anything. And so when an opportunity comes around to get involved in, you know, shaping decisions, they're like, great, you know, like it's lovely to see. And so there'd be an example from a school that I worked with where they were implementing what they called Initially they were calling it a teaching and learning checklist. So they were like, the checklists were around at the time. There was a book called The Checklist Manifesto and the checklists were being used in, in medicine and so on and bringing about good effects. And so they were like, yeah, let's have a teaching and learning checklist. And it was all in terms of like, this is how to mark books, this is how to start a lesson, this is how to do feedback, this is behavior management, and so on and so on. And they floated this checklist idea out through these 5-minute interviews. And very quickly got the information back that people really didn't like it. It just felt like nobody's ever going to be able to check all of those boxes in every day of their lives. And so it just felt like we're always being measured against this impossible ideal. So they started referring to it as a reflection tool. So it's just like, this is just a tool of ideas that we can use to reflect on your practice as a coaching tool in professional learning within your departments. He's like, yeah, so let's just look at these areas. We could maybe do a little self-evaluation thing. Which of these things do you think are the most pertinent issues at the moment with regard to these particular classes that you're teaching? And yeah, that went much better. And I often find that when you do that 5-minute interview thing, there's often like a sharp correction early on, and people are like, oh, okay, yeah, we're framing this the wrong way, the language is rubbing people up the wrong way. But people often say like, we're never going to not do this now because we really get a sense of what people are thinking across the school, and that, that richly informs the decision-making process.

Yeah, well, it's that exactly, that incredibly useful feedback, because I mean, in a way it sounds obvious that a checklist has a very different atmosphere than a reflection tool, right? In it, just in the name, right? In what it says about the culture of an organization which implements that, whereas perhaps that wasn't the intention in the initial idea of the checklist. Useless, but that's how people receive it. And you don't know that until you actually speak with them.

Yes, absolutely. And that was a nice example, I think, of how— and the meat of the policy didn't really change that much. Like, the content of the tool didn't change that much. It was just about framing and language, right?

That's interesting. But then it also has to be— it can't just be lipstick on a pig, right? Like, it can't just be rebranding the same thing because otherwise there's a cynicism that is importantly there, I think, amongst staff that it's just a rebranding exercise, but the same checking, accountability, measurement kind of culture is still being implemented, even though we've called it now a reflection tool.

I mean, in that case, I don't think that it was like a very sort of top-heavy school. It was all about a compliance mindset. It was a very forward-thinking school. Yeah, I think that they just realized that they just got the language wrong, but the basic idea was let's just like be explicit about what good looks like. Let's just have a shared vision. Of what good looks like so that everybody's on the same page, literally like single page of A4.

Yeah.

So in that case, I think that it was okay. But yeah, I agree with you, you know, authenticity and showing vulnerability, right, as leaders and just like being open about when things haven't worked as well as when they have. And like the communication around that as well is really key. Do you know what? One of the things that really surprised me when I was writing this book was just how many ideas there are that are just really commonplace in other fields, in industry, in healthcare, in politics. Things like having a comms plan or doing a root cause analysis or project management, basic sort of bread and butter issues that just— for— I don't understand why, but these things are just often not used in education. Comms especially, like, and on the podcast that I did a while ago, somebody picked up on that language and they're like, oh, it sounds a bit corporate, doesn't it? Comms. And it's Well, you know, maybe that's what— that's the effect that it has on you. But if you're arguing that we shouldn't have comms because they use them in businesses, then that's just a bad argument. And so often if you talk to people in schools like, why did that initiative not work very well? They're often like, miscommunication, lack of communication, conflicting communications. Like, it's such a massive, massive reason and it's not planned out. And it's actually quite complicated, comms, because there's all these channels. You know, you've got like one-to-many channels, like broadcast channels, which we often think about— emails and newsletters and the website and what have you. Then there's many-to-one, you know, you might have an inbox, you might have some, you know, some like a suggestion box and data collection. There's also many-to-many, things like professional learning, like dialogic approaches to professional learning where people are all talking with each other a lot, oracy. And then there's one-to-one, and you need to think about how you're using all of these different channels in a strategic way and like calendared throughout the year. And so that it's not just the same person just sounding like a stuck record, but you've got different people, surprising people communicating about your feedback initiative to different audiences through different channels at different times of the year. And it's amazing when you see that actually working in action. And then you just set reminders and it's like, right, so it's, you know, mid-November. So it's your turn to stand up in the staff briefing and just to talk for a minute about this, this method that you've been using with your classes and what have you. And it just builds this sense of momentum for change. It's like, oh wow, this is what people are talking about. And that's really key as well. If I just add one more thing on there, one of the chapters in the book is called Diffusion of Innovations, and it's about how ideas spread through a population from the keen beans through to the ardent resistors. And the answer to that question is people talking to people about your innovation. That is it. Like, if this whole conversation boils down to one thing, it's that, like, How can you as a school leader engineer ways for people to talk to people about your change initiative? And the more ways that you can find to do that, the more likely it is that this sort of the so-called the halo effect, like the neighbor effect, is going to spread from that classroom to that classroom, down the corridor and throughout the school. And so it's actually quite a simple thing to organize when it comes down to it.

Amazing. Thank you, James. I really appreciate how much depth and thought you put into it and how much you engage in dialogue around as you develop the ideas. That's something I really admire about the way you work, is you're always inviting dialogue and living what you're saying about the taking the feedback and the transparent work. So I really so appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you very much. It's really nice to reconnect with you, Tim, and hopefully it won't be too long before the next one.

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