Reflections on my leadership

Walking through corridors on a busy day it's easy to participate in shallow conversation with students and it's even easier to ignore them all together, put your head down and get to your next lesson (or the tranquility of the staff room!). Students need to feel as if they are an important part of our lives. They want us to care and they want to have meaningful conversations with them. Unfortunately too many schools are rife with shallow and meaningless conversations that are more detrimental to student motivation than not speaking to them at all. Let me give you some examples of shallow conversations I've regularly heard during my time in education: "Hey, how are you?" "Are you OK?" "How's your day going?" Initially these appear to be absolutely fine comments to be saying to students. They seem pretty caring and considerate, however think about the responses you normally get from these questions? "Yeah, fine", "Not t...

Over the past 2 decades the education system has become obsessed with trying to measure every aspect of performance. We measure outcomes, quality of teaching and learning, the impact of interventions, student progress, quality of marking and feedback and the list goes on. In January 2018 figures compiled by the Liberal Democrats found that "a ltogether 1.3 million days have been taken off by teachers for stress and mental health reasons in the last four years, including around 312,000 in 2016-17" (The Guardian ' Epidemic of stress' blamed for 3,750 teachers on long-term sick leave'  11/01/2018 ).  One of the key reasons teacher's feel under pressure within the work place is the constant scrutiny they find themselves  under as schools strive to measure all aspects of performance. Even the idea that you can measure students progress during a 30 minute observation would have been laughed out of school staff rooms 30 years ago, but these days we find this to...