One of the hardest parts of my job is what I call ‘the long look’.  This is the art of thinking in to the future – knowing where I want to go and carefully implementing the incremental steps, day by day, term by term, year by year – and not rushing to do it all at once. I learned something valuable very early on that was imbued in me from years in the sporting world – there is no rush to win.  This is an essential ingredient in building a happy school.  Without it, there is too much change at once or surface change – superficial change – without the depth of work required first.  This creates burnout and/or a trail of failed initiatives and ideas which ultimately have the people you lead stop wanting to follow.  And, if you’re leading and no body’s following, you’re just takin’ a walk.

I find it really hard.

I often speed on my way to work and my way home.  I eat at my desk and work. I am terrible at buying cars or homes because I just want to get the first one I like.

We are conditioned to employ this type of thinking from virtually every corner of the English educational system:

The faster I improve things, the better leader I am.
Intervene today, data impact tomorrow.
8 hour inspection can determine quality of an entire school, its leaders and teachers
30 minute observation can determine the quality of a teacher
Improve English today.  Maths tomorrow. The curriculum yesterday. Or, better yet, all at once.

This type of narrative is deeply flawed. Damaging. And often, disastrous. And the headlines about Three Bridges and other schools that ‘do things differently’ are often the same.

No more marking
Lose the Learning Walks
Scrap Performance Management
No Observations
No scrutiny, book looks, monitoring.

All of this *could* be said about Three Bridges.  But its whats underneath all of those things that really matters.

Deep school improvement takes time.  Nuance. It takes the long look.

Where we are as a school today is as a direct result of the culmination of years of work. All of the headline approaches at Three Bridges took time, planning, intention, vision, alteration and incremental steps.

Teacher agency takes time. It isn’t simply borne out of the completion of a PGCE or BEd.

One of the key developments at Three Bridges in the coming year is the move away from parent-teacher meetings, often led by standardized and teacher generated data (testing, teacher assessment against the curriculum, etc).  Data is a great servant, but poor master.  When we lead with data, we are implicitly saying ‘this is what is important here.’  While we might explicitly say other things, our actions speak loudest.  Now – the easiest thing for me to do would have been to make this change almost immediately, years ago.

I have known for many years that this was something I wanted to excise.  I hate the idea that parents are coming in to our school for the only timetabled meetings of the year and the conversation is guided by test scores and numbers.  It is the smallest piece of the puzzle here, yet it is given the greatest amount of teacher-parent time.  Even if the teachers spend their time talking about other things, we all know what the meeting is about.

I want pupil-led conferences. I want the children to be leading their families through their learning portfolio with courage, passion and precision.  I want them talking about what they loved about a unit of work, what they are most proud of and what they found most challenging.  I want them to talk about a time when they didn’t understand and what changed things for them.  I want them to talk about questions they still have.  I want them to be in control of the conversation.

But there is no rush to win.  I needed the long look.

Before the pupils can be ready to lead their own learning in this way, our staff must be in this kind of environment first.

About 4 years ago, we initiated Lesson Study.  This was a crucial step in the process.  I wanted teachers to be meaningfully connected with a focus on discussing learners and learning.  This was also the introduction to many of them to teacher-led research.  After each wave of lesson study, the teachers were asked to create research posters and present on their findings.  Developing this comfort with asking questions about learning, investigating the learning strategically and surgically, and coming to conclusions that they could immediately put in to practice in their own lessons was pivotal.  This, coupled with clear collaboratively designed instructional programmes, was one of the steps that rendered lesson observation obsolete.

After this, we introduced teacher micro-research, also known as annual growth plans and lines of enquiry.  This was in replacement of Performance Management and data/teacher standard targets that were often imposed.  The purpose of this move was to further embed the concept of teacher led learning.  For school and teacher improvement to be deep and sustainable, they need to be in control of their own learning.  However, they needed to have experience as researchers first.  Asking challenging questions of one’s own professional development isn’t easy.  It is complex and layered.  Lesson Study was an essential first step.  Additionally, teachers needed this experience before we introduced a pedagogical model that put pupils in more autonomous and agency laden positions in the classroom.  A second ingredient is that as professionals asking and answering questions, they meet with me to discuss what they have enjoyed about the process, what they have found challenging, where they have been getting stuck, what further questions they have, what impact answering the questions is having on them and their class and practice.

They are being given a comparable professional experience so that when it is time for our children to be leading their families through their learning experiences (in pupil led conferences), they can genuinely understand how this deepens the pupil experience and supports the view that education at Three Bridges is a practice of Freedom.

I speak to many educators that say ‘we love what you’re doing at Three Bridges.  We have eliminated marking, or we got rid of performance management, or we have stopped observations!’  And while I am deeply humbled and honored that what we are doing here has been well received elsewhere, I fear that all of the work beneath the water – the stuff that doesn’t make the headlines – gets missed because it was never in the headline.  And that is often more disastrous than what was removed to begin with.

Avoid quick-fixes.
Swap out pace for distance.
Read the headline and ask ‘why’ and ‘what happened first’.
Do not be fooled by what you hear or see.
Look deep.
Look far.
Look in.

There is no rush to win.