Education Leaders LIVE | April Reflections

About this episode

The episode reflects on the importance of incremental change in leadership and the challenges faced by educators.

April was a packed month on the Education Leaders podcast. Five episodes, four guests, and a thread that quietly ran through all of them: the value of small, listened-to, incremental change. Chris Scorer joined me for our monthly live show to make sense of it all. Here's what landed. Listening before leading. Richard Wheadon's episode on his leadership journey hit hardest here. Richard's been honest about arriving at a new school full of confidence in approaches that had worked before, only to find the school wasn't ready to hear them. Chris reflected on his own version of that story from his deputy head days. The lesson Richard pulls out, that the relationship has to flip and you're the one who needs to understand them first, is something most leaders quote at interview but find genuinely hard once the pressure to deliver kicks in. Cognitive load isn't only a classroom concept. Meg Lee's episode on the science of leading drew the parallel cleanly. We'd never overload our students the way we routinely overload our teachers. Chris had sharper questions about where standardisation tips over into removing teacher agency. There's a real risk that well-intentioned alignment becomes…

People in this episode

Host: Shane Leaning

Guest: Chris Scorer

Topics covered

• leadership
• incremental change
• teacher agency
• cognitive load
• education

Keywords

• leadership journey
• teacher overload
• standardisation
• education leaders
• incremental change

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