Guardrails

I came across the above a few weeks ago — it shows the self-indentified ‘guardrails’ of the Cleveland Browns NFL (American Football for the unitiated) franchise. These were some of the key tenets that they determined were going to drive their organisation forward as they moved out of the abyss of winning only 1 game in the 2016 and 2017 seasons combined. They are informed by analytical thinking that is increasingly pervasive in US Sports (see Moneyball). Despite their history of being an unsuccessful organisation, the Browns have recently, and rapidly, emerged as one of the smartest organisations in US professional sports and won their first playoff game since the 1994 season this past year. I like the document and wondered if you could apply it to schools, departments, even yourself as an individual teacher.

Let’s try and break down some of the headings and see how they might cross over to an education context. Some things cross over nicely, and some don’t at all. I’m no headteacher, and there’s lots of things I don’t know, so some of what I am saying here is very speculative. Perhaps consider this piece a conversation starter as much as anything else.

Let’s start with the quotation at the top, by Paul DePodesta (formerly employed by Billy Beane of Moneyball fame before going on to work for the LA Dodgers and then crossing over from Baseball to the NFL).

“Constantly questioning the efficacy of your belief system and trying to uncover value where it’s not readily apparent.”

The first part of that is all about questioning our priors and being open-minded, a quality all of us working in education need, even (especially?) when we feel we have convincing evidence of what works. The second part, around ‘value’ is something we don’t often discuss so much in education — maybe it feels too unwholesomely capitalist? But the quest for value is something that has been central to the debates around teaching in recent years. It explains why we’ve seen some schools dramatically scale back their marking policies, or abandon their post-16 provision, or change their behaviour policies, or move towards instructional coaching. It’s because we believe these things will have much bigger bang for our buck than other strategies. ‘Opportunity cost’ is another way of looking at it.

Talent Acquisition and Retention

For schools, just as much as sports organisations, talent matters. We are increasingly seeing the more successful Multi-Academy Trusts paying much more attention to the important of talent development. Dylan Wiliam himself has pointed out the fact that you have to ‘love the ones you’ve got’ when it comes to teachers, and particularly in some locations there is not a queue of people waiting to apply for your school. Studies showing the importance of the quality of the teachers in the school in terms of driving student achievement are pretty much ten a penny. So talent acquisition and retention matters. But in my experience some organisations, and departments within organisations, are a bit slow on the uptake. What might be some guardrails for schools and individual departments to ensure effective talent acquisition and retention?

• Talent retention is perhaps the meatier one to get into. Some obvious key principles to supporting this surely include

1. Having an effective induction programme tailored to the differing experience levels of the incoming staff.
2. Ensuring unconditional support for the new colleague in terms of behaviour management while they settle in, a process that can really take at least a year.
3. Ensuring supportive processes are in place to give useful but not judgemental feedback on lessons to ensure staff are adjusting to the requirements of the new institution.
4. In the longer term, enabling opportunities inside school for colleagues to develop and gain wider experience, whether this be through putting people onto NPQ programmes, or creating paid internal roles, or by supporting colleagues in engaging with their subject community outside of the institution. In general, talking to people about their career aspirations is so important. I think schools sometimes are awkward about this because they think they will lose people, but I actually think the reverse is true. The more we know about people’s hopes and ambitions, the more capacity the school has to respond to that accordingly. In addition, we shouldn’t fear losing people too much — churn of staff is inevitable and we need good people from other institutions, as much as they need good people from us.
5. Ensuring opportunities are equal across the piece is important. An excellent Science or Maths teacher likely will have more opportunities open to them than a similarly excellent Art or Media Studies teacher. How can that be addressed?

• In terms of talent acquisition, that is a bit above my current pay level, but I think in terms of a Head of Department level, I can play a role in promoting the work of the department and school on social media, and demonstrating openness so that people feel invited to ask questions if a post arises within our team. Particularly, being transparent about what we teach and some of our core approaches is really important in a History context (it’s always really annoying and off-putting when you’re looking at a job in a school and it’s difficult to work out what content options they actually teach).

Key Positions

Now this is controversial in a school setting. Again, it’s a bit above my pay grade here, and clearly every role in a school is important. But do we have a sense as to which positions have the biggest impact in a school? From a purely ‘Progress 8’ standpoint, you might want to pile your resources into English and Maths. But I don’t think this would lead to a cohesive overall staff team and non-Core subject teachers can feel marginalised pretty quickly as it is. I guess that might vary from school to school. Maybe there is a need to strengthen senior or middle leadership capacity, for example? Is a faculty structure needed, for example, to enhance senior leadership capacity? Or does it need to be removed, in order to widen out the middle leadership opportunities and strengthen subject distinctiveness which might be lost particularly where subjects are grouped together in more incoherent faculties. Maybe there’s a vacancy in a weak department that needs a high quality person. How do you sell that and ensure the incoming person knows the challenge that awaits them?

Competitive Advantages

This is something I think about a lot when it comes to applying for jobs myself. What are the things that make me standout as a candidate that my competition likely will not have as much of? A few things spring to mind in addition to ‘students I teach generally get good results’:

• I’ve worked in 5 different schools now so have a wide range of experience — I have not become ‘institutionalised’. Although I accept some people might see this as flightiness, so there are potential downsides.
• I have Middle and Senior Leadership experience in multiple schools. My middle leader experience includes running a cross-school aspect (Work-Related Learning) as well as traditional subject leader experience.
• I’ve overcome a significant setback in my career and bounced back strongly, so I know what it’s like for others in new schools facing the same challenges (relevant to think about when I’m applying for leadership positions).
• I’ve widened my own professional learning experience by doing this blog, speaking at a couple of edu-conferences, Historical Association fellowship on the Korean War, etc. I’ve also developed networks with good people across the country via social media. This last bullet point has been a significant personal guardrail for me over the last couple of years as I seek further career fulfilment.

I don’t think it’s helpful to think about the ‘competitive advantage’ of my department all that much, because I am part of one whole school team and I don’t want to facilitate counter-productive rivalries (except with regards to Geography, obvs). As I think senior leaders should be wary of making too many comparisons between departments I need to practice what I preach there.

Clearly in an ideal world schools wouldn’t be competing against each other too much either, but obviously it does happen. Schools fundamentally need parents to choose their institution over the one down the road because no bums on seats = no school! Schools also compete with each other to get the highest quality staff in the building as well. Ideally these things should make schools think carefully about creating a positive environment for their staff to flourish in although clearly that doesn’t happen all the time either, sadly.

Looking at the document above, the last point ‘DO NOT SILO’ is probably one that crosses over directly from sports into schools (and really all organisations). To me, this is all about alignment. Building alignment is absolutely crucial. It starts at the top of the institution with a clear vision for the school, and percolates down through the whole organisation. I have certainly noticed it in organisations where alignment does and doesn’t exist. That alignment clearly also has to be healthy. Sometimes people can align around unhealthy ideals or goals (e.g. promoting an unhealthy workload culture) and that needs identifying and tackling.

Coaching (Leadership)

Here I equate coaching in a sports context with the act of teaching in an education context. The two points referenced in the photo above clearly translate directly to education. ‘Allow coaches to coach’ easily translates to ‘allow teachers to teach’, and I think we’d all welcome the removal of management burdens (although I’d add the word ‘unnecessary’ before that). Have a ‘co-ordinator’ pipeline translates to having a ‘leadership pipeline’ in an education context, which links right back across to what we discussed earlier with talent retention. The key here is to try and develop from within where possible.

Learning

The final part of this I am going to think about is the section at the bottom. I love the way it’s put in the document.

• ‘Evaluate ourselves constantly’. Goes without saying. But it must be done in a healthy way. I sometimes see in job adverts lots of talk of being ‘relentless’ and chit-chat about all sorts of ‘non-negotiables’ which tells me leaders aren’t behaving in a healthy way, and are not always the best at self-evaluation. A red flag.
• ‘Create our own data and compile what we are creating’. I’ve blogged before about the problems of data as it is currently used in education. Data is really important but we often waste time looking at meaningless data, and we could certainly benefit from breaking some of the largely self-imposed data straight-jackets we find in schools.
• ‘Learn from other organisations’. Simply put, I don’t know how we can look at the school performance tables, and look at those schools at the top of the tree, and not try to want to learn from them. That doesn’t mean importing in their ideas wholesale, because that won’t work when an existing school culture is already in place. But I think where organisations are open to ideas emanating from outside the organisation, is probably where you’ll likely see more success in the long run.

I think that’s all I’ve got for now. As I said above, consider this a conversation starter, and a slightly different way of thinking about the thing we all are aiming for, which is better and healthier schools. What are your own guardrails? What about for your department, or your school? I think that for schools we would need some additional categories. This discussion has centred around the adults in the organisation. We have not said very much about the children! Issues like ‘curriculum and pupil learning’, ‘behaviour and attitudes’ and ‘enrichment’ might well need their own sections! Another blogpost, perhaps.