In one of the workshops, someone mentioned learning styles. Something about how an activity would suit "your visual learners." I cringed a little, because that one's been picked apart for years, and there it was anyway, presented as fact to a room full of school leaders nodding along.

I'm not telling you this to feel clever about spotting it. I've done the same thing plenty of times. Read something, decided it was right, and gone looking for places to use it. Most of us have.

That's roughly where my conversation on the podcast with Andrew Watson started this week. Andrew has spent fifteen years looking at how cognitive science does and doesn't translate into real classrooms, and he's allergic to the idea that "research says" settles a question. To him it's an invitation to look closer.

Andrew's wariness kicks in most when research hardens into a rule. Or worse, a number. He used the old ten-minute rule as an example, the one claiming people can only concentrate for ten minutes so you should chop lessons into ten-minute chunks. The evidence behind it turned out to be almost embarrassingly thin. But you didn't even need to check, he said. The fact it had a number in it and called itself a rule was enough to walk straight past it.

Leaders get handed rules constantly. Do retrieval practice for the first five minutes of every lesson. Run your one-to-ones to this template. A rule is appealing because it means someone else has done the thinking and you just have to follow it.

Andrew has a mantra he repeats in the schools he works with. "Don't just do this thing, think this way." He won't walk in with a list of best practices, partly because he doesn't believe they exist. He'd rather help people understand how memory or attention actually works, then trust them to decide what that means for their own kids and their own context. A teacher of young children and a sports coach will do something completely different with the same principle, and to Andrew that's the whole point.

This is the harder path for a leader, no question. I still think it's the right one. The teacher who comes to you buzzing about a study they've just read doesn't need you to be the expert who approves it or kills it. Andrew's suggestion is to send them off to find the three most persuasive studies that back the idea and the three that argue against it, then come back and talk it through. You're not the gatekeeper there. You're handing the thinking back to the person who'll live with the decision in their classroom long after any expert has gone home.

The whole conversation is over at educationleaders.co/podcast/164 if you want it. We also get onto cooking, of all things, and an analogy about chicken, vinegar and lye that I won't spoil.

So here's my question for your weekend. What's the rule in your school that everyone follows but nobody's questioned in a while? Reply and tell me. I read every one.

Shane

PS. This is the work at the heart of the Intensive, getting your judgement back so the basics stop eating your week. If you've been curious about it, have a look here: educationleaders.co/intensive

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Some of it was obvious stuff. The way they held a room. The certainty they projected. The way they spoke in meetings. I thought that was what leadership looked like, so I tried on version after version of it.

And I was reasonably good at it. Which was almost the problem.

What I didn’t work out until later is that none of it was me. I wasn’t drawing on anything real. I was performing a version of leadership that had been written by other people, and every day it cost me more than I could see at the time. It was only when I stopped trying to change my colours, when I started accepting that I was actually a valid candidate for this job as myself, that things shifted. I was lucky I figured that out when I did. A lot of leaders never do.

This week on the podcast I’ve been thinking about why that is, and I found an unlikely reference point: the cuttlefish.

A cuttlefish can change its colour, its pattern, even the texture of its skin. It can blend into almost anything. For a cuttlefish, that’s just how it works. The trouble is, a lot of school leaders are doing the same thing, and we’re not built for it. Holding a version of yourself that isn’t real takes a massive amount of energy Stack that on top of everything else you’re already carrying, and it’s no wonder Wednesday feels like it should be Friday.

The leaders I see thrive aren’t the ones who’ve figured out how to play the role better. They’re the ones who’ve stopped playing a role at all. They lead from what they already know, what they already value, what they’ve already built through years in schools. That’s not a shortcut. It takes work to trust that version of yourself. But it drains you a lot less.

Have a think this week about where you’re changing your colours. Not the obvious stuff, the bigger performances are usually easy to spot. The subtler ones. The moments where you say something in a meeting that isn’t quite what you think, because it’s what you’ve learned a leader is supposed to say.

Is that serving you, or is it just costing you?

Reply and let me know. I read every email.

Shane

P.S. A heads up - next week on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday I'm sending some emails about my Leadership Intensive Course and how you can join the September cohort. It's not something I do often, so I wanted to be upfront about it.

If they're not relevant to where you are right now, no hard feelings at all - feel free to skip them. But if you do open them, I'll make sure there's enough in there to be worth your time whether you're interested in joining or not.

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This isn't really a sustainability story. I've watched the same thing play out around almost every initiative a school launches. The kit arrives, the good intentions arrive, and the actual change never does.

We're good at this in schools. Something new gets announced, it picks up a name and a logo and a slot in the briefing, and then we wonder why people roll their eyes the second it comes up again. Claire and I reckon that teachers have the rolliest eyes of any profession. We've all sat through enough big launches that fizzled out by half term to know how the story usually ends.

Clare has spent years getting international schools serious about sustainability, and surprisingly little of her advice is actually about the environment. Most of it is about how a school treats the work itself.

She put it bluntly. The moment a leader calls something a project, it's curtains. A project sits off to one side, with an end date people know they can wait out. The things that really take hold get treated like everything else that matters in a school: a clear reason for doing them, a proper team rather than one exhausted champion, a simple plan, and a place on the agenda when the real decisions get made.

That last one is where I think most of us trip up. We know how to run a curriculum change. We've got a process for it, and we follow the process. But anything softer or newer gets handled like a nice to have, off to the side, and then we're surprised when it stays a nice to have.

That school in Spain is three years down the line now. They've got forty student leaders, and they've got teaching staff, operations and leadership sitting around the same table, which Clare says almost never happens anywhere. Sustainability comes up whenever the big calls get made. These days it runs like everything else they take seriously, and nobody has to chase it.

Every school has a pile of good ideas that quietly went nowhere, and you can probably name a couple of yours. Which of them are you treating like a project, when really it should be core business?

Clare's full conversation is episode 162, and it's worth your time even if sustainability is nowhere near your radar this term: shaneleaning.com/podcast/162

Hit reply and tell me which idea you've let drift. I read all of them.

Shane

PS. Getting something to stick, treating it as real work and practising it until it's just how you operate, is the whole point of the Education Leaders Intensive. Ten weeks, one skill at a time, with the practice and feedback that turn good intentions into changed habits. If it's been sitting on your list, you can book a quick chat about whether it's a fit here: zcal.co/leaningshane/intensive

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I’ve been hearing variations of this from heads of school on repeat for a few years now. Sometimes it’s feedback that doesn’t take. Other times it’s a deputy who used to be first to try something new and somehow isn’t anymore. I’ve offered up burnout, change fatigue, the weight of the last few years catching up. Sometimes that lands, but honestly, sometimes it doesn't.

Then this week I recorded an episode with Nancy Weinstein. Nancy’s been tracking the cognitive skills of 35,000 students aged 8 to 21 going back to 2015, which means her dataset captures the pandemic and everything after it. When you ask teachers what’s changed in students, almost all say attention. Nancy’s data says it’s verbal memory, which has dropped by roughly half.

Nancy also tested teachers. And teachers are showing some of the same cognitive shifts as their students. Particularly flexible thinking, which is the skill that lets you take feedback in and adapt.

Go back to the staff member who nodded but didn’t quite take in what you said. Read that moment as cognitive rather than as resistance. That’s not letting anyone off the hook. It’s just that pushing harder doesn’t make sense if someone’s actually struggling cognitively. It just makes you feel like a bad manager and them feel like a bad colleague.

Nancy did add that flexible thinking is the most malleable of all the cognitive skills she measures. It can come back. Though probably not while we’re stacking new initiatives on top of the old ones and treating every bit of pushback as a problem with attitude.

The full conversation with Nancy is here. There’s more in it I didn’t get to today, including what she thinks about AI in the classroom.

Hit reply and tell me what you’ve been seeing in your staff over the last year. I’m collecting these stories and want to hear them.

Shane

P.S. If you want to spend two proper days practising the kind of coaching conversations this points to, I’m running my Leading as a Coach workshop again in Shanghai on 20 and 21 November. Twelve people in a room, mostly practice. The first cohort earlier this year went well enough that I’m doing it a second time. Details here.

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The funny thing is that we're both experienced. We've both led organisations, both spent years thinking about this. And still neither of us has managed to break the habit.

So I went looking for why. Not the obvious answer, by the way. The obvious one is psychological safety, and yes, sometimes you say yes because you genuinely don't feel safe to say no. That's real. But I wanted to understand the other thing. The yes you hand to people you trust, in a relationship that works, where nothing is stopping you except something inside you.

Going back through Adam Grant's Give and Take, and a newer book by Sunita Sah called Defy, helped me name four reasons.

The first is that we want to be liked. Yes feels warm. No feels cold, a bit unfriendly, not what you'd expect from someone you get on with. So we reach for the warm option.

The second is that we want to be seen as capable. We worry a no tells our head we're not up to the job, when really it's just us being honest about what's already on the plate. We even have a name for the person we're trying to be. A "can do" person.

The third is the most calculated, and it's so real. We say yes now so we get asked again. Say no this time and maybe the interesting project goes to someone else next time. So you say yes to protect future you.

The fourth is that we treat yes as currency. I'll say yes to you now, and I'm quietly banking it, because at some point I'll need to ask you for something.

When I lined all four up, one thing stood out. Every one of them is a good instinct. Wanting to be liked isn't a flaw. Neither is wanting to be trusted, or wanting to stay close to the good work. Sah makes the point that compliance is trained into us from childhood, to the point where saying yes gives our brains a small hit of dopamine and saying no doesn't. The yes pathway gets stronger every time we use it, while the no pathway stays underdeveloped. I found that reassuring, actually, because while you might not be able to retrain a character defect, you can definitely retrain a habit.

In the episode I go further. I look at what saying yes too much costs you, your team and the person you report to, and I walk through a four-step response I've been using, including one time during COVID when it didn't get me off the hook at all. You can listen here: https://www.shaneleaning.com/podcast/160

It's also the kind of thing we go deep on in the Education Leaders Intensive. The next cohort starts in September and places are starting to fill, so if untangling habits like this one sounds useful, that's where the proper work happens.

You don't need a programme for the first step though. Look at your own week and see which of the four was behind your last yes. I'm doing the same. Let me know what you find.

Shane

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You see it most obviously with external consultants. They walk in for a morning, watch two lessons, and produce a list of things the school needs to fix. Heads have lived with the consequences for years.

It happens inside schools just as often. A deputy drops into a year group, sees one inconsistent lesson opening, and writes it up as a whole-team issue. A head of school sits in on a head of department meeting and forms a view about culture from forty minutes. A trust leader visits for a day and decides what should change, based on a slice that may not be representative of much.

I've been guilty of this myself, more times than I'd like. You walk in with the best of intentions, and you walk out having added something to a leader's desk that probably wasn't the thing they most needed.

This is what Sam Crome and Chris Passey get into in this week's episode. Both stepped into headship this year after years of building public profiles in the sector through their writing, podcasts, and conference work. The view from inside the chair has changed how they think about people walking into schools to help.

Sam's line was the one that stayed with me.

"Assumptions are the death of good advice."

He talks about how the hardest part of learning to coach was silencing the voice in his head that said he already knew the answer before the other person had finished speaking. He thinks the same instinct is what undoes most external support to schools. People walk in convinced they know what's needed, and they miss the actual context entirely.

Chris's framing sits alongside this. He says heads have a desk full of things they left behind when they came to your session, and that desk is still there when they get back. Whatever you bring adds to that workload. So if you're not adding more than you cost, you've made their week harder.

The fix isn't complicated, but it does require some restraint. Get the context properly before you offer the recommendation, ask more questions than you answer, and accept that what you've seen elsewhere may not apply here.

This applies whether you're an external consultant or a senior leader walking into a colleague's department on a Tuesday morning. You haven't seen enough to recommend yet. Get curious about it first.

You can listen to the full conversation with Sam and Chris here: shaneleaning.com/podcast/159

Shane

P.S. The September cohort of the Intensive is now open for applications. Ten weeks, a small cohort, and the most practical leadership programme I've built. Details and how to apply are at shaneleaning.com/intensive.

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It still happens. Whenever something new lands, or I'm in a room where I'm meant to be the one who knows, it creeps back in.

I sat down with Julia Bialeski for this week's podcast, and we open with her version of it. She'd just been promoted to Principal in spring 2019, the role she'd worked years for, and she was walking around terrified. Convinced that at some point everyone would realise she wasn't up to it, and the whole thing would come crashing down.

Julia has a phrase she's borrowed from a friend. "Why not me?" When she is in a room scanning everyone who seems to know what they're doing while she feels she clearly doesn't, those three words pull her back. She was picked for a reason. So was everyone else.

I had my own version growing up. My grandma used to tell me, "Shane, you will go to college, and you will find a nice girl at college too." I was the first in my family to go to university. She was right on both counts. Those words sunk in early, and they've stayed with me.

That's why Julia's smile file idea hit me. A plastic envelope where you keep the cards and kind emails as they come in. On the bad days, you pull a few out. They're proof that someone, at some point, thought you were doing alright.

We're coming in to the summer term, exams looming, everyone running on empty. Before that voice gets loud this week, ask yourself: am I really not good enough at this, or am I just exhausted? Most weeks I confuse one for the other.

Episode 158 with Julia is here: https://www.shaneleaning.com/podcast/158. Worth a listen on the way home.

If you've got a smile file, or words you've kept close from someone who believed in you, hit reply and tell me.

Shane

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You felt fine when you made it. Clear-headed, even.

Then you go home. You're brushing your teeth. Or you're on the sofa. Or you're driving back in traffic. And there it is. That sickly feeling in the pit of your stomach. Did I get that right? Should I send a clarifying email? Maybe soften it in the morning?

This week's podcast is about that feeling. Because I spent about ten years reading it completely wrong, and getting leaders to read it differently has probably been the single most useful unlock I've stumbled on.

Most of us treat that discomfort as data. My gut's talking, so there must be something off about this decision, otherwise why would I feel this bad? Makes sense, right? It's also the trap. The science on this is pretty clear. Making a hard call genuinely changes how you feel afterwards about what you chose. Within seconds, your brain starts quietly revaluing the options, committing to the one you picked. That sickly feeling isn't your intuition warning you. It's your brain doing the work of committing.

The reframe that changed how I lead: that feeling isn't a warning. It's a receipt.

You made the call. The thing was delivered. The discomfort is just confirmation the transaction went through. You don't stand at the till staring at the paper receipt going oh no, what have I done, maybe I shouldn't have bought this. You paid, you got the thing, the receipt is proof. Your brain works the same way after hard calls.

Knowing this doesn't make the feeling go away. I still get it. I had it on Sunday night after a tough conversation with a client. What changes is what you do with it. I don't treat it as evidence anymore. I don't write panicked emails at 11pm. I don't lie awake running alternate endings. I just go, ah, there you are. Receipt's arrived. That's normal. And I go to sleep.

The full episode goes further: why complaints after a change always sound louder than the thank-yous (there's a Kahneman finding on loss aversion sitting behind this), and why reappraisal protects your working memory in a way suppression doesn't. Have a listen here: shaneleaning.com/podcast/157.

This receipt idea is exactly the kind of thing we work on in the Intensive. We practise it live, on the decisions you're actually sitting with. The next cohort kicks off on September 15th and places are filling fast. Have a look at shaneleaning.com/intensive, or just hit reply and I'll send the details across.

Go easy on yourself this week.

Shane

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There's usually an assumption underneath that worry. The idea that one of these things has to give. That if you really make space for student voice and student passion, you've had to soften the rules to do it. Schools like Green School Bali get to grow young changemakers, the thinking goes, because the rules apply differently there.

I asked Melati Wijsen about this on the podcast this week. She started Bye Bye Plastic Bags at 12, spoke at the UN as a teenager, never went to university, and now teaches at three universities and runs YOUTHTOPIA. If anyone has earned the right to argue for loosening the reins, it's her.

She didn't.

I asked what her teachers got most right. I expected her to talk about the freedom, the 50 days she barely spent on campus in her final year, the way her UN trips counted as science credits. Instead she said the best thing her teachers did was hold her accountable. They didn't give her brownie points for the activism. An essay wasn't going to cover a fortnight off school for the IPCC. She had to do the science and the maths on top of the changemaking. Looking back at 25, she said this is one of the things she's most grateful for.

The freedom was real and so was the bar. Neither one was the price of the other.

That's the bit I keep turning over. We tend to frame this as a trade-off between rigour and curiosity, and Melati's teachers seem to have just refused the trade. They believed in what she was doing and they wouldn't let her use it as a reason to drop the rest. What surprised me most was that she said it felt like respect.

If you've got a passionate 14-year-old in your school right now, I'd love to know what they're being held to, and whether they'd describe the bar the way Melati does.

Hit reply and let me know. Always good to hear what's actually going on in your school.

Shane

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I could see the patterns. The meeting structures that were eating time. The feedback loops that weren't quite landing. I've seen versions of this before in dozens of schools, and my brain was already reaching for the solutions that worked elsewhere.

And then I caught myself.

Because what I've learned, sometimes the hard way, is that what you see in the first day of visiting a school is almost never the full picture. There's context you can't know yet. History you haven't heard. Relationships you don't understand. The school is probably already aware of the thing you've spotted, and they've probably got reasons for why it looks the way it does.

I have to hold those early impressions lightly. Not dismiss them, but not trust them too quickly either.

This came flooding back to me while recording this week's episode with Richard Wheadon. Richard spent the first decade of his career in a brilliant London school. Strong culture, excellent CPD, collaborative leadership. It was so good that he didn't even realise how much of it was deliberate. It just felt normal.

Then he moved. New school, new community, no established relationships. And he did what most of us would do. He tried to recreate what had worked before.

It didn't go well.

He sent an email to a colleague early on, asking for their thoughts on several things and flagging one area he thought needed to change. The reply called him a dictator. In his previous school, people knew him. They knew his suggestions came from a place of caring about students. In this new place, nobody had that context yet. They just saw someone new arriving and telling them what was wrong.

Richard is honest about this. He says he went in too fast. He hadn't listened enough. He assumed his reputation and track record would speak for themselves, but nobody there had seen them.

What strikes me about his story is how invisible good leadership becomes when it's working. The culture in his London school felt effortless precisely because it had been built so carefully over years. He'd been swimming in it without realising someone had filled the pool.

Most of us have a version of this. You walk into a new context, whether it's a new school, a new role, or even visiting someone else's school to support them, and you carry your previous experience like it's a universal map. But it's not. It's a map of somewhere else.

Richard's advice is to listen before you lead. Which sounds obvious until you're the person who just arrived somewhere and can see six things that need fixing. The temptation to act is enormous, especially when you've got a track record that tells you you're usually right.

But being right about the problem doesn't mean you're right about the timing. Or the approach. Or the relationships you'll need to make the change stick.

Spring's arriving in the northern hemisphere this week. If you're heading into the final stretch of the school year, this might be worth sitting with. Where are you carrying assumptions from a previous context into your current one? Where might you need to slow down and listen before you act?

You can hear Richard's full story, including a brilliant moment where Ross McGill humbled him mid-call, on this week's episode: shaneleaning.com/podcast/155

I'd love to hear from you on this one. Have you ever walked into a new context and had your assumptions tested? Hit reply and tell me about it.

Shane

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Every teacher was running their own system. In some ways that was great because people had ownership and autonomy. But it was also creating all these little conflicts. Between classrooms, corridors, playgrounds. Students didn’t know what to expect from one room to the next, and teachers were getting more and more stressed trying to hold it all together.

What they ended up doing was stripping it back. A few shared structures everyone agreed to. It wasn’t any one teacher’s perfect system. But as a whole, things settled down. The school felt like it could hold a bit more.

At the time I put it down to simplification. Fewer systems, less confusion. Makes sense. But my conversation this week with Meg Lee made me reflect on what else was going on.

Meg’s spent 20 years leading large school systems in the US, and she made a distinction on the podcast that I think is really important.

Cognitive load and workload are not the same thing.

You can cut your to-do list in half and still feel completely overwhelmed. Because it’s not about how many tasks are on the list. It’s about how many things your school is asking people to think deeply about at the same time.

And Meg goes further than that. She says organisations themselves have cognitive load. Not individual people. The system. When you stack new curriculum on top of a behaviour review on top of strategic planning on top of a safeguarding audit, you haven’t just added tasks. You’ve overwhelmed your school’s ability to think properly about any of them.

That school I was working with? They didn’t really have a behaviour problem. They had an organisational cognitive load problem. Too many competing systems asking people to think hard in too many different directions.

So here’s a question worth sitting with this weekend. Not “what can we take off people’s plates?” but “how many things are we asking this organisation to think hard about right now?”

Meg’s take is that you pick two things for the year. Stay with them. Come back next year and keep going with those same two things. I know that sounds too simple. And honestly, it’s the bit most leaders struggle with. Not because they disagree, but because board expectations, accreditation cycles, and external pressures all push in the other direction.

But if your school feels stretched right now and nobody can quite explain why, that question about organisational cognitive load might get you closer to the real answer than any workload audit will.

Listen to the full conversation with Meg here.

The September cohort of the Education Leaders Intensive is coming together and this kind of thinking is right at the heart of it. If you’re curious, have a look at shaneleaning.com/intensive or just reply to this email and I can send you more details or we can get on a quick call.

Have a great weekend.

Shane

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Around 100 people voted. 57% said "engaging, but nothing changes." 30% said "short-lived impact." 11% said it was a waste of time from the start.

And lasting change in practice? 1%. One person.

Now look, it's a LinkedIn poll. Tiny sample. But the pattern it shows is real, and a major new report from the Teacher Development Trust just confirmed it at serious scale. Over 1,000 teachers and leaders surveyed across England. Nearly four in ten said CPD hadn't clearly improved their ability to do their job. Only 15% said there was any meaningful follow-up after training. And the formats that actually work best, coaching, peer observation, collaborative inquiry, were the ones schools use least.

I recorded a solo episode this week unpacking all of it. The data, what it means, and what you can do about it. You can listen here: Why CPD Keeps Failing

But the thing that keeps coming back to me isn't the data. It's the question underneath it.

How much of your CPD budget is being spent on things that feel productive versus things that are productive?

Because every school leader I work with has good intentions about professional development. The intent is almost never the problem. The problem is the design. And the follow-up. And the question nobody wants to ask: does the person delivering this CPD actually have the time, the training, and the support to do it well?

If your professional development culture depends on one person, or one external provider, you don't have a culture. You have a dependency. And when that person leaves, or when the provider's contract ends, so does the change.

That's the bit I keep coming back to. Building something that stays even when people don't.

If you listened to the episode or have thoughts on how your school handles this, I'd love to hear from you. Just hit reply and tell me what's working, or what isn't.

Shane

PS. If you're looking at your CPD approach and thinking "yeah, we're probably in that 57%," the ICA International Leaders Conference might be worth a look. I'm partnering with the ICA on it, 7 and 8 May, two half-day virtual sessions on sustaining change. Tom Sherrington's speaking too. And we're doing a Red Envelope thing where if you book a place, you can gift one to an emerging leader.

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If you’ve been here a while, you might have the same experience as a lot of my readers and listeners. You know the podcast, you’ve heard the conversations, but you’re not entirely sure what I actually do on a Tuesday morning. So this week felt like the right moment to fill that in.

Here’s the short version.

Education Leaders is three things now: the podcast (151 episodes and counting), a community for school leaders who want to think alongside people who genuinely get what the job feels like, and an academy where I spend most of my working time. That includes direct work with schools on leadership development and organisational change, and online programmes like the Education Leaders Intensive.

There’s also a second organisation that most people don’t know about. It’s called the Work Collaborative, a not-for-profit I co-founded with my co-author Efraim Lerner. Its mission is restoring organisational confidence in schools. The idea that schools should trust their own expertise, lead their own change, and stop outsourcing their thinking to the next external initiative that comes through the door. That one I care about deeply.

What I didn’t expect, when I sat down to record this week’s episode, was how much I’d reflect on the fact that none of this was planned. There was no grand vision. I started because I wanted better conversations. The rest grew from conviction, not strategy.

I think there’s something in that worth sitting with if you’re a school leader. The things that actually stick rarely start with a perfect plan.

Episode 151 is out now. I’d love to know how you found the show.

And if any of this is new to you — welcome. Glad you’re here.

Shane

P.S. Two new courses are arriving soon through the academy: one on demystifying data in schools with Chris Scorer, and one on leading neurodiversity with Sarah Battersby. More on those very shortly.

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Picture a classroom in Shanghai. Grade 9. A teacher asks students to hold up mini whiteboards showing their answers. She scans the room. Six students have it wrong. She nods, says "good effort everyone," and moves on.

I was in that school last week. And I've seen versions of that moment hundreds of times.

It's not that she didn't care. She'd done exactly what the training said. Gather evidence of learning. Check for understanding. Use the tool. What nobody had taught her was what to do with what she found. The instrument was there. The action wasn't.

This is the quiet failure inside most formative assessment programmes. Teachers use the tools conscientiously, exit tickets, diagnostic questions, mini whiteboards. But interpreting what you find, making a decision, following through, and checking whether it worked? That part gets skipped. Not because teachers are lazy. Because nobody ever modelled it.

Valentina Devid, who co-authored Formative Action, reframed this for me entirely. In the Netherlands, they stopped using the phrase "formative assessment" altogether. The word assessment was the problem. Teachers heard it and immediately thought of testing, data, judgement. So they replaced it with formatief handelen: formative doing. The emphasis lands exactly where it needs to, on the action that follows the evidence.

Schools that genuinely grasp this distinction start to look different. Teachers don't just ask the question and move on. They anticipate the likely misconceptions before the lesson. They know what they'll do when half the class has it wrong. They've already thought about those thirty seconds after the mini whiteboards go up, before they're even standing in the room.

Think about your own school. Does everyone share a clear picture of what should happen in that window?

That gap between the instrument and the action is where most improvement efforts quietly die.

If you're in Asia and want to work through this properly, Valentina and I are running a full-day workshop in Shanghai on April 24th. She co-wrote the book. I work on implementation with school leaders every day. It's not often those two things are in the same room. The details are here.

Wherever you are though, here's something worth doing next week. Ask a few of your teachers what they do with the information they gather during lessons. Not which tools they use. What they do next. The answers will tell you exactly where your programme actually stands.

That's the real starting point.

Reply and tell me what you're seeing. I read everything.

Shane

Listen to the latest episode

Click here to listen to this week's episode of my chart-topping podcast, Education Leaders

The tappers predicted about 50% of listeners would get it right. They could hear the melody in their heads while they were tapping, the words, the tune, all of it.

But only in forty people guessed correctly.

The listeners only had taps. No melody, no context. Just knocking.

Newton called it the curse of knowledge. Once you understand something deeply, you can’t go back to not understanding it. The music plays automatically and you forget nobody else can hear it.

Which is exactly what’s happening when you explain a timetable change or a new assessment process and three people walk away with three different versions of what you said. You weren’t unclear. You just had the melody playing and your team had the taps.

So what do you actually do about it? In this week’s episode of Education Leaders I teach paraphrasing as a practical habit, and I mean genuinely practical. There are three steps. In short, you signal that you’re about to reflect back what you’ve heard. You restate it in your own words, not theirs. Then you check: did I get that right?

The restate step is the one that does the real work. When you translate what someone said through your own understanding and say it back, any gap between what they meant and what you heard becomes visible immediately. Before anyone goes away and does the wrong thing for a fortnight.

Worth a listen if you’ve got twenty minutes.

Listen here → shaneleaning.com/podcast/149

Have a cracking weekend.

Shane

Listen to the latest episode

Click here to listen to this week's episode of my chart-topping podcast, Education Leaders

Not what you hope they say. Not the mission statement or the tagline. What words do they use at the school gate, or over dinner, or in a WhatsApp group you’ll never see?

I spoke this week with Selina Boyd from the Good Schools Guide. Her job is to visit schools and decide whether children are genuinely thriving there. And the way the Good Schools Guide figures that out might surprise you.

It starts before anyone sets foot in the building. Families are spoken to first. Not to tick a box, but because that’s where the real story lives. The team listens for specific words. Belonging. Welcomed. Blossomed. When parents start using language like that unprompted, it signals something no website or prospectus ever could.

Then comes the visit itself, and it’s the small things that matter. Whether a child comes running up to show off a piece of work. Whether older students meet your eye in the corridor and actually want to talk. And Selina’s favourite signal? Walking around with a head who gets treated a bit like a celebrity, because kids keep stopping them to share what they’ve been doing.

That’s not something you can stage.

We also got into what authentic school storytelling actually looks like. And it cuts both ways as a leader. Authentic leadership isn’t what you say about yourself. It’s what others say about you. The parents who can reel off stories about bumping into the head at the school gate. The child who goes home and talks about their teacher. That’s your reputation, whether you’re actively managing it or not.

There’s a dinner party analogy worth borrowing here. If someone spends the whole evening talking about themselves, you switch off. But when someone tells you a story about another person, you lean in. Schools are no different.

The most trusted version of your school’s story isn’t on your website. It’s what your parents say to each other, what your students share, what your staff carry with them outside of work.

The practical bit is straightforward, though most schools miss it. The ones doing this well aren’t just good at marketing. They’re making it easy for other people to speak up. Are your parents in spaces where they naturally talk about you? Do your staff feel comfortable sharing what’s genuinely good? Are your students, especially older ones, given any kind of outlet?

One school Selina visited had a sixth form student who’d found the school himself online, done his own research, and then persuaded his parents it was the right place for him. The school didn’t do that. The story did.

So what does that look like where you are? Who in your community is telling your story, and are you making it easy for them?

Hit reply. I’d genuinely like to know.

Shane

Listen to the latest episode

Click here to listen to this week's episode of my chart-topping podcast, Education Leaders