Tell me if you recognise this. You sit down with someone on your team to give them a small steer. Not difficult feedback, just a nudge on something you’d like them to try differently. They nod, they say the right things, and you walk out already half-knowing nothing’s going to change. Two years ago they’d have run with it. Now you can’t tell what’s happening.

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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