Have YOU Made A Good Start To The Year?

It's a good time to have a first checkpoint of the year. For us, 24 days of the term gone. I estimate that, in our school, most exam year groups are going to have about 1000 lessons between the start of this term and the start of their exams. So far they have had about 130 of these. By the end of this week, it'll be 15% through the year. So, I challenged them this morning - "How have you done so far?"

A few years ago, a former pupil came to speak to our teachers about what he had learned from winning two Olympic Gold medals which could be applied to what we do. One of the things he referred to was this: at the end of every day of training, their coach would take the crew to one side and they would talk about their day’s training. Every day he would ask them, has today been a 'gold medal day'? For four years, they would ask that question every day. They believed that it would take gold medal commitment every day to gain a gold medal at the end of four years.

Now most pupils aren't planning towards a target four years ahead, although some may be. For the moment, it's worth looking ahead to the end of this year. Maybe a pupil has targeted a clean sweep of A and A* grades at GCSE. Has the first 24 days been A/A* in quality? Maybe the target is a distinction in Grade 8 of a musical instrument? Has the first 24 days’ music practice been grade 8 with distinction standard? Or a sporting goal: a certain time in the 200 metres - has the training thus far been consistent with that goal. Or it might be three A grades at A level - have the first 24 days been AAA standard.

For those that have managed this, I encourage them to reflect with satisfaction, but also to consider that the good start will be wasted if it isn't built on, because merely to start well is not to do well at all.

For those who haven’t managed to make a start in line with their long term goals: change NOW! Don’t change tomorrow, and don’t leave it until next week. A change tomorrow is half as likely to be put into practice as a change today. If any students get to this stage of the school year and have not started in tune with the goals they have set yourself, the easiest and best time to change this is right away. The longer any of us practice not working in a distinction, or AAA or all A* and A way, or whatever the target we have set yourself, the better we will get at working in a way that will not deliver our goal. 

And, if one doesn’t know how to work in a way that is consistent with our objectives, we must ASK. 

So I encouraged our whole school community to use the question ‘Has it been a gold medal day?’ as a shorthand for the more difficult and more nuanced idea of whether today has been a day in which our attitudes and approach have been consistent with our long term objectives.

And finally, it's worth considering whether our effect on others is to make them have a gold medal day, or to prevent them from doing so - because gold medals are often won in teams, or crews, rather than individually. Even when the medal looks as if it's an individual award, there's nearly always a team behind the medallist, who made it all possible.

Have I had a gold medal day? Have you? Questions worth asking. Every day.

The Power of Expectations

What are you expecting this year? This is the key question I asked our pupils this morning. I suggested to them that there is evidence to suggest that, whatever one is expecting, one is likely to be right. Those who expect good things tend to put unexpected failures down to bad luck, and see successes as reflective of their ability, and those who expect less good things tend to put their successes down to luck, and see less successful results as being reflective of their ability.

It’s tremendously important at the start of the school year that pupils have high expectations - to understand what they are being taught in Maths, to do well in English, expect to be able to play the pieces their instrumental teacher gives them, to beat the opposition at rugby or hockey, to be able to learn their lines for the school play, expect to better their opponents at the Model United Nations, and so on.

The power of expectations was clear in the last football season. For decades teams had gone to Manchester United’s ground expecting to be beaten, and hoping for a draw. With a new manager, and a new set of circumstances, at Old Trafford, teams turned up not expecting to be beaten, and playing to win. As a result, many did win, and more managed to draw. So the difference between Manchester United and the rest of their league was reduced by a reassessment of expectations.

Similarly dancers, and sportsmen and women give a lot of time to visualising themselves being successful so that it becomes their natural expectation. Because doing so makes them more likely to achieve their goals.

However, and I think it is a big however… a great deal, it seems to me, of a healthy and wholesome approach to life is to be able to hold two different, sometimes contradictory, concepts in balance. Some readers may be thinking that if all one does is expect success and good things that might make one complacent. We all know people who expected to be able to play a piece of music in a concert, or pass a vocab test, or their Driving Theory test, or beat the opposition, and failed because they were overconfident.

And so, as well as expecting to be do well this year, I encouraged our pupils constantly to reinforce a ‘growth mindset’ - that hard work will enable them to do what they want to do. I exhorted them to expect great things, and work their socks off for them. To be optimistic, but not complacent or arrogant.

'The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it but that it is too low and we reach it’. So said Michelangelo. Aspiration, high expectation, huge hard work to achieve it. To any pupil readers of this: I encourage you to set lofty targets, and make this a year where you strain every sinew to achieve them, whatever they are, and where possible encourage others to achieve their ambitions too.

Learning From The Chimp

I have recently been struck by the number of books in a relatively new genre, the latest of which is is The Chimp Paradox, written by Dr Steve Peters, the psychologist behind the British Olympic Cycling Team, the Sky cycling team, and Liverpool FC.

Peters describes the human brain as having two competing systems. First, the limbic system, which Dr Peters calls it your ‘chimp’, (a primal system which serves to keep you alive and away from the bottom of the food chain), and second the frontal lobe where many thinking and decision making functions have their origin (the ‘human’ in Peters’ lexicon). The chimp and the human brain vie for supremacy in each of our skulls.

This is what nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’ in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman is at the end of a remarkable career as a behavioural psychologist investigating human behaviour and the unconscious influences on it - often coming from the chimp, or ‘system 1’ brain.

Kahneman and Peters concede that both parts of our brain are useful, but Malcolm Gladwell, another of the authors in this area, points out in Blink, ‘system 1’ is what enables a firefighter to use all their experience to say ‘this fire just doesn’t feel right’ and pull all their firemen out of a building before it collapses. ‘System 1’ is what we use when we meet someone when we are trying to decide whether to trust them, and helps us to make accurate quick judgements of character.

Sometimes, of course, we use the ‘chimp’/’system 1’ when it isn’t useful: when we explode with anger about something trivial, when we react emotionally and disproportionately, when we lack perspective. This might be because someone has invaded our animal territory, and we are actually trying to defend it. Because ‘system 1’ is instinctive, we can also use it sometimes without realising it.

One of Kahneman’s experiments relates to  a workplace honesty box for donations towards the cost of coffee, tea and other refreshments. He found that a poster of a human face looking directly out of the picture were put in the room, people would put more in the honesty box. This is ‘system 1’, or our ‘chimp’, making people instinctively do something which is actually irrational.

A key part of our learning as people as we get older is which system to use for which decision. For example which is better for choosing a university: ‘system 1’ - the ‘chimp’ - which goes on feel and intuition, or ‘system 2’, which analyses all the costs and benefits of different courses and different locations. Which might be better if we are deciding whether or not to buy a pair of shoes? Which might be better in deciding whether or not to go out with a boyfriend or girlfriend?

You can use both the ‘chimp’ and the ‘human’, ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’, to make a decision too.

Perhaps education should involve more opportunity to reflect on these issues, so that experience of decision making can be used to improve young people’s capacities in these areas.

Book Review - Turn the Ship Around, By David Marquet.

I heard this book recommended by Simon Sinek (Start With Why) and that was enough to persuade me to read it. For those who don’t like suspense, I’ll start with the punchline: read it.

I have read other books about what Marquet calls the ‘leader-leader’ paradigm (Multipliers, for a start), but this is systematic, clear, devoid of theoretical kite flying and refreshingly practical. Marquet tells us what he did, and why he did it. He had to take over a nuclear submarine, the performance of which had been rock bottom, and he had six months to turn it into a highly effective fighting force. That he chose to do so in a way which went totally against the culture of the US Navy, and that he got backing to do so, is remarkable. For me the one issue which is not unpacked in the book is that Marquet was clearly line-managed by a commander who was willing to let him impose his own leadership (non) style. The bracketed word will make sense after you have read the book.

Two tips for those who take my advice and read this book: look out for the phrase ‘I intend to...’ and note the careful intentionality of the way in which all his reports were expected to do their jobs. The fact that giving away power, taking away control, led to both being as much in evidence is one of those marvellous paradoxes of human behaviour. This is a real must-read for those who lead organisations, of whatever size.

One word of caution - I always start books of this sort with a determination to read them for the nuggets. Most books on how to lead or manage better have a small number of superb tips. This is no exception: don’t be disappointed by all the things that don’t transfer from a nuclear submarine to your organisation.

Disappointing Children

Life, as Rick Gekoski observes in his 1998 book, Staying Up, is about winning and losing. Education is preparation for both of these outcomes – but the truth is that schools spend much more time on one than the other. In recent times, some schools have gained headlines by having weeks in which pupils were invited to experience ‘failure’ to see how they coped with it and thereby to build up resilience.

But there are two kinds of failure. There’s the kind which is half-expected, the result of an adventurous have-a-go attitude: for such people, who are constantly stretching themselves, there can be a freedom to try for more than they think they can manage. The consequence of failure? A shrug, a determination to learn from it, and a sense that life goes on.

The other kind comes when failure is unexpected. And this is the point – failure week produces the first kind of failure – expected, almost synthetic, and therefore not crushing. Resilience is really the capacity to withstand the disappointment that we didn’t see coming. It’s the unexpected ‘D’ grade, the loss to a team that was expected to be weaker than our team, the sudden freeze in the middle of a musical performance following an error so unfamiliar that it momentarily swamps us.

It’s this kind of disappointment – not getting what we want, when it makes us ache with disappointment – that is an essential part of education. If we don’t experience this kind of disappointment in our early lives, we risk becoming achievement junkies whose approach is therefore only to take on the achievable. I wonder if this is what Mrs Gove was hinting at this week when she described private school pupils as ‘cossetted’.

A lot of ink has been spent pointing out the correlation between those who were unsuccessful at school and their success at business. But what if the cause of the success at business was the lack of it at school? What if the ability to bear repeated disappointment – to score below the pass mark in a French vocab test, to concede 5 goals, or 50 points, in every week’s match – was the ideal preparation for repeated refusals on the part of investors to back an entrepreneur’s work? What if Richard Branson and Jamie Oliver were taught that continuing to try against unbearable odds (and being able to sleep at night at the same time) was the quality that would enable them to survive at school. What if the perseverance that the less able learned at school turned out to be more important than the intellectual tricks performed by the scholars?

In most schools the irresistible force that is stopping schools from being able to set up experiences that disappoint children can be supportive parents. The battle our sector hasn’t yet begun to win is to teach parents that for children to face really tough battles in their education is a key part of the education.

Might the disappointing children be the children who haven’t yet been disappointed. Schools ought to make it their business to give children the experience of being disappointed more often – as well as helping them through it, of course. This might – in our consumerist age – feel like we are setting the bar lower: shouldn’t we be trying to satisfy every customer? In some senses it is the parent whose child is successful in becoming a prefect, in scoring A* grades, passing music exams, and in the first team, who should be knocking on the Head’s door, not the parent whose child isn’t.

So, in our School Assembly this week, I challenged pupils to see disappointments as a chance to learn life’s most valuable lessons. And I challenged them to make the school a sufficiently secure place that we can all talk about failures and disappointments, and learn from each others’ as well as our own. That's interdependence for you.

It’s Not Too Late To Make (The Right) New Year’s Resolution

I am convinced the reason that many New Year’s Resolutions fail is because they aren’t realistic or sensible. Too often they are over-ambitious, too focussed on the measurable (it’s hard to make good personal goals SMART), too new, and too goal-orientated.

So last week, in my first assembly of the New Year, I challenged our pupils to make resolutions which were helpful and which they would be able to make stick. Here are five things I recommended (and still do!) to make a new resolution work – and it’s not too late to try it:

1)      The resolution should be related to a ‘process-goal’ not an ‘outcome-goal’. It was very striking when Olympic Gold medallist Anna Watkins came to speak to our pupils last term that she felt that the key to her London 2012 success (where she won a gold medal with Katherine Grainger having been unbeaten for some years) was due in part to the fact that they set process-goals. When we make the process as good as we can, we have done all we can to achieve the goal, and can take the pressure of our own performance.

2)      Make the goal incremental: focus on something you have already started to do a little of and want to do more – this way you know already that you aren’t trying to do something which is beyond you, and the resolution will seem achievable from the start.

3)      Make the goal relevant rather than measurable: although management people are right to say goals should ideally be measurable, it’s much more important that they are relevant. Many people substitute  a much less relevant, but measurable goal, for a core-to-their-purpose but unmeasurable skill. As time passes, and realisation of the irrelevance increases, they drop the resolution entirely because it is increasingly apparent that it isn’t actually central to achieving the core goals.

4)      Be accountable: tell other people about the resolution. Get others to help you to achieve it. This hardly needs explanation. And...

5)      Don’t take up something, or give something up, merely to be able to boast about it. You’ll weary of that. If you want to give up chocolate for a year, great – but don’t do it so that you can needle chocolate-eaters. Resolutions should be valuable in and of themselves, not a form of one-upmanship. The problem with boastful resolutions is that it isn’t long before we meet someone with a better (or more noble!) goal than ours – and once that happens, our motivation for keeping it collapses.

Breadth, And Talking To Your Neighbour, Matters More Than IT.

There are occasions in every teacher’s career when a pupil say something in their lesson which takes them aback. The clearest such memory for me was the pupil who asked, 20 minutes into a lesson about what makes people successful, ‘Sir, if you don’t mind my asking, but how are you defining success?’ The answer to his question (and it was a ‘him’) made for a better lesson than the one I had planned, and the digression prompted by the intelligence and independence of that question was a fabulous one for learning – both mine and the pupils’.

I was put in mind of that when reading the excellent paper by James Heckman, Professor of Economics at The University of Chicago, writing not about economics, but about education. (http://www.heckmanequation.org/sites/default/files/F_Non-cognitive%20skills_V3.pdf)

What struck me about this paper was not that it break s new ground, but rather that it re-states what many boarding schools – state and private – and some other (private) providers have known for a long time. The provision of excellent non-intellectual skills in the formative years is as important as the development of intellectual – or cognitive – skills.

At the school at which I work, there is a complete consensus on this idea: it is not enough that we enable pupils to do well in exams, though we do do this, and well. In addition to this, it is essential that we provide young people with the capability to gain promotion, not just the qualifications that will gain them a job.

The breadth of educational provision at private schools in the UK, of course, is not part of the analysis of those schools by the OECD, and PISA does not value that part of the curriculum, except insofar as it enables pupils to do better cognitively (which it does). Non-cognitive – or character – development, makes a tremendous difference to the prospects of young people, and this development does not have to take place only in the home, as Prof Heckman’s paper hints. Rather it can be – should be – part of the core provision of schools.

One further thought on this: the last decade has witnessed an extraordinary investment in IT in schools. The idea that greater levels of IT investment would generate better learning was so widely assumed that it has rarely been questioned. However, one of the consequences of this investment is that young people are spending more and more time within the curriculum staring at a screen, and – of course – they are definitely doing this outside the curriculum too. What they are doing less of is talking, in groups, with a purpose. There is the world of difference between a conversational drift, and the sort of verbal exchange that demands a conclusion, particularly under time pressure.

I am a huge neophile: I love my tablet, and gadgets thrill me. IT has a strong role to play in education, and there are many things we should use it for. But Prof Heckman’s paper reminds us not only that schools have a strong responsibility to develop non-cognitive skills, but also to recognise the development of relational skills, and to see them practised in the classroom.