Education Leaders | The Chart-Topping School Leadership Podcast

This week, we're revisiting a favourite from the archives. Shane sits down with Katharine Birbalsingh, founder and headmistress of Michaela Community School, the free school in a converted Wembley office block that has posted the highest Progress 8 scores in England for three consecutive years. Katharine explains why she's never once used an agenda in a meeting, why simplicity beats choice in almost every part of school life, and why she believes real autonomy only works when staff genuinely own what they're building together.You'll hear the ice cream cone analogy Katharine uses to explain why schools quietly become too complicated over time, why she deliberately warns candidates about the parts of Michaela they might not like before hiring them, and how she applies the logic of the dating world to setting standards with parents and pupils alike. Whether or not you agree with her approach, this conversation will push you to think harder about what genuine conviction in leadership actually looks like.Resources & Links Mentioned:Michaela Community SchoolThe Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers, edited by Katharine BirbalsinghThe Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them by E.D. HirschEpisode PartnersInternational Curriculum AssociationSisi

When a teacher in South Carolina hit 86% on a goal she had set for herself, her school moved off the state's lowest-performing list and the state department called to ask how she had done it. In this episode, Jim Knight, founder of the Instructional Coaching Group and the person who coined the term "instructional coaching", explains why that result had almost nothing to do with the teaching strategy involved. Jim has spent thirty years researching professional learning at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning, and he brings that research to a frank conversation about why so much well-meaning coaching quietly deprofessionalises the very teachers it is meant to support.You'll learn why Jim treats every coaching relationship as a partnership rather than an instruction, and why even experienced, well-intentioned leaders can slide into telling without noticing they are doing it. Jim walks Shane through the four conversations that move a teacher from watching video of their own classroom to setting a measurable, student-focused goal, using a real example of a teacher whose exit-ticket scores climbed once she and her coach chose cooperative learning strategies together. Along the way, he explains why Richard Boyatzis describes bad goal-setting as being a "helpful bully", and why the satisfaction of giving advice is not the same thing as doing right by the people you lead. If you have ever wondered whether your instinct to fix things for your staff is helping them or holding them back, this conversation offers a clear, research-backed alternative.Resources & Links Mentioned:Jim Knight's Instructional Coaching GroupJim Knight on LinkedInJim Knight's books, including Instructional Coaching and The Impact CycleCoaching Conversations podcast with Jim KnightDaniel Pink's "Drive"Self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan)Miller and Rollnick's work on motivational interviewingMichael Bungay Stanier's "The Coaching Habit"Bryan Goodwin and McREL's "The New Classroom Instruction That Works"Marzano's "Classroom Instruction That Works" (McREL)Spencer Kagan's cooperative learning structuresLearning Forward (formerly the National Staff Development Council)Episode PartnersInternational Curriculum AssociationSisi

Ever sat in a meeting watching one person take over while everyone else goes quiet, and had no idea how to step in? Shane tackles exactly that in this solo episode. He unpacks why dominant speakers do more than annoy the room: research on "hidden profile" problems shows that when one person carries the conversation, groups are far more likely to land on the wrong decision, because the quietest person in the room is often the one holding the missing piece. Shane explains why most leaders freeze in this moment and what actually stops them from stepping in.You'll learn a four-step technique called the redirect: naming the person, acknowledging something specific they said, bridging with "and" rather than "but," and inviting a named colleague into the conversation. Shane breaks down why each step matters, including the psychology behind starting with someone's name and why generic acknowledgement backfires. He also covers the timing judgement call of when to step in, and how to handle it differently when someone's length is driven by distress rather than dominance. If you lead meetings of any kind, this is a tool you can use next week.Episode PartnersInternational Curriculum AssociationSisi

Ask a teacher how many people looked at their exercise books last year and you might be surprised by the number. Tyrone Ruth counted his: fifteen different people, in a single academic year. In this episode, Tyrone, a teacher-turned-senior-leader with experience across the UK and the Middle East, unpacks what he calls the hidden curriculum of surveillance: the quiet network of book looks, learning walks, data drops and digital check-ins that most schools treat as completely normal. He argues this constant, low-level monitoring is doing real damage to teachers, even when no single leader intends any harm.You'll hear why Tyrone thinks there's a critical difference between professional accountability and a surveillance culture rooted in mistrust, and how that distinction changes the way a school should ask questions of its staff. Tyrone shares the story of an eleven-page marking policy, explains why teachers end up producing evidence rather than teaching, and uses Bentham's Panopticon to describe how simply feeling watched changes behaviour. Shane and Tyrone also get into what school leaders can actually do about it, starting with a simple but uncomfortable exercise: listing everything you currently monitor and asking who it's really for.Resources & Links Mentioned:Tyrone Ruth on LinkedInPanopticon (Jeremy Bentham) — BritannicaEpisode PartnersInternational Curriculum AssociationSisi

This is a bonus episode. Every last Thursday of the month, Shane sits down with Chris Scorer to pick apart the themes from the month's podcast guests, the stuff that stuck with them, the bits they disagreed on, and where it all leads. If you listen to the main feed, this is your chance to hear those conversations chewed over properly.It's a quieter one this month, summer holidays for a good chunk of the northern hemisphere, and Chris is back after an eventful July of his own. But two short episodes turned into a properly meaty conversation, and one thread runs right through it: we do things instinctively in the classroom that we somehow forget to do when we're leading adults.They start with defensive teachers. Chris flips Shane's original question on its head, not "have you had a defensive teacher?" but "have you been one, and why does the system make us feel that way?" That leads somewhere useful. Defensiveness isn't a character flaw, it's natural, and often it's a symptom of a place that's short on psychological safety rather than a problem with the person in front of you. Shane digs into the practical side, three-point communication and the side-by-side effect, why a conversation in a car feels easier than one across a desk, and why British parliament sits the way it does. There's a lovely story about a CEO who solved everything with a pen and a bit of paper. And a genuinely practical bit for leaders: what do you actually do when you've tried all the right things and the defensiveness still won't shift?The Zaretta Hammond episode gives them plenty to sit with. Her point that learning is meant to be messy, the liminal spaces, the trapeze hanging in mid-air, and the way our results pressure tempts us to over-scaffold and quietly rob students of the struggle they need. Chris connects it to leadership: we promote strong administrators who like their bookshelves ordered by colour, then wonder why nobody feels safe to make mistakes. Shane makes the case for Zaretta as someone who holds the complexity, neither camp in the tired progressive-versus-traditional split. And there's the first pancake, which is always pants, and what that tells us about growth.The best tangent is about collaboration. Why does teaching leave people so alone? Chris brings up the group planning built into Chinese domestic schools. Shane picks it up with Shanghai maths, why importing the teacher without the conditions was an expensive flop, and how healthcare has proper supervision while teaching makes do with line management and a PD slot. They land on staff room culture, professional supervision, and Shane's argument that the problem was never the idea, it's the system that leaves teachers no time to use it.They close on the big one. Education second only to medicine, until someone in a Bucharest audience of 500 gently corrected Chris: education matters more, because medicine is about the here and now, and education is about the here, now and ever after. Worth the listen for that line alone.Episodes mentioned in this conversation:How to Defuse Defensive Teachers (solo episode) → /podcast/167/Management Mastery (Poppy Nobes) → /podcast/168/Rethinking Equity Through Learning Science (Zaretta Hammond) → /podcast/169/10 Million Views Later (Tom Sherrington, a rerun pick from Skyler Rose) → /podcast/170/What are Leadership Levers? (solo episode) → /podcast/171/Coming up next month:Tyrone Ruth on how accountability can freeze a school in its tracks, and the brilliant Jim Knight of the Instructional Coaching Group on getting back to basics with instructional coaching. Plus a few solo episodes. Keep an eye on the feed.Join us live:We broadcast Education Leaders Live on the last Thursday of every month on LinkedIn and YouTube, or at educationleaders.live. Come and bring your thoughts, your pushback, and your own stories from the field. That's what the show's for.

Seventeen weeks into writing a weekly newsletter on LinkedIn, Shane has landed on a simple but powerful idea: leadership levers. This episode explains what makes a lever different from a project or a habit, why it has to be small enough to do tomorrow morning without telling anyone, and why it has to live inside something already in your week, like a meeting or a handover. Drawing on John Sweller's research on cognitive load and Stephen Rogelberg's studies on meetings, Shane makes the case that most leadership problems aren't solved by trying harder, but by placing effort somewhere better.You'll learn why a single sentence sent before a meeting can prevent hours of follow-up confusion, and why two minutes at the end of a meeting assigning names to actions can stop decisions turning into vague memories. Shane also shares how learning a framework for difficult conversations freed up enough mental space to actually listen better, rather than working out the opening line from scratch every time. If you're looking for practical, repeatable moves rather than another big initiative, this episode gives you a way to think about where to place your effort for maximum return.Resources & Links Mentioned:Education Leaders Intensive programmeEpisode Partners:International Curriculum AssociationSisi

This week, we're revisiting a favourite from the archives, recorded back when this podcast was still called Global Ed Leaders. Shane sits down with Tom Sherrington, the former headteacher turned writer, speaker and co-author of the Teaching WalkThrus series, to trace how he built one of the biggest audiences in education from a single WordPress blog in 2012. Tom explains why he never planned any of it, how a joke Twitter handle became his brand for years, and why he still presses publish every time expecting nobody to read it.You'll hear why Tom believes the best blog posts are the honest ones, including the post about his own OFSTED experience that cost him one speaking invitation and won him another. Tom shares his view on why anonymous social media accounts don't deserve a reply, why he refuses to criticise a school from the outside, and what he'd tell a school leader starting out today. If you've ever wondered whether putting your voice out there is worth the risk, this conversation will change how you think about it.Resources & Links Mentioned:Tom Sherrington's blog, teacherhead.comTeaching WalkThrus, with Oliver CaviglioliEpisode PartnersInternational Curriculum AssociationSisi

Zaretta Hammond wants school leaders to stop treating change as a straight line. In this conversation, the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain explains why growth actually moves in a spiral, why there's always a dip before things get better, and why so many educators are caught off guard by that dip because the system rarely rewards the messiness of learning. She unpacks the idea of "liminal spaces," the uncomfortable in-between moments where old skills are falling away and new ones haven't settled yet, and argues that school leaders need real skill in guiding people through them, not just managing productivity.You'll learn why Zaretta believes "we cannot PD our way out of this learning crisis," what she calls the "theory of the first pancake," and why she thinks evaluation should ask teachers what they've experimented with rather than whether they delivered a polished lesson. Zaretta also breaks down the difference between rapport and alliance in the teacher-student relationship, and why closing achievement gaps depends on combining cognitive science with culturally responsive teaching rather than treating them as separate camps. If you've ever wondered why some professional development sessions leave your staff buzzing but change nothing back in the classroom, this conversation explains why, and what to do instead.Resources & Links MentionedZaretta Hammond's Ready for RigorZaretta Hammond on LinkedInCulturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain (book)James Nottingham's Learning PitRichard Elmore's instructional core (Harvard Graduate School of Education)Episode PartnersInternational Curriculum AssociationSisi

Most schools pour resources into developing brilliant teachers and then promote those same people into management roles with almost no preparation for what comes next. This episode centres on a genuinely exciting initiative: Management Mastery, an in-house leadership development programme created by Poppy Nobes, Head of Professional Development at Aldridge Education. Poppy built the programme after recognising a gap that formal qualifications like NPQs simply can't fill; the operational, contextual, and deeply practical side of managing people in your specific organisation. From handling difficult conversations to structuring communication channels, Management Mastery is designed to make the implicit explicit.You'll hear how Poppy and her team started by working backwards from the problems they were actually seeing in their workforce, grievances, repeated sick leave, unsupported staff, and designed a programme around the skills leaders needed to prevent them. Shane and Poppy discuss why practice-based professional development is just as vital for managers as it is for classroom teachers, the power of a shared language (including the "balcony and dance floor" concept that keeps coming up in their cohort), and why being geographically spread across ten schools from Brighton to Durham makes community-building all the more essential. If you've ever wondered whether your organisation has quietly assumed that leadership development is covered, this conversation will make you think again.Resources & Links Mentioned:Aldridge EducationPoppy Nobes on LinkedInTeach First Golden Thread CoursesEpisode Partners:International Curriculum AssociationSisi