Laurie O’Donnell

Our Chief Executive, Bernard McLeary pointed me towards an interesting article from The Economist magazine – ‘What works in education: the lessons according to McKinsey’

[Full text of report from McKinsey]

It’s well worth a read. The findings are that the countries doing well by international standards (PISA) – Finland, Canada, Singapore, South Korea – all do some things in common.

According to the consultancy outfit McKinsey they all do three things very well:
1. Get the best teachers
2. Get the best out of teachers
3. Step in when pupils start to fall behind

It seems that pay is not the most important factor in getting the top graduates to become teachers but status and value are. In Finland all new teachers must have a master’s degree. South Korea recruits primary teachers from the top 5% of graduates so there is fierce competition for entry into the profession.

Support and training (cpd) seem to be crucial. Especially in terms of collaborative learning around communities of practice. Singapore gives teachers 100 hours of training per year. Teachers in Finland get half a day a week to work with other teachers.

Early intervention and a big investment in ‘special-education teachers’ is important. Singapore provides extra lessons for the lowest performing 20% of students, Finland has the largest proportion of teachers focussed on the lowest performing learners.

So in summary, and by my reading of the article, it would appear to be that the usual suspects:

• the level of investments in education (relatively low in Singapore)
• higher salaries for teachers (Germany, Spain and Switzerland)
• more tests (England and USA)
• more rigorous inspection regimes (Finland doesn’t even have a schools inspectorate)

are not the magic bullets of success, however important they might still be. What schools need to focus on is recruiting well, investing heavily in collegiate professional development and dealing with learning difficulties as early as possible and as often as required.

After the sessions offering my ‘top tips’ on leadership to LTS staff (see previous post) I was asked some questions. I have tried to capture these with an outline of the answers I gave.

Can you learn to be a leader or is something you are born with?
Great question. I take a situational (and adaptive) view of leadership rather than one based on position or status. My daughters often provide leadership at home when it comes to deciding how we spend our time, our money or what we are going to eat. In the workplace leadership often shifts within a team depending on the context, expertise and experience of team members. However, there are also some situations where positional leadership is important and I have seen organisations where the people paid to lead duck the difficult decisions.

There are leadership skills/competences that can be learned – largely through exercising them rather than reading about them (and the earlier the better). Having said that there are some personal characteristics/dispositions that I think are helpful, eg being able to listen and empathise, not being too risk averse, being optimistic, being able to express a clear view that is comprehensible to others. As a former teacher you would expect me to say that all of these are learnable and they are. Some people have a better start which means the others have to work harder at developing the skills, competences, and dispositions if they are going to be effective.

Which of your top tips do you find the most difficult to put into practice?
I don’t like admitting it but probably the one relating to prioritising work. When I am in the office I could quite happily spend my time walking round speaking to staff and finding out what they are doing. Important work but I also need to make sure that I complete tasks, do paperwork, review plans, prepare for meetings etc. The reality is that I enjoy the former more than the later and we all tend to gravitate towards our comfort zones and I need to watch this. As an aside I am really pleased that my comfort zone is not sititng behind a desk or filling my diary with long pointless meetings.

How do you get staff to lead rather than wait to be led?
It’s about the culture of the organisation. If people get their backsides kicked for showing their initiative or if there is a blame culture you can bet that nobody wants to lead unless they absolutely have to. (See Don Ledingham’s excellent post on personal accountability against aspirations.) In LTS we need to give staff supported opportunities to lead – very different to dumping tasks that we don’t like. We need to learn from mistakes, ie if we are going to make mistakes we should try to make new ones. In my experience supported opportunities to lead helps to motivate staff, so we get much better results as an organisation because we are maximising our collective potential and are able to deliver better services to our stakeholders.

What about leading across and up?
Not easy but the top tips should help, in particular know your role and make sure you know what you stand for. Building these relationships has to be based on an understanding of mutual interest (achieving organisational goals) and mutual dependency (you need your peers and boss to succeed just as much they need you to succeed – if this is not the case you have a sure recipe for a dysfunctional organisation).

I am pleased to see another new area of the LTS Online Service going live with the launch of Scotland’s Culture.

This new body of resources around Scotland’s Culture provides a small but select collection of classroom resources to support, among other things, the celebration of St Andrew’s Day. Other resources include some information on the Scottish flag, The Satire, and a selection of other key cultural resources including links the National Museums and National Library.

I hope they are useful and look forward to seeing how this area develops over the next couple of years.

I was asked to speak to a group of LTS staff this week on the subject of leadership and identify some ‘top tips’ for aspiring leaders. Here is a adaptation of what I came up with as a starter for discussion:

1. Be a lifelong learner – as soon as you think you know all the answers you can be sure you don’t. Read as much as you can and widely as you can (not just ‘how to’ stuff but also the classics of literature because they are timeless and deeply rooted in the human condition).
2. Know what you stand for – what do you believe, what are the values that underpin your work and why are you doing the job in the first place?
3. Recruit well – never employ someone if you are not sure about them. The best employees don’t need to be motivated, your job as a leader/manager is to make sure you don’t demotivate them (Jim Collins in ‘Good to Great’ talks about getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats on the bus).
4. Embrace complexity, ambiguity and change – that’s the way the world is so you might as well get used to it, deal with it and where possible manage, control and direct it.
5. Be as strategic as you possibly can – try to see the big picture, look to the long-term and try to take people with you (taking time to win hearts and minds pays dividends in the long run).
6. Know your role and what counts as success in your role – if you are leader then you can’t spend all of your time on management tasks. Any more than a shop assistant can spend all the time stocking the shelves and sweeping the floor. They need to serve customers you need to provide leadership.
7. Learn how to prioritise – everything you do is important because you are spending your valuable time doing it (and unless you are self employed somebody else’s money, eg the taxpayer). You need to be able to quickly identify exactly where you need to spend your time and try to deal with tasks before they become urgent, ie be proactive rather than reactive (Stephen Covey of the 7 Habits writes well on this). You need to develop a light touch. Land on the task that needs your attention give it exactly the right amount of attention and then move on without carrying any baggage to the next task.
8. Try to make your work serious fun but don’t take yourself too seriously – listen a lot and try to smile (even laugh) more.
9. [Late addition LO'D] Be as optimistic as you can be given the context you find yourself in – back to Jim Collins and what he calls the Stockdale Paradox, never lose the belief that you will in the end be successful but make sure you also confront the ‘brutal facts’ of your current situation and deal with them. Martin Selegman’s ‘Learned Optimism’ is also important here, blind optimism is not a rational position you sometimes need to be more pessimistic.

How do these look? What have I missed? Are they tips about leadership or something else?

[Further late addition: Interesting link on John Connell's blog to a pdf of the Little Book of Leadership.]

Finished the Alvin and Heidi Toffler book Revolutionary Wealth last week – been meaning to read it for more than a year. Building on much of the ground prepared in their previous works Future Shock and Third Wave [First Wave was agricultural revolution, Second Wave industrial revolution and Third Wave is the knowledge revolution] these world reknowned futurists serve up another good old page turner.

The basis premise of the book is that convential measures of the wealth system such as GDP (’grossly distorted product’) or average wages only cover half (or less?) of the real economy. The other half is made up of unpaid work, what the Tofflers call ‘prosuming’. This prosuming economy covers everything from parenting, hobbies, diy and being a good citizen through to open source software development and using an ATM [or banking online] rather than visiting a bank. The argument is familiar to anyone who has considered how much it would cost the NHS if families and friends did not care for their elderly or ill loved ones. What is new argue the Tofflers is the impact that this is beginning to have on the traditional econonomy. Again familiar territory to anyone who has looked at the effect of web2 on publishing or file sharing on the entertainment industries. They identify massive (tectonic) shifts in the relationships between time, distance and knowledge that are disrupting the exisitng order of the world as we transition to brain-driven knowledge economies.
The book covers a lot of ground from the future of capitalism through future scenarios for China, Japan and the USA. Their style is very much about exploring options and identifying trends rather than predicting the future. All in all a very enjoyable and informative read.

It’s a lovely autumn morning here in Dundee and I have one of those rare days without any meetings in my diary. A day to catch-up with tasks, clear some clutter (paper and email), have a walk round the office to speak to colleagues and even have the luxury of blogging from the office rather than in the evening at home.

It’s been a mad couple of months since the summer.

• Had a great visit to Singapore
• Had a great SLF – maybe the best so far?
• Made good progress on our Dundee office move (now know where, just need to find out when and then manage the how)
• Glow is going to plan, three more local authorities signed the Customer Agreement (the ‘licence’ to use Glow)
• Started joint LTS/SQA work on a national online assessment resource
• Appointed John Low from West Lothian and East Lothian’s edublogger Ewan McIntosh as National Advisers to lead on the development of Glow2
• Connected Magazine shortlisted for Scottish Magazine of the year
• Early Years Online and Modern Foreign Languages Environment areas of the LTS Online Service shortlisted for UK e-Learning Awards
• Launched lots of new stuff online – ConnectedLive, Climate Change (a model of how to deal with the controversy around the Al Gore movie), Debating in Schools, Games Based Learning (The Consolarium), Journey to Excellence (with HMIe), Learning about Learning, Participation in Learning (with Save the Children) … [didn’t have time to add all the links but they can be found on the LTS homepage

So what lies ahead?

• Well Glow is the biggest thing on my agenda. Four local authorities are starting to use Glow now (Renfrewshire, South Lanarkshire, Dundee and East Dunbartonshire) with another group ready to go soon thereafter. We are gathering some momentum now and it is important that we focus on supporting the early adopters and secure some quick wins. I think this will also help reassure some of the doubters about Glow and win the last few hearts and minds.
• Need to get the Dundee office move sorted. Moving house is said to be one of the most stressful life events. We need to make sure that we have a smooth transition with the minimum of hassle for staff.
• Need to get started on SLF 08. We have already booked the venue and will need to secure keynote speakers soon. In fact we need to get started on SLF 09 &10 soon as we really need to plan two years ahead.
• I expect to spend quite a lot of time helping to get national online assessment resource moving.
• Want to ensure that our r&d work continues to be given high priority and in particular need to invest more of my time in web2 and the computer games for learning areas.
• Got to make sure that our other work continues to tick along, eg online communities of practice and virtual advisory service
• Also want to do some work on technology and content strategies as well as improving our performance reporting systems.
• Would be a good boost to staff if we were to win awards for our Connected publication and for the LTS Online Service.

But for now it’s time for a quick cup of coffee before attacking my inbox and making a few phonecalls.