‘The one thing’

There are times when my experiences in education and politics crossover more overtly. I guess this is no surprise: they’re both people-focused activities. This time the crossover was about communication, specifically message discipline. I’ve read a fair bit about educational leadership and change implementation. Consistent themes include the need to prioritise, checking people have the bandwidth and resources to implement the change, and communicating plans clearly and repeatedly. I’ve never seen the phrase used, but I think message discipline is an important part of change implementation.

In lots of change management and leadership, they talk about prioritising and making a change ‘the one thing’ which people need to focus on (I think that phrase comes from Gary Keller and Jay Papasan’s 2013 book of that name). I don’t think anybody who works in a school would disagree with such an approach; although we can probably think of lots of times when this approach isn’t taken. When I was asked to lead on implementing a new Teaching & Learning Framework, I knew that we needed message discipline: we had to make it clear to everyone in the school that this was the one thing which we would be prioritising.

‘We want to make people bored of seeing this’

When I was talking with the team – the working group – who had put together the new framework, I said that we had to make sure we were always talking about it and referring to it. It had to be linked to every piece of professional development did, we had to weave it like a thread through all of our processes. There were sessions in our INSET week which I led which were centred on the new framework. There were other sessions led by colleagues which had an emphasis on topics such as behaviour. Behaviour is of course a key element in our teaching & learning framework, so I asked the colleague leading the behaviour training to make an explicit reference to the framework; they added the graphic of the framework to their slide deck. This was all part of our aim that people would be bored of seeing the framework because it was everywhere (while hopefully not bored of the content and its purpose!).

Teachers are busy people. Schools are busy places. This busyness makes things noisy. Communication and implementation has to cut through that noise. Being clear, concise and consistent is the way to do this. The framework is graphically represented as a single diagram (concise), with a supplementary ‘knowledge base’ which defines and offers exemplars of each element of the framework (clarity). To achieve consistency we’re following the rhetorical advice: repetition, repetition, repetition. We have scheduled professional development this year so that we keep revisiting the framework. Call that last step retrieval or spacing and you’ve probably spotted that a lot of what we’re doing for professional development and change implementation is also what we do in good teaching.