5 Ways To Engage Leaders In The Science Of Learning

Imagine you are a school leader with 30 years experience and have been trained in Fountas and Pinnell, L3 or Reading Recovery. You’ve been seen as an expert - provided professional learning and coached others in using the processes. In fact, you probably wouldn’t be in the position that you’re in today without that skill set. You’ve literally overseen thousands of children go through your programs and have felt a sense of achievement from that.

One day, someone tells you that the way you’ve been teaching children to read, is not best practice. How would you react?

The more I have engaged with evidence-informed educators, the more I have heard the question pop up of, “What do I do when I don’t have the support of school leaders?” The above scenario is one that is actually quite common and the reality of where we are at.

Without a doubt, the most effective & efficient way of making whole school changes, is when it's led from the top. School leaders are able to shape the culture, priorities and policies. However, that doesn’t always happen and when you take into account the experiences and perceptions that we all have, it is easy to see why.

So, what can we do? Firstly, we need to understand that most of the time, the people we are proposing change to, are not even in the process of considering it. Prochaska and DiClemente, 2005 have labelled this as the “Pre-Contemplation” phase and this article will focus on working with people at this stage.

Earlier this year, I presented a webinar on, “How to implement the Science Of Learning when the rest of the school isn’t” and the following five tips are some of the things that I went through:

Know your stuff
Know your leader
Understand that change is stressful
Attend to their needs
Shrink the change

1) Know your stuff

In schools, too many decisions are bets made with little or no understanding of the odds (Didau, 2020). We estimate the best and ignore the worst outcome. Part of the reason why you are in the situation that you are in, is because too many reactionary decisions have been made in the past.

Schools are low-validity and high-complexity domains. Meaning a lot of the data that we collect is not actually valid data. So, you need to have a strong understanding of what is currently happening and the stories behind the numbers. I’ve written more about this in 5 Rules For Using Data Effectively.

In ‘Reduce Change to Increase Improvement', Professor Viviane Robinson states that, "If you can't illustrate advice, don't give it." If you’re reading this article, you’ve probably got a pretty good idea on what the evidence says and you've come to the realisation that if we're going to aim for best practice then it needs to be implemented consistently across the school through an enacted systematic and sequential curriculum.

You need to collate your information, so that you can present it. Depending on the Pre-Contemplator’s needs (which we will look at later), it could be recorded footage of student performance, research papers, data from similar schools or if you have already made changes - data from your own classroom.

2) Know your leader

Know the other side, before you criticise the other side. We are all affected by various cognitive biases and most of the time we are not even aware of it. Some that your school leader may be affected by are:

Sunk-cost fallacy: when we make decisions based on how much we have previously invested. Most of these Pre-Contemplators would have been major players in implementing programs like L3, Reading Recovery, Learning Styles, F&P, Inquiry based learning – a lot of time, money and effort would have gone into these failed programs. It's still going into these programs. So, people feel committed to what they’ve invested into.
The Dunning-Kruger effect: when people who know very little, believe they know more than they do. So, they might dismiss your proposal to incorporate a Direct Instruction approach because they read an article that says students should be able to discover learning for themselves. This shows their lack of understanding in how learning happens and what teachers can do to support it in being more effective and efficient.
Intuitive decision-makers: We'll naturally do whatever we can to avoid thinking too hard. The leader will typically default to the intuitive approach rather than the deliberative ( Patuawa et al, 2022). This is explained by the law of least effort which states that our brain uses the minimum amount of energy for each task it can get away with.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 thinking also states how we revert to our System 1 thinking. He describes System 1 as being automatic and impulsive and System 2 is when we are very conscious, aware and considerate.

Alarmingly, people tend to have more faith in leaders who display this confident, swift, intuitive approach despite the fact it avoids any sort of process that looks at evidence.

3) Understand that change is stressful

From thousands of years of training to survive, humans have developed the ability to go into "fight or flight" mode. Whatever you propose to the Pre-Contemplator it is requiring a change in their thinking. Change is stressful.

When we are stressed our sympathetic nervous system releases hormones called adrenaline and cortisol. This then triggers a chain of events in the body including our breathing rate increasing, a faster heart beat and it generally feels uncomfortable and we go into fight or flight mode.

These are characteristics that have popped up in a number of studies and I've tried to fit them into this framework of Fight or Flight and then given them names to increase the chances of remembering them.

Self-righteous Sarah: A belief that I am right, and others are wrong. We need to tread gently. Build trust, show empathy and avoid blame.

Controlling Con: These people are very resistant to the change because they may be feeling anxious about the unknown and like to be in control e.g. they know what to do with levelled readers and benchmarking. That's their comfort zone.
Protective Peter: A need to protect themselves and others from embarrassment or hurt. Full of excuses. “It’s the parents/area/COVID fault” or “it's another fad'', are common reasons Protective Peters will come up with to avoid thinking about change.

Reluctant Remy: You don’t know what you don’t know. This educator may just believe that there is no problem that needs to be fixed and comfortable in what they are doing.

Resigned Reid: Unfortunately, educators have been promised many “magic bullets” that haven’t worked in the past. Understandably, Reluctant Reid has been through this ineffective process too many times and is now reluctant to even consider change due to change fatigue.

I’ve written more about the difficulties of change here:

4) Attend to their needs

Professors Tiziana Casciaro and Julie Battilana in Power for All, write about how we have 2 basic needs of safety and self-esteem with six things that address those needs:

1. Material resources

2. Morality

3. Achievement

4. Status

5. Autonomy

6. Affiliation

We need to connect to their needs so we can break through their protective barriers (cognitive biases and fight or flight response). If we can attend to their needs and engage them in the decision-making process, they are more likely to see there’s a problem.

Pre-Contemplators do not like being told what to do, so we need to work with them in coming up with a solution. We need to support them so that they still feel in control. Can you get them to tell you what the problem is?

If you are presenting large amounts of information, you are best off giving them time to process this information. Lock in a time to come back to it.

5) Shrink the change

When you propose your Theories of Action (what you believe are the best solutions to the problem), it needs to be one-on-one to avoid group-think bias (when we conform to the beliefs of the group). So, hopefully you've built a team and you have all started to normalise your Theories of Action.

In the webinar, I used the analogy of having a gardening team that is planting lots of seeds, but focusing on one or two plants at a time. We want to shift the pre-contemplator into the contemplation stage before we make our proposal.

However, we still need to be open-minded. Otherwise, we are just mirroring the behaviour of the resistor. So, we need to:

lean into the conversation with genuine curiosity
not make assumptions about what they are thinking
clarify what they are saying e.g. "Let me just check..." or "Am I right in saying..."
dig deep into any reservations that they may have e.g. "Tell me more about that..."
ask direct questions e.g. "Are you happy with..." or "What did you see..."

We know that success leads to motivation, which in turn increases our attention. So we need to take a “best bets” approach in choosing what to do. We want this experience to feel more like organising an Uber trip, than trying to plan a 6-month overseas holiday. Uber makes the experience for the customer easy, safe and unambiguous.

Examples of ways to shrink the change

Using ready-to-go, evidence-based programs like InitiaLit or Sounds-Write
Choosing an area that teachers already have a strong knowledge base in e.g. look at being more structured in how oral language is taught
Look at something which is already being done, but not as effectively as it could be e.g. the use of decodable readers
Phonics might be taught, but not following a systemic synthetic phonics sequence

Caveat

The school leader will only contemplate your proposal if they feel psychologically safe to make the change. This means that you need to have built a rapport with them. If they feel attached to current practices like it is a part of their identity, the degree of difficulty will be even higher.

In How Minds Change, David McRaney writes about how people interpret things through the lens of their tribe. So, we can show them all the evidence in the world, but they may still interpret it very differently. He uses this quote from sociologist, Brooke Herrington, “The fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death.”

Final thoughts

It’s not easy pushing for change from the bottom. There’s a reason why we have the saying, “Pushing 💩/rocks uphill.” That’s how it can feel and it can literally take years. You will feel frustrated, but we just need to stay focused on making those tiny shifts. You don’t just go out one day and run a marathon, it all starts with one step and then continually putting one foot in front of the other. We need to have the mindset that supporting Pre-Contemplators to change is just part of the process in improving student outcomes.

Next steps

Think Forward Educators Live Workshop:

Implementing the science of learning workshop

On Wednesday 30 November, we will be hearing from real teachers at various phases of implementation, discussing their real-world challenges.

Dr Nathaniel Swain and Brendan Lee will then guide teachers and school leaders through some possible solutions, taking an evidence-informed approach.

To respect people's privacy, this session will not be recorded.

Register here

About Brendan Lee

Brendan Lee is a Primary School Assistant Principal in NSW. He has previously been a high school teacher and cafe owner! When he fell down the rabbit hole of educational research, he felt compelled to help bridge the gap between research and practice by supporting teachers in implementing the evidence.

References

Battilana, J. & Casciaro, T. (2021) Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business. Simon &Schuster

Breakspear, Simon and Ryrie-Jones, Bronwyn (2020) Teaching Sprints: How Overloaded Educators Can Keep Getting Better. Corwin

Didau, David. (2020) Intelligent Accountability: Creating the Conditions for Teachers to Thrive. John Catt Ed. Ltd

DiClemente, C. C., & Velasquez, M. M. (2002). Motivational interviewing and the stages of change. Motivational interviewing: Preparing people for change, 2, 201-216.

Heath, C. & Heath, D. (2010) Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. Crown Business

Hord, S. M., Rutherford, W. L., Huling, L., & Hall, G. E. (2006; revised PDF version uploaded on Lulu.com, 2014). Taking charge of change. Austin, TX: SEDL. Available from http://www.sedl.org/pubs/catalog/items/cha22.html

Kahan, Dan M., The Expressive Rationality of Inaccurate Perceptions (October 7, 2015). Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 40, 26-28 (2016), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2670981

Kahneman, Daniel (2013) Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Klaff, O. (2019) Flip the Script: Getting People to Think Your Idea Is Their Idea (Portfolio)

Mccrea, Peps (2020) “Motivated Teaching: Harnessing the science of motivation to boost attention and effort in the classroom” CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Mcraney, David. (2022) ‘How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion. Portfolio

Patuawa, J.M., Sinnema, C., Robinson, V. et al. (2022) Addressing inequity and underachievement: Intervening to improve middle leaders’problem-solving conversations. J Educ Change . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-022-09449-3

Prochaska, J.O. and DiClemente, C.C. (2005). The Transtheoretical Approach. Handbook of Psychotherapy Integration. (pp. 147-171) United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, USA.

Robinson, Viviane M J. (2017) Reduce Change to Increase Improvement (Corwin Impact Leadership Series). SAGE Publications