I did a CPD session a week ago and I’ve been kicking myself about it a bit ever since.
As we all do, I felt the pressure of time. I had one session to get this one thing done and I didn’t want to talk for too long because I wanted to give people time to actually do the work.
So, I spoke for ten minutes max and then asked people to crack on in their teams.
And when I think back, I probably omitted the most important part: the sharing, discussion and unpicking of an example. It was there on the PowerPoint for people to look at, but I sped through it when presenting to staff.
Staff went away and, God bless them, a number of departments got the piece of work back to me within the same week.
And I celebrated the speed at which we had got the job done.
Then I paused. And reflected.
And I’ve been thinking ever since about what I increasingly see as one of the challenges facing education: our need to get things done, tick things off and move quickly onto the next thing.
Sometimes, perhaps, to the detriment of deep thinking, conversation and meaningful collaboration.
Education has become an incredibly busy world. There is always another deadline, another email, another meeting, another initiative, another thing that needs our attention. Our days are full and, because they are full, efficiency can easily become the thing we value most: How quickly can we get this done?
But I’m increasingly wondering whether we sometimes need to ask a different question: How do we make sure we get this right?
Because there is a difference between doing something and thinking hard about something.
There is a difference between completing a task collaboratively and actually collaborating.
And there is a difference between finding space in a meeting agenda to discuss something and giving people the intellectual space to wrangle with it properly – something I’ve been reflecting on since reading Radical Candour by Kim Scott.
That space matters.
We need space for hard thinking. For disagreement. For questions. For conversations that go off on tangents and somehow come back somewhere better. For looking at an example together and asking, Is this actually what we mean? For changing our minds. For returning to something a week later and realising it isn’t quite right yet.
We need time to talk about our disciplines and the minutiae of how something is taught. To debate why a unit sits on the curriculum and whether it deservedly does. To consider what pupils need to know, in what order, and why.
Particularly when establishing something new, there is surely nothing more important than getting those foundations right.
What is taught? Why is it taught? How is it sequenced? How is it assessed? How do we know it is working?
These are deceptively simple questions. But answering them properly requires time, thought, challenge and collaboration.
And yet, in a culture of busyness, it is precisely this kind of thinking that can become squeezed.
I was part of that culture in my own CPD session. I prioritised giving people time to do over giving us enough time to think together first.
And perhaps that is the bit I have been kicking myself about.
Can one person slow the pace of doing down? I’m not sure. The time I have with staff is limited and finite and something beyond my control.
But I can return to this work and so the work that came out of that CPD session will be returned to. We will look at it again, talk about it, challenge it and improve it further until it is right for our pupils.
Because it needs to be right for our pupils.
And maybe there is a wider challenge here for those of us in leadership.
If something is important enough to ask people to do, it is important enough to create the space for them to do it well.
And creating that space sometimes means asking people to do less.
Fewer things. Better.
Less rushing to complete. More time to think.
Less ticking off. More wrangling, questioning, discussing and refining.
Less celebrating how quickly something has been done and more celebrating the quality of the thinking that went into it.
Because we cannot keep adding without occasionally taking something away. And we cannot ask people to think deeply while simultaneously filling every available space with something to do.
Perhaps one of the most important things we can do as leaders, then, is to protect that space.
To decide what really matters and to give people permission to spend quality time on it.