Teachers spend years learning to coach people. Ask questions, not give answers. Build trust before expecting vulnerability. Hold space. Stay quiet when staying quiet is the hardest thing.
Then they get promoted. And most of it disappears.
Chris Scorer — school leader, data specialist, and co-host of Education Leaders Live — said it plainly this month: "You'd never walk into a classroom and tell kids to do something just because you're telling them to. Yet leadership very often does exactly that."
If you've ever watched that gap open up — between what you know good leadership looks like and what actually happens under pressure — you're in the right place. You're not the only one who's seen it.
This is Education Leaders Live, the monthly companion show to the Education Leaders podcast. Each month, host Shane Leaning and Chris Scorer sit down with the listeners who show up live to unpack the best conversations from the feed. This month they hit a milestone — Episode 150 — and three conversations that kept pulling at the same uncomfortable question.
Why coaching programmes fail If you've ever launched a coaching initiative in a school and watched it quietly dissolve, Gene Tevonetti's research will probably explain why. After working with hundreds of schools, he found it's almost never the method that fails. It's one unresolved question that nobody answered at the start: what gets shared, what stays private, and who actually agreed on that before the coaching began? Confidentiality isn't just a detail. It's the foundation — and most schools pour it last.
Why smart leaders make terrible decisions You're not irrational. You're human. Shane walked through five cognitive biases that show up constantly in school leadership — anchoring, availability, the endowment effect, groupthink, and optimism bias. Chris brought an unexpected angle: Richard Thaler built behavioural economics to help people understand how we actually make decisions, not the tidy rational-actor fiction economists had been selling for decades. Then it came out he'd run workshops for Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on how to use that same understanding to manipulate people through their websites. Chris was genuinely heartbroken. He contrasted it with Tim Berners-Lee, who simply gave the internet to the world with no IP, no commercial conditions, nothing. "With great power comes great responsibility," Shane said. It might be the most honest five seconds of the month.
The future of British international schools (Episode 150 milestone) Simon Probert introduced an idea that's quietly reshaping how the best international schools think: rooted cosmopolitanism. There's a difference between raising students to be "global citizens" — a well-meaning idea that can leave young people belonging to nowhere — and students who are deeply anchored in their own culture and genuinely open to the world. As demographics shift in international school cities like Shanghai, this stops being philosophical. What is your school actually for? Do all your stakeholders agree? And if they don't, whose job is it to sort that out?
Chris also had his "Chris Solves the World" moment. One practical step that any international school could take tomorrow. It involves language. Worth staying for.
You can join Shane and Chris live every last Thursday of the month at educationleaders.live, on LinkedIn, or on YouTube — 6pm Shanghai / 10am UK. Bring your thoughts, your pushback, and your own stories from the field. That's what this show is built for.
If this is your world, we'd genuinely love to have you in the room.
👇 Which of these three conversations is living in your head right now? Let us know.
Join Shane's Intensive Leadership Programme at educationleaders.co/intensive
Shane Leaning, an organisational coach based in Shanghai, supports school leaders globally. Passionate about empowment, he is the author of the best-selling 'Change Starts Here.' Shane is a leading educational voice in the UK, Asia and around the world.
You can find Shane on LinkedIn and Bluesky. or shaneleaning.com
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