Education Leaders | The Chart-Topping School Leadership Podcast

This is a bonus episode. Every last Thursday of the month, Shane sits down with Chris Scorer to pick apart the themes from the month's podcast guests, the stuff that stuck with them, the bits they disagreed on, and where it all leads. If you listen to the main feed, this is your chance to hear those conversations chewed over properly.

It's a quieter one this month, summer holidays for a good chunk of the northern hemisphere, and Chris is back after an eventful July of his own. But two short episodes turned into a properly meaty conversation, and one thread runs right through it: we do things instinctively in the classroom that we somehow forget to do when we're leading adults.

They start with defensive teachers. Chris flips Shane's original question on its head, not "have you had a defensive teacher?" but "have you been one, and why does the system make us feel that way?" That leads somewhere useful. Defensiveness isn't a character flaw, it's natural, and often it's a symptom of a place that's short on psychological safety rather than a problem with the person in front of you. Shane digs into the practical side, three-point communication and the side-by-side effect, why a conversation in a car feels easier than one across a desk, and why British parliament sits the way it does. There's a lovely story about a CEO who solved everything with a pen and a bit of paper. And a genuinely practical bit for leaders: what do you actually do when you've tried all the right things and the defensiveness still won't shift?

The Zaretta Hammond episode gives them plenty to sit with. Her point that learning is meant to be messy, the liminal spaces, the trapeze hanging in mid-air, and the way our results pressure tempts us to over-scaffold and quietly rob students of the struggle they need. Chris connects it to leadership: we promote strong administrators who like their bookshelves ordered by colour, then wonder why nobody feels safe to make mistakes. Shane makes the case for Zaretta as someone who holds the complexity, neither camp in the tired progressive-versus-traditional split. And there's the first pancake, which is always pants, and what that tells us about growth.

The best tangent is about collaboration. Why does teaching leave people so alone? Chris brings up the group planning built into Chinese domestic schools. Shane picks it up with Shanghai maths, why importing the teacher without the conditions was an expensive flop, and how healthcare has proper supervision while teaching makes do with line management and a PD slot. They land on staff room culture, professional supervision, and Shane's argument that the problem was never the idea, it's the system that leaves teachers no time to use it.

They close on the big one. Education second only to medicine, until someone in a Bucharest audience of 500 gently corrected Chris: education matters more, because medicine is about the here and now, and education is about the here, now and ever after. Worth the listen for that line alone.

Episodes mentioned in this conversation:
How to Defuse Defensive Teachers (solo episode) → /podcast/167/
Management Mastery (Poppy Nobes) → /podcast/168/
Rethinking Equity Through Learning Science (Zaretta Hammond) → /podcast/169/
10 Million Views Later (Tom Sherrington, a rerun pick from Skyler Rose) → /podcast/170/
What are Leadership Levers? (solo episode) → /podcast/171/

Coming up next month:
Tyrone Ruth on how accountability can freeze a school in its tracks, and the brilliant Jim Knight of the Instructional Coaching Group on getting back to basics with instructional coaching. Plus a few solo episodes. Keep an eye on the feed.

Join us live:
We broadcast Education Leaders Live on the last Thursday of every month on LinkedIn and YouTube, or at educationleaders.live. Come and bring your thoughts, your pushback, and your own stories from the field. That's what the show's for.

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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Seventeen weeks into writing a weekly newsletter on LinkedIn, Shane has landed on a simple but powerful idea: leadership levers. This episode explains what makes a lever different from a project or a habit, why it has to be small enough to do tomorrow morning without telling anyone, and why it has to live inside something already in your week, like a meeting or a handover. Drawing on John Sweller's research on cognitive load and Stephen Rogelberg's studies on meetings, Shane makes the case that most leadership problems aren't solved by trying harder, but by placing effort somewhere better.
You'll learn why a single sentence sent before a meeting can prevent hours of follow-up confusion, and why two minutes at the end of a meeting assigning names to actions can stop decisions turning into vague memories. Shane also shares how learning a framework for difficult conversations freed up enough mental space to actually listen better, rather than working out the opening line from scratch every time. If you're looking for practical, repeatable moves rather than another big initiative, this episode gives you a way to think about where to place your effort for maximum return.

Resources & Links Mentioned:
Education Leaders Intensive programme

Episode Partners:
International Curriculum Association
Sisi

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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we're revisiting a favourite from the archives, recorded back when this podcast was still called Global Ed Leaders. Shane sits down with Tom Sherrington, the former headteacher turned writer, speaker and co-author of the Teaching WalkThrus series, to trace how he built one of the biggest audiences in education from a single WordPress blog in 2012. Tom explains why he never planned any of it, how a joke Twitter handle became his brand for years, and why he still presses publish every time expecting nobody to read it.

You'll hear why Tom believes the best blog posts are the honest ones, including the post about his own OFSTED experience that cost him one speaking invitation and won him another. Tom shares his view on why anonymous social media accounts don't deserve a reply, why he refuses to criticise a school from the outside, and what he'd tell a school leader starting out today. If you've ever wondered whether putting your voice out there is worth the risk, this conversation will change how you think about it.

Resources & Links Mentioned:
Tom Sherrington's blog, teacherhead.com
Teaching WalkThrus, with Oliver Caviglioli

Episode Partners
International Curriculum Association
Sisi

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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Zaretta Hammond wants school leaders to stop treating change as a straight line. In this conversation, the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain explains why growth actually moves in a spiral, why there's always a dip before things get better, and why so many educators are caught off guard by that dip because the system rarely rewards the messiness of learning. She unpacks the idea of "liminal spaces," the uncomfortable in-between moments where old skills are falling away and new ones haven't settled yet, and argues that school leaders need real skill in guiding people through them, not just managing productivity.
You'll learn why Zaretta believes "we cannot PD our way out of this learning crisis," what she calls the "theory of the first pancake," and why she thinks evaluation should ask teachers what they've experimented with rather than whether they delivered a polished lesson. Zaretta also breaks down the difference between rapport and alliance in the teacher-student relationship, and why closing achievement gaps depends on combining cognitive science with culturally responsive teaching rather than treating them as separate camps. If you've ever wondered why some professional development sessions leave your staff buzzing but change nothing back in the classroom, this conversation explains why, and what to do instead.

Resources & Links Mentioned
Zaretta Hammond's Ready for Rigor
Zaretta Hammond on LinkedIn
Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain (book)
James Nottingham's Learning Pit
Richard Elmore's instructional core (Harvard Graduate School of Education)

Episode Partners
International Curriculum Association
Sisi

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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Most schools pour resources into developing brilliant teachers and then promote those same people into management roles with almost no preparation for what comes next. This episode centres on a genuinely exciting initiative: Management Mastery, an in-house leadership development programme created by Poppy Nobes, Head of Professional Development at Aldridge Education. Poppy built the programme after recognising a gap that formal qualifications like NPQs simply can't fill; the operational, contextual, and deeply practical side of managing people in your specific organisation. From handling difficult conversations to structuring communication channels, Management Mastery is designed to make the implicit explicit.

You'll hear how Poppy and her team started by working backwards from the problems they were actually seeing in their workforce, grievances, repeated sick leave, unsupported staff, and designed a programme around the skills leaders needed to prevent them. Shane and Poppy discuss why practice-based professional development is just as vital for managers as it is for classroom teachers, the power of a shared language (including the "balcony and dance floor" concept that keeps coming up in their cohort), and why being geographically spread across ten schools from Brighton to Durham makes community-building all the more essential. If you've ever wondered whether your organisation has quietly assumed that leadership development is covered, this conversation will make you think again.

Resources & Links Mentioned:
Aldridge Education
Poppy Nobes on LinkedIn
Teach First Golden Thread Courses

Episode Partners:
International Curriculum Association
Sisi

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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.