What if your school is trying to improve the wrong things?
What does it take for a school to learn?
I have just completed facilitating the IB Category 3 workshop Leading an IB learning organisation. There have been some great conversations during the month, with participants bringing a fascinating range of experiences from their different schools and contexts. I thought it might be useful to jot down some of the key challenges we explored, together with some of the reflections that emerged from the discussions.
What struck me most was how often seemingly straightforward school improvement challenges turned out to be cultural, relational and systemic issues. This raised some important questions about what it really means to lead a learning organisation.
Are we collaborating or actually learning?
Schools are generally very good at creating opportunities for people to collaborate. We have meetings, committees, collaborative planning, professional learning communities and working groups. But collaboration does not necessarily mean that learning is taking place.
A team can meet regularly, share information and complete tasks without changing its thinking or practice. Genuine team learning requires something more: psychological safety, professional dialogue, a willingness to question assumptions, shared responsibility and a commitment to learning from evidence. Perhaps the more useful question is not “How much collaboration do we have?” but “How do we know whether our teams are actually learning together?” And ultimately, what evidence would demonstrate that this learning is making a difference to practice and to students?
Can we disagree well?
Another recurring issue was the difficulty of creating a culture where people feel able to disagree, admit uncertainty and challenge established practice. It is tempting to think that a positive school culture is one where people get along and conflict is minimised. But avoiding disagreement can actually prevent learning.
Psychological safety should not mean that everyone agrees. It should create the conditions for people to say, “I'm not sure,” “I see this differently,” or “Could we look at the evidence?” This led to an important distinction between being nice to one another and being able to disagree well. The challenge for leaders is therefore not simply to reduce conflict, but to create the trust and structures that allow constructive disagreement to become part of professional learning.
Before changing the school, understand the school
One participant captured this beautifully:
“Before changing a school, understand the school you are actually leading.”
This seems obvious, but it is surprisingly easy for leaders to arrive with a solution before fully understanding the system into which they are introducing it. Schools have histories, relationships, informal networks, established routines and previous experiences of change. Understanding context means asking what has happened before, what people believe about the issue, where trust and influence sit, what existing strengths can be built upon and, importantly, what assumptions we might be making that aren't actually true.
This also changes how we think about resistance. Rather than seeing resistance simply as something leaders need to overcome, what if we treated it as information about the system? Resistance might reveal a previous failed initiative, a lack of trust, competing priorities, workload concerns or a different understanding of the problem. This does not mean every objection should determine the direction of change, but it does mean that leaders should become curious about what resistance might be telling them.
Effective leadership therefore begins with sense-making before solution-making.
What mental models are shaping our decisions?
The idea of mental models generated some particularly thoughtful discussion. Our decisions are influenced by assumptions about learning, teaching, leadership, accountability, students and what constitutes a successful school. Because these assumptions are often deeply embedded, we may not even recognise them as assumptions.
A school might say it values student agency, for example, while continuing to operate from a mental model in which adults make most of the important decisions. A school may promote collaboration while maintaining structures that reward individual performance. We may say that professional learning is important while treating it as something that happens through occasional workshops.
This raises a challenging leadership question: What do we believe that might be getting in the way of what we say we want to achieve?
Building a learning organisation therefore involves more than changing structures. Sometimes we need to change the thinking that produced those structures in the first place.
Is your vision really shared?
We also explored what it means for a school to have a shared vision. It is relatively easy to produce a vision statement. It is much harder to establish whether people genuinely share an understanding of what it means.
Do teachers, students, parents and leaders simply know the words, or do they have sufficiently similar mental models about the kind of school they are trying to create?
Developing a shared vision therefore needs to be a process of dialogue rather than simply a leadership exercise. Questions such as “What makes a good school?”, “What do we want students to experience here?” and “What should students be able to do differently as a result of their education?” can help bring different perspectives into the conversation.
A shared vision becomes much more powerful when people can see themselves within it and recognise their contribution to making it a reality.
Are we measuring activity or impact?
A final theme running through many of the conversations was the need to move beyond activity as evidence of improvement.
We can count professional learning sessions, meetings, observations, action plans and completed initiatives. But these tell us relatively little about whether meaningful learning or improvement has occurred.
A more useful chain might be: Professional learning → changed thinking → changed practice → changed student experience → evidence of impact
This does not mean that every initiative needs a complex evaluation framework. It means that leaders should be clear about what change they are actually trying to create and what evidence would convince them that it has happened.
The question becomes less “Did we do it?” and more “What is different as a result?”