Andy hargreaves quotes

We must use collegiality not to level people down but to bring together their strength and creativity.

Standardized personalization=universal right to meaningful learning. Personalized standardization=flexible access to mandated learning.

Human growth is not like rhubarb. It can be nurtured and encouraged but it cannot be forced.

Trust processes as well as people.

We should test prudently; not profligately.

Time is the enemy of freedom.

Strong professional communities risk and sometimes relish conflict.

Pompous asses knows how to put the moan in sanctimonious.

Students are often the last to know about change that is occurring in their own school system.

Teachers still command great respect in the families and societies of many Asian cultures.

Too many professional development initiatives are done to teachers - not for, with or by them.

Service to others should be one of the most basic purposes of family life and schooling.

The Common Curriculum can easily become the karaoke curriculum, where everyone just follows the bouncing ball of the script.

We need to establish platforms for teachers to initiate their own changes and make their own judgments on the frontline, to invest more in the change capacities of local districts and communities, and to pursue prudent rather than profligate approaches to testing.

Teachers who don't pull their weight drag down the profession and their colleagues with it.

Teaching is a passionate profession.

Students and their families carry more responsibility for student success in the East.

Evaluation schemes that implicate 100% of the staff to detect a small % of incompetents are a waste of time.

There is no algorithm for creativity.

Your most memorable students are in your first classes and your last classes: make your last years the finest of your career.

Teachers who believe they can make a real difference in their students lives REALLY do.

One or two bad teachers is a problem with the teachers. A school with many bad teachers is a problem of leadership.

Every solution has a problem.

On school culture: It's hard to eat something you've had a relationship with.

Sustainable leadership does not compromise the future by expanding and accelerating too quickly in the present.

High performing organizations have cultures of creativity and risk. They encourage workers to innovate and play.

What we want for our students we should want for our teachers: learning, challenge, support, and respect.

On learning: if you really want alignment, go to a chiropractor.

Teachers are always emotional: by default if they bore us, and by design when they excite us.

As we seek to eliminate individualism in teaching, we should not eradicate individuality with it.

On technology: The teacher is mightier than the mouse.

The most important emotion in classrooms is surprise.

Educational reforms are like ripe fruit. They rarely travel well.

High performance leaders create an inspiring future by connecting with a classic and honorable past.

Teaching is not the oldest profession. But it is certainly among the loneliest.

Don't raise the bar and narrow the gap, but narrow the gap to raise the bar.

Total teachers aren't perfect teachers.

Students become good learners when they are in the classes of teachers who are good learners.

Excellence is the asymptotic state that never quite reaches perfection.

Leadership is often the afterthought of educational change.

We need standards with flexibility, not standardization with force if we are to get the best from our teachers.

Schools that cannot tolerate interesting & enthusiastic eccentrics who work better alone than together are devoid of flexibility & spirit

Education leaders must have the will at times to release leadership to the teachers the parents and the students.

There is no morality without temptation; otherwise it is just lack of opportunity.

Deadwood did not kill itself!

A brainscan cannot interpret itself and neither can a data dashboard in education.

When the purge of teacher individualism is unrestrained, eccentricity, initiative and individuality become the casualties.

The teacher has more power than the Minister.

Alberta funds almost all its schools and districts to design and evaluate their own innovations. Teachers are the drivers of change, not the driven.

Sustainable leadership does no harm to and actively improves the surrounding environment.

Teachers create and transform energy. They are the dynamos of educational change.

Economic necessity should be the mother of educational invention

High performance leaders capitalize on crises to galvanize the motivation and actions of people in the organization.

Singapore gives 10% "white space" time to all of its teachers to come up with their own innovations outside of the official curriculum. This encourages teachers to turn to their colleagues for inspiration and ideas.

The economists who have put the spotlight on teacher quality are the ones who most misunderstand it.

In collaborative cultures, failure and uncertainty are not protected but shared and discussed to gain support.

There is a new science of complexity which says that the link between cause and effect is increasingly difficult to trace; that change (planned or otherwise) unfolds in non-linear ways; that paradoxes and contradictions abound; and that creative solutions arise out of diversity, uncertainty and chaos.

Implementation of technological change must involve critics as well as advocates.

In high performing countries, principals are working with highly qualified teachers who come from the top tiers of the graduation range, who have been rigorously prepared in universities and through supervised practice in schools, and who remain in education for all of their careers.

In Finland, within very broad government guidelines, teachers create their own curricula together across schools in every community and district. They don't confine collaboration to their own individual schools and to just implementing other people's ideas.

We must never return to the Julie Andrews curriculum where we teach "a few of my favorite things"!

Too often, shared visions really mean, "I have a vision; you share it!"

Schools cannot shut their gates and leave the outside world on the doorstep.

Teaching is a never-ending story. The work is never over; the job is never done.

On being: Arrogance is not the prerogative of the gifted.

We learn more from people who are different from us than ones who are the same.

High performance leaders know they have to breathe out when they are coming up for air.

When creativity is the goal, schools must have their own platforms to network and innovate.

You cannot understand the teacher or their teaching without understanding the person the teacher is.

Although everyone wants to change the teacher, it's time for the agents of educational reform to change themselves.

It is those who have the distinction of privilege who set the standards of disgust with failure.

All teachers are already leaders. It's in the nature of teaching.

Adolescence is about digging out the iron inside irony.

The rules of the world are changing. It is time for the rules of teaching and teachers' work to change with them.

Walking makes us take problems in our stride.

Schools often get the teachers they deserve!

Arrogance is the conjoined twin of ignorance.

Teaching is an emotional practice: it activates, colors & expresses people's feelings.

Culture is the possibility and impossibility that bacon and fruit can appear on the same plate.

Improvement is about doing something better; innovation is about doing something new.

The quality & morale of teachers is absolutely central to the well being of students and their learning.

On data: We are the drivers, not the driven.

On assessment: measure what you value instead of valuing only what you can measure.

You cannot switch teachers on and off as if they were PowerPoint presentations.

Capacity building originally meant helping people to help themselves. Now it means required training to deliver imposed policies.

We disagree with the assertion that great teachers can be replaced by online alternatives. The futuristic claim that technology will triumph over teachers ignores all the social and relational dimensions of teaching and learning.

Professional trust is a process, not a state.

It's time for the US to widen its circle of learning, not to circle its wagons against hostile ideas in education reform.

Mentors turn into tormentors if they believe they are always right.

If we're all on the same page, no one's reading the whole book.

Courageous leadership is not fearless leadership. What makes you a leader is how you deal with your fears.

We will not achieve high performance in education if we replace teachers with machines or turn teachers into machines.

Leadership is the cigarette that's smoked once the change has been consummated.

A successful school has to engage all the people, all the powers, and all the capacities within it.

It is not the time to put school districts up for auction. Now is the time to galvanize them into action.

In healthy individuals, emotions don't distort rationality, they enhance it!

Without optimism & self-belief among teachers, classrooms become wastelands of boredom & routine and schools deserts of lost opportunity.

It's important to be innovative when times are prosperous. It's essential to be innovative when they are not.

A first class system of early childhood education is the hallmark of a caring and civilized society.

Every learner has special needs.

Physically, teachers are often alone in their own classrooms with no other adults for company. Psychologically, they never are.

Blame and betrayal are the emotional enemies of improvement.

On teacher education: induction into current mandates must not turn into seduction away from best practice.

On government & unions: the only thing worse than blind trust is blind mistrust.

If one foot is in a bucket of steam, and the other is in a bucket of ice, you are not, on average, comfortable.

Lateral trust among colleagues is as important as vertical trust within the hierarchy.

Change is easy to propose, hard to implement, and especially hard to sustain.

The bags that teachers carry home symbolize their guilt about the endless care they have to give.