Andy Hargreaves Quotes

Trust processes as well as people.

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

We should test prudently; not profligately.

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

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.

Every solution has a problem.

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

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

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

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

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

Blame and betrayal are the emotional enemies of improvement.

The teacher has more power than the Minister.

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.

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

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

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

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

Leadership is often the afterthought of educational change.

Professional trust is a process, not a state.

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

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

Adolescence is about digging out the iron inside irony.

Schools often get the teachers they deserve!

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

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

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

Teaching is a passionate profession.

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

Total teachers aren't perfect teachers.

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

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

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

The most important emotion in classrooms is surprise.

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

Pompous asses knows how to put the moan in sanctimonious.

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

Strong professional communities risk and sometimes relish conflict.

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

There is no algorithm for creativity.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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