Intelligent Accountability: Creating the conditions for teachers to thrive

by David Didau

we should be making ‘educated bets’ with a thorough knowledge of the evidence and weighed by a clear understanding of the problems we’re trying to solve. If our bets are aligned with the purposes we’ve agreed, then by putting time and effort into the implementation and sustainability of our decisions, we avoid the unscrupulous optimism of best cases and address the possibility of the worst case coming to pass. As the economist Thomas Sowell warns us, “It is so easy to be wrong – and to persist in being wrong – when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.”

Human nature being what it is, if we’re given too much trust – if no one checks what we’re doing – we tend to become complacent and stop striving to be better. If accountability is overemphasised, then everyone becomes so concerned with trying to cover their backs and look good that they are inadvertently prevented from pursuing what might be a wiser course of action. Every teacher will need different levels of support in order to be as effective as possible. A school in which there is too much trust or too much accountability is likely to treat its staff unfairly. This is because equality – treating everyone in the same way – can be fundamentally unfair.

Trust is all very well, but we know that people don’t always do the right things. To trust blindly is foolish, so we need mechanisms for checking that others are performing with integrity.

If you’re going to lead a school, you have to believe that you know enough to be of service, but the uncomfortable – and liberating – truth is that no one person can ever know enough to effectively run a school. The knowledge you need will be distributed among everyone who works within your school, and there will be pockets of expertise in every department and year team. If you restrict your collective knowledge to only those in senior leadership positions, your decisions will always be less intelligent than they could have been had you tapped the collective knowledge of the entire school community.

In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki argues that we stand a much higher chance of making good decisions when we work collectively than when we operate in isolation.7

Homogeneity. Unless there is genuine diversity in approaches and thought processes, senior leadership teams are more prone to conformity and become an echo chamber. As Matthew Syed says, “Homogenous groups don’t just underperform; they do so in predictable ways. When you are surrounded by similar people, you are not just likely to share each other’s blind spots, but to reinforce them …

Encircled by people who reflect your picture of reality, and whose picture you reflect back to them, it is easy to become ever more confident of judgements that are incomplete or downright wrong. Certainty becomes inversely correlated with accuracy.”8

Centralisation. Management structures and hierarchies in schools tend to crowd out the expertise of classroom teachers.

Division. The structure of schools increases the risk that knowledge and expertise will be divided into silos. To avoid this there need to be systems in place to break down the walls between subjects and year teams, as well as those between middle and senior leaders.

Imitation. Collective knowledge only works where viewpoints are independent. As soon as schools start blindly copying each other, the process falls flat.

Emotionality. Collective wisdom can be easily undermined by peer pressure, herd instinct, social norms and even collective hysteria. It takes cool heads to avoid being subsumed by collecti...

We can only access the collective intelligence within a school by encouraging others to express contrary opinions. Unless we access this source of socially distributed cognition we are not only likely to make disastrous decisions, we are also unlikely to recognise the extent of the disaster. To create the conditions for teachers to thrive y...

Although finding contradictory evidence is unlikely to kill us, it may still be a threat to our pride (or even our employment!). This, we tell ourselves, is the correct way to run a school, to manage a class, to teach this subject, to interact with students. How do we know? We just do. We tend to have a lot invested in our beliefs – time, effort, credibility – and if we find evidence that we might be wrong, we run the risk of looking foolish. So, it makes sense not to check.