Show Notes
🎙️ The Leadership Lens Episode Title: Behaviour for Learning – Building the Conditions for Thinking Episode Summary: In this episode of The Leadership Lens, Rachael Snowdon-Poole — serving Headteacher in a recently Outstanding school, Director of Performance & Standards across 20 primaries, and Trust Safeguarding Lead — explores one of the most powerful levers school leaders have: Behaviour for Learning. Because great behaviour isn’t just about calm corridors or tidy classrooms. It’s about creating the cognitive space for pupils to think deeply, remember securely, and learn meaningfully. Rachael unpacks what really sits beneath strong behaviour culture — moving beyond systems and sanctions to explore how beliefs, routines, and leadership alignment drive consistency and cognition. Drawing on insights from Dan Willingham, Tom Bennett, Peps McCrea, Dylan Wiliam, and Bandura, and from the real experiences of an executive headteacher leading multiple rural primaries, Rachael explores: Why attention is the gateway to learning — and how behaviour affects cognition. How social norms shape culture and why alignment across adults matters most. Practical strategies for sequencing behaviour improvement in sustainable ways. How leaders can move from managing behaviour to building behaviour. The power of coaching, visible leadership, and cultural reinforcement over time. You’ll leave this episode with clarity about how to create classrooms that aren’t just calm — they’re cognitively alive. 🎧 Listen Free You can listen to The Leadership Lens on: Spotify Apple Podcasts Amazon Music ⭐ Go Premium – Lead Behaviour with Clarity and Confidence Premium members receive exclusive access to the Behaviour for Learning Leadership Reflection Guide, a detailed evidence-informed tool to help you take this episode from theory into action. Inside, you’ll find: 🔍 Reflective prompts to evaluate the current behaviour culture in your school. 🧩 Discussion frameworks for SLT or middle leader meetings. 🪞 Diagnostic questions to identify where alignment and consistency could improve. 💡 Action-planning templates to translate insights into clear, trackable next steps. 📊 Research-aligned examples that link leadership practice to cognitive science. Use it with your leadership team to strengthen culture, align expectations, and build the true conditions for learning — where behaviour supports thinking, not just order. Join The Leadership Lens Premium Membership today to unlock this reflection guide plus every past and future CPD resource, including training slide decks, scripts, and templates across behaviour, teaching, culture, safeguarding and more. 👉 https://tinyurl.com/theleadershiplenspremium 💬 The Leadership Lens helps school leaders cut through the noise of frameworks, policy, and research — translating it into clarity, compassion, and concrete next steps for the classroom.
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I Thought We Had Our Personal Development Offer Sorted… Then I Properly Looked at It
In last week’s episode, I explored why so many school development plans don’t quite do what we hope they will. We looked at the idea that we often focus too heavily on goals, rather than the day-to-day systems and habits that actually drive change in schools. We also reframed the starting point for planning away from “what do we want to achieve?” and towards “what are our persistent problems?” This week builds directly on that thinking. Because once you’ve identified your persistent problems, the next step is deciding what to do about them. That’s the moment where most plans either become genuinely powerful… or quietly fall apart. In this episode, I introduce the concept of premortems, a simple but incredibly powerful way of strengthening your school improvement plans before you implement them. Rather than waiting to evaluate something after it hasn’t worked, a premortem asks you to imagine that your plan has already failed, and then work backwards to understand why. It sounds uncomfortable, and it is, but that discomfort is exactly where the insight sits. In this episode, I explore: Why we tend to move too quickly from identifying problems to implementing solutions What a premortem is and where it comes from How premortems create space for honest, risk-aware thinking within leadership teams A step-by-step walkthrough of how to run a premortem effectively in your school A detailed school-based example focused on improving reading fluency in lower KS2 Three non-examples of premortems that look right on the surface but fail in practice — and what goes wrong in each case How to use premortems to strengthen your school development plan before it reaches the classroom 🧠 Key takeaway Identifying the right problem is only half the work. Designing the right response, and properly stress-testing that response before you implement it, is where school improvement either succeeds or quietly falls apart. Premortems help you do exactly that. 💡 Premium Membership If you want to take this straight into your own setting, this week’s premium resource is designed to do exactly that. As a premium member, you’ll receive: A full slide deck that walks you step-by-step through the premortem framework Clear guidance on how to structure and facilitate the session with your team A resource you can use immediately in SLT meetings or wider leadership discussions Premium membership also gives you access to the full back catalogue of 36 episodes, each with accompanying resources including: Training scripts Slide decks School development frameworks Practical tools you can use straight away Topics covered include safeguarding, behaviour, personal development, curriculum design, retrieval practice, alternative provision, and much more. 👉 You can join here: https://the-leadership-lens.mykajabi.com/premium-membership It’s £11 per month, and each week you’ll receive a resource linked directly to the episode, designed to support your work as a school leader in a practical, usable way.