Thought Piece: Case - Based Reasoning as a potential tool for education leadership development
by Get Real Leadership Hub
Picture the scene…a senior school leader is sat in their office, incessantly fiddling with a pencil, whilst trying to figure out how best to raise standards of teaching and learning across the school in a short space of time. Outcomes have suffered in recent years and the school has seen some significant turbulence, with multiple headteachers at the helm over the past few years. As a result, staff morale is at an all-time low and the churn of staff is compounding existing challenges. SLT are faced with key priorities across multiple areas and CPD time is gold dust. The challenge is complex. The challenge is multi-faceted. The challenge is very real…and this particularly exhausted senior leader has 15 minutes to ponder the solution before they must cover Y5 Art. These are the realities of school leadership…
Every day, up and down the country, leaders are grappling with the complexity inherent in school improvement efforts. The advent of the National Professional Qualifications acted as an important first step in providing leaders with the domain-specific knowledge they needed to begin addressing the challenges they face on the ground. However, knowledge alone is not sufficient. Turning that knowledge into context-sensitive action, through strategic and co-ordinated efforts and measured implementation, is arguably the most critical process. How can leaders translate domain-specific knowledge into solutions that address the knotty challenges that exist in educational leadership?
One approach which has been adopted with much success in the fields of medicine, the military and beyond is the use of Case-based Reasoning. Cognitive psychologist Gary Klein, the pioneer of Naturalistic Decision Making has spent many years researching how experts make decisions on the job. His research and specifically his analysis of decision-making across multiple fields, has enabled him to identify the key factors at play for expert decision-making to take place. These include using past experiences as ‘cases’ to identify patterns (similarities and anomalies), to develop situational awareness and to make effective decisions at pace.
How might this idea be applied to education? The first obvious point to make is that we can’t accelerate the number of genuine experiences a given leader gains over the course of, say, a year. But we can give leaders the opportunity to simulate certain ‘scenarios’ in a low-stakes environment so that they can develop their repertoire of experiences and begin to develop refined mental models for tackling challenges in their schools. The sector also holds a lot of existing expertise- how could this expertise be utilised more deliberately to ensure that those colleagues who possess strong mental models share the way in which they make sense of complex situations and provide others with this insight? By therefore pooling the expertise and experiences of leaders across the sector, we could provide professional development for leaders that helps them better deal with the complexities of their roles.
Another element of educational leadership that is important to note is the isolation that can be felt by leaders as they navigate the challenging nature of their roles. In best-case scenarios groups of schools create sustainable networks of leaders to mitigate against this. However, this is not a universal entitlement. Could pooling expertise also enable supportive networks to be established which both strengthens mental models and tackles ‘leadership loneliness’ in tandem. By doing so perhaps we can address the problem of headteacher recruitment and retention, encouraging a sustainable pipeline of leaders into headship.
A 2021 Teacher Tapp article showed that the percentage of teachers that wanted to eventually become Headteachers was decreasing over time.
https://teachertapp.com/uk/articles/who-wants-to-be-a-headteacher-this-and-more-findings/
Teacher Tapp, Who wants to be a headteacher? This, and more findings, 2 November 2021
Could an innovative approach to leadership development, focused on case-based reasoning, be a strategic approach to solving this problem?
Evidence-informed, ‘best bets’ don’t exist for educational leaders in the same way they do for the classroom teacher. But we think that by exploring new mechanisms of professional development for leaders that help them contextualise their knowledge and learn from others’ experience, we can get closer to bridging the knowing-doing gap which, to varying degrees, exists in the education sector at present.
Written by Lekha Sharma, Sarah Cottinghatt and Nimish Lad