Andy Hargreaves Quotes

One or two bad teachers is a problem with the teachers.

A school with many bad teachers is a problem of leadership.

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

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

There is no algorithm for creativity.

Standardized personalization=universal right to meaningful learning.

Personalized standardization=flexible access to mandated learning.

It's important to be innovative when times are prosperous.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Capacity building originally meant helping people to help themselves.

Now it means required training to deliver imposed policies.

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 learner has special needs.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professional trust is a process, not a state.

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

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.

Time is the enemy of freedom.

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.

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

Deadwood did not kill itself!

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

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

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

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

Adolescence is about digging out the iron inside irony.

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

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

Total teachers aren't perfect teachers.

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

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

We should test prudently; not profligately.

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

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

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