A paradox is an odd or self-contradictory statement which has about it the ring of truth. (Greek – para = contrary to; doxa = opinion). Maybe it’s the natural cynic in me, but I enjoy looking for paradoxes at work. It offers a sideways look and alternative perspective to the daily grind. What seems at first to be negative or absurd, may in fact be profoundly encouraging.

When I embrace paradox, I open my mind to the possibility that people’s motivations are good, to the realisation that some of my richest learning emerges from some of my most difficult professional moments, and to the hope that my efforts are not, in fact, in vain.

The paradox of the lonely teacher
Teaching is the most exposed job in the world. All day long, thirty children’s faces scrutinise your every move, enjoying your mastery, spotting your mistakes. Yet it’s a job you often do alone. It’s easy to pass five hours a day with no adult contact other than a rushed ‘hello’ on the way to the loo or swapping duties on the playground. While you appear to be part of about six different teams (curriculum, pastoral, duty etc), it can be lonely.

The paradox of the first day of term
All the experience, training, CPD and preparation in the world doesn’t offset the imposter feeling of the first day of term when I ask myself, can I really do this?

The paradox of INSET
What teachers are most in need of, at the beginning of term, is the space and time to plan. What they normally get, is a barrage of presentations and more stuff to work on.

The paradox of being observed
You have to be observed teaching not well, or at least well out of your comfort zone, to actually develop. If people always see you at your best, you won’t learn or grow much. Yet we are strangely terrified at the prospect that people might watch us at less than our best. Try to invite people into your worst lesson, your toughest group, to see your most fragile subject knowledge. Be less perfectionist.

The paradox of getting better as a teacher  
Progress (and mastery) takes much longer than you think. There are periods in your professional career when you feel you’re not making much progress. Lessons take ages to plan, feedback doesn’t spark joy, you hit the same blocks in your pedagogy, results aren’t improving. There are even days you wonder why you’re doing the job. And then quite suddenly, everything changes gear. Lessons seem to plan themselves, you hear feedback that makes you smile, children’s behaviour softens, test results begin to shift. What’s happened, of course, is that all the tiny habits and skills and techniques have begun to compound. All those hours and days and weeks when it felt like you were sinking, were in fact the compulsory building blocks we all have to push through, to make it as a teacher.

The paradox of planning
For novice teachers especially, a plan or mental structure helps us make it through the week. But while it’s sensible to have a clear sense of how each lesson will run, if we are too prescriptive, we may get two things wrong: firstly, we’re in danger of lecturing-with-slides instead of teaching; secondly, we may be less alert to what the children in front of us actually need.

The paradox of best lessons
The best lessons we deliver are sometimes the one we plan the least. This can come as a complete surprise when it first happens, when we winged it and survived. But clearly it doesn’t mean we stop planning lessons. It’s just an indication that you’ve built up a deep scaffolding of how to think about constructing learning in front of the children whose needs and strengths that you know well. And because those skills are so deep-set, they are sitting dormant ready for a rushed/badly planned lesson. Another paradox might be happening too…

The paradox of the expert
Really effective teachers operate with a fluency which makes the enormous number of complex actions going on in a lesson (and in the teacher’s brain) look simple. And yet…

The paradox of teacher expertise
Really effective teachers can sometimes be those with less subject knowledge, or who have only recently learned the subject. This is because we are more intimately aware of the stumbling blocks, new learners experience. Whereas if we are familiar with the subject matter, we are prone to impatience, we underestimate complexity, and so rush the learning. This is the curse of the expert.

The paradox of invisible learning
The most accomplished work and the deepest thinking often don’t look exciting. Great learning often emerges from silent phases of learning: excellence in art, writing, reading and calculation requires periods of flow. When it looks like little is taking place in class, this is often when the deepest learning takes place. You may not be able to see it, but it is happening.

The ‘bad’ appraisal paradox
The targets we set for my annual review 51 weeks ago, weren’t actually the things that really mattered to me, weren’t what I needed to help me carry out my role, and guess what, they’re not the things I’ve actually been working on.

The paradox of praise
Although we know that creating a culture of deliberate and specific praise is one of the most influential leadership skills there is, bringing positive energy to all in your school, we pay little attention to it. We don’t teach how to do it, we don’t expect to have to learn it, and strangely, it never appears on a person spec.

The paradox of meetings
Most meetings are unnecessary, are badly run, involve the wrong people or are dominated by loud people, or are just boring. But the interesting thing is that some of our most creative and productive work comes when we collaborate closely with others.

The recruitment paradox
I used to spend lots of time thinking about appointments: writing bombproof JDs, getting adverts in all the right places, designing tip-top websites, fine-tuning interviews. But I wasted a lot of time, because this is the wrong way round. I was focusing on the people out there, instead of looking more closely at the people here with me. Making good appointments, I now realise, is more about building talent, and less about just securing talent.

The paradox of subject leadership
In my primary school, I have to teach all of the subjects in the world to all of my children, and then somehow pretend that I’m like a secondary head of department, and help all of the teaching staff with my subject.  And all because an inspection framework made it so.

The paradox of observing lessons
The people who observe lessons do this to monitor teaching, not to improve their own or their team’s. The Heads of Department and subject leaders who lead teaching and learning, and who could actually make the most difference in their teams, scarcely have time to observe lessons.

The knowledge and confidence paradox
The more you learn about something, the more you realise that there is so much you do not know. The people who are supremely confident of their own knowledge are usually the most ignorant. As Socrates reminds us, the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

The paradox of line management
The best line managers trust their colleagues implicitly, but still keep an eye on what’s happening.

The paradox of education
The best societies provide education which helps young people become conscious adults, who can then go on to examine that same society, and ask whether it is fit for purpose (as James Baldwin said in 1963).

The accountability paradox
Accountability mechanisms which were set up to help, often erode confidence. Mechanisms designed to improve school performance (league tables, pay incentives) may be harmful, because they encourage perverse incentives and discourage collegiate behaviour. A recent study of 1200 teachers found that ECTs are leaving not because of workload, but because of aspects of their work framed by accountability. The accountability measures designed to ensure value for money in education have actually caused the loss of the millions of pounds invested in teacher expertise.

The paradox of doing the wrong things
In the poorest performing schools where children need most help to make better progress, you’d think teachers would spend their time on the things which will help this. But in fact, a TeacherTapp survey of 3000 teachers in 2019 showed that teachers with the highest quintile of free school meal provision and the lowest two of the four inspection grades, were likely to be asked to produce more data than other teachers.

The Education Secretary paradox
The fewer Education Secretaries we have to work with in one year, the more progress we make as a profession.

The introverted paradox
I used to think that it was the extrovert teachers (the flashy ones making all the noise) who children liked the most. But the steadiest, most constant pupil-teacher relationships I’ve seen over the years are usually with teachers who are less showy, who are quietly organised, who often find that their pupils choose to stay behind after class to talk to them. Who may be more introverted. Similarly, the teachers most likely to help me when I was stuck (with my planning, or resources) tended not to be the ones who made a song and dance when I arrived, but the ones quietly going about their business.

The paradox of tinkering
When a plan we’ve just introduced isn’t yet working perfectly, often my response is to want to change it. This is like pulling up a seedling that I planted only a week ago because it looks like it’s not growing quickly enough, and re-potting it in new compost. Then doing this again in a week’s time. But what was actually happening was that the roots were bedding in. When I behave like this as a leader, I give the illusion of progress, but with each tinker, each uprooting of a system, I actually reduce the agency of my colleagues and their sense of confidence about what we are achieving together.

The paradox of exhaustion
Some of my greatest satisfactions in the job have come out of the most challenging situations, the children who have presented the most difficulty, the parents I thought I’d never get on board. The days when I feel most exhausted with nothing left to give, are the days when surprising things happen. Colleagues are kind. A boy says thank you as he leaves class for lunch. When I’m on break duty on the freezing playground a solitary girl comes to chat, and on the good days even the seagulls, normally so accurate in their bombing raids, miss each of us.

The paradox of leadership
Its not the highly paid leaders who arrive in a blaze, promising transformation, who I warmed to, nor who were most successful. No, it was usually those who slipped in the backdoor to help, who were calm and clear about what we should do, who stuck around when results weren’t great, who were there to chat when staff were struggling to manage, who didn’t give up on them, who led quietly, yet always kept themselves in the background.

The paradox of school size
From the outside, the smallest schools may make the least sense economically, but from inside they make the most sense in how they build community.

The paradox of special needs
Children who have a special need actually need more, not less. What they actually need is work which is more challenging for the teacher to design (not less), a curriculum which needs more thought (not less), a mechanism of delivering which requires more precision (not less). But what they often actually experience is some kind of thin, diluted version of what everyone else is getting. Often what they actually get is less (not more).

The paradox of Christmas
Our pupils who most need a decent Christmas (as Dickens reminds us, in A Christmas Carol, “for it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas”) may be the least likely to get it.

The paradox of love
80% of my time is spent thinking about 20% of my children. Actually, the mathematics of the Pareto principle may not go far enough. It’s the children who behave in the least lovable ways, those who are the most defiant and most oppositional, those who who require the most patience, who need real love. It is those who may be hardest to love, who may seem unreachable, or sometimes even unteachable, are the ones who require the most love of all.