Education Leaders | Evidence Informed School Leadership

April was a packed month on the Education Leaders podcast. Five episodes, four guests, and a thread that quietly ran through all of them: the value of small, listened-to, incremental change.

Chris Scorer joined me for our monthly live show to make sense of it all. Here's what landed.

Listening before leading. Richard Wheadon's episode on his leadership journey hit hardest here. Richard's been honest about arriving at a new school full of confidence in approaches that had worked before, only to find the school wasn't ready to hear them. Chris reflected on his own version of that story from his deputy head days. The lesson Richard pulls out, that the relationship has to flip and you're the one who needs to understand them first, is something most leaders quote at interview but find genuinely hard once the pressure to deliver kicks in.

Cognitive load isn't only a classroom concept. Meg Lee's episode on the science of leading drew the parallel cleanly. We'd never overload our students the way we routinely overload our teachers. Chris had sharper questions about where standardisation tips over into removing teacher agency. There's a real risk that well-intentioned alignment becomes content delivery dressed up as consistency.

The story I shared that fell apart in real time. I told one from a large primary school I worked in years ago, where they standardised planning to save teacher time. Some teachers delivered the lessons rigidly. Some scrapped them and rebuilt from scratch. Only a handful actually did what the school intended. Good intention, awful side effect. Wise leadership might have started with a consultation rather than an assumption.

Curiosity as a North Star. Melati Wijsen, founder of Bye Bye Plastic Bags and Youthtopia, took us across to the Netherlands and Bali. Chris flagged the bit that surprised both of us: Melati's gratitude to teachers who didn't let her off the hook, even when she was already running a charity in her teens. There's a real lesson in how Green School Bali holds structure and freedom together. Her book, Change Starts Now, came out a month before mine and happens to be the same colour, which I'm still slightly bitter about.

Vulnerability isn't optional. Julia Bialeski's episode on leading through imposter syndrome went live on Tuesday and is already the most downloaded of the month. Chris and I both copped to feeling it ourselves. Julia's framing of the panic, the public face, and the modelling cost we pay when we hide it from staff and students ties straight back to Richard's journey and to my solo episode on post-decision doubt. The thread underneath all of it: if we can't sit with not knowing, we end up performing certainty instead of building it.

Episodes mentioned
Meg Lee | The Science of Leading: shaneleaning.com/podcast/154
Richard Wheadon | The Danger of Getting Comfortable: shaneleaning.com/podcast/155. Richard's book Learning Habits (Routledge) is well worth your time.
Melati Wijsen | How Schools Can Grow Young Changemakers: shaneleaning.com/podcast/156. Melati's book Change Starts Now collects 100 lessons from over a decade on the frontline.
Solo | The Science Behind Post-Decision Doubt: shaneleaning.com/podcast/157
Julia Bialeski | Leading Through Imposter Syndrome: shaneleaning.com/podcast/158. Julia is also the author of Leading with Grace.

Join us live
We do this on the last Thursday of every month at educationleaders.live. Come and bring your questions. The live chat is genuinely the best part of the show.
Join Shane's Intensive Leadership Programme at educationleaders.co/intensive

Shane Leaning, an organisational coach based in Shanghai, supports school leaders globally. Passionate about empowment, he is the author of the best-selling 'Change Starts Here.' Shane is a leading educational voice in the UK, Asia and around the world.

You can find Shane on LinkedIn and Bluesky. or shaneleaning.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Most school leaders have felt it at some point: that quiet, nagging suspicion that everyone else is more capable, better prepared, and more deserving of the role. Julia Bialeski knows it well. In the spring of 2019, she walked into her first principal job with a smile on her face and panic in her chest, presenting excitement to the world while privately wondering when everyone around her would figure out she wasn't good enough. In this conversation, Julia, educator, district leader, career coach, and author of Leading with Grace, talks honestly about why imposter syndrome hits school leaders so hard, why the loneliness of the job makes it worse, and why the profession's retention crisis has everything to do with the leadership models we put in front of the people coming up behind us.

Julia shares two practical strategies that have worked for her over years in leadership: a daily learning log that helps you end the day focused on what you gained rather than what you still don't know, and the "smile file", a simple physical collection of notes, cards, and messages that she has carried with her for over a decade and reached for on her hardest days. She also shares the question that changed how she thinks about new roles and challenges: not "am I good enough for this?" but "why not me?" If you've ever sat in a leadership role quietly wondering whether you really belong there, this conversation is worth your time.

Resources & Links Mentioned:
Julia Bialeski on LinkedIn
Leading with Grace by Julia Bialeski

Episode Partners
International Leaders Conference
Sisi
Join Shane's Intensive Leadership Programme at educationleaders.co/intensive

Shane Leaning, an organisational coach based in Shanghai, supports school leaders globally. Passionate about empowment, he is the author of the best-selling 'Change Starts Here.' Shane is a leading educational voice in the UK, Asia and around the world.

You can find Shane on LinkedIn and Bluesky. or shaneleaning.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

That sickly feeling after a tough leadership call isn't your intuition warning you that you got it wrong and this episode explains exactly why. Drawing on Leon Festinger's 1957 work on cognitive dissonance, a 2021 meta-analysis from Hebrew University, and Kahneman and Tversky's research on loss aversion, Shane reframes one of the most common experiences in school leadership: the quiet panic that shows up on the sofa after a hard decision. If you've ever drafted a softening email at 11pm or lain awake running alternate endings, this one is for you.

You'll learn why that post-decision discomfort is a receipt, not a warning, proof that your brain is doing the work of committing, not evidence that you chose wrong. Shane also explains why the loudest complaints after a change are predictably loud (loss aversion means losses feel twice as heavy as gains), and why suppressing the discomfort actually makes you a worse leader in the room. The practical takeaway is a single written exercise you can do this week that won't make the feeling stop, but will change what it means to you.

Resources & Links Mentioned:
Leon Festinger's A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957)

Episode Partners
International Leaders Conference
Sisi
Join Shane's Intensive Leadership Programme at educationleaders.co/intensive

Shane Leaning, an organisational coach based in Shanghai, supports school leaders globally. Passionate about empowment, he is the author of the best-selling 'Change Starts Here.' Shane is a leading educational voice in the UK, Asia and around the world.

You can find Shane on LinkedIn and Bluesky. or shaneleaning.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melati Wijsen started Bye Bye Plastic Bags at age 12, spoke at the UN as a teenager, and never went to university, yet she is now teaching at three universities and shaping how a generation thinks about leadership and change. This episode is a conversation about what happens when a school genuinely creates space for a student's passion, and what school leaders can learn from one of the most compelling young voices in global education. Melati's journey through the Green School Bali, international advocacy, and her new book Change Starts Now offers a rare window into what education looks like when curiosity is treated as a core subject.

You'll hear why Melati believes clarity beats inspiration when building a movement ("Bye bye plastic bags" mobilised an island; "let's change the world" mobilises confusion), and why she burnt out at 16 after saying yes to too many causes. She and Shane discuss the real tension between academic accountability and changemaking and why she argues it doesn't have to be binary. Her practical answer for any leader with a passionate 14-year-old in their school is specific, actionable, and completely free. If you've ever wondered whether your school's systems are growing future leaders or quietly flattening them, this conversation will leave you with a lot to sit with and a few things to act on.

Resources & Links Mentioned:
Melati Wijsen's website
YOUTHTOPIA learning platform
Change Starts Now by Melati Wijsen (Harper Collins)
Melati Wijsen on LinkedIn
Green School Bali
Mealti Wijsen's Instagram

Join Shane's Intensive Leadership Programme at educationleaders.co/intensive

Shane Leaning, an organisational coach based in Shanghai, supports school leaders globally. Passionate about empowment, he is the author of the best-selling 'Change Starts Here.' Shane is a leading educational voice in the UK, Asia and around the world.

You can find Shane on LinkedIn and Bluesky. or shaneleaning.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There's a particular kind of leadership trap that nobody warns you about: the one where everything is going so well that you stop noticing why. Richard Wheadon spent the first decade of his career in a high-performing London school where great culture, strong professional development, and collaborative leadership were simply the norm. It wasn't until he moved to a new school in the Northwest that he realised none of it had been accidental, and that his confidence had quietly tipped into assumption. This episode, built around Richard's honest account of that transition and the humbling moments that followed, including a candid conversation with Ross McGill that stopped him in his tracks, is essential listening for any leader who has ever walked into a new context expecting their old success to travel with them.

You'll hear why Richard believes the single most important thing a leader can do when they arrive somewhere new is listen before they lead, and why skipping that step cost him time he couldn't get back. Richard also makes a compelling case for blogging as a leadership development tool, not for the audience, but for the depth of thinking it forces you to do. Whether you're navigating a school move, trying to build a culture from scratch, or simply looking for your next challenge, this conversation will give you a lot to reflect on.

Resources & Links Mentioned:
Richard Wheadon on LinkedIn
Richard Wheadon's book: Learning Habits

Episode Partners
International Leaders Conference
Teaching Walkthrus
Join Shane's Intensive Leadership Programme at educationleaders.co/intensive

Shane Leaning, an organisational coach based in Shanghai, supports school leaders globally. Passionate about empowment, he is the author of the best-selling 'Change Starts Here.' Shane is a leading educational voice in the UK, Asia and around the world.

You can find Shane on LinkedIn and Bluesky. or shaneleaning.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.