Research School Network: Research-leads – Part 3: Devil’s Advocates


Research-leads – Part 3: Devil’s Advocates

by Huntington Research School
on the

Take a moment to consider the following scenario. You are in a school meeting with the senior team. You are discussing a hot topic that has a variety of opinions on the leadership team – maybe it involves a budget decision, such as purchasing a glossy new edu-product. Now, before you get a chance to speak, the Executive Headteacher makes their feelings known. Forcefully.

Those feelings are diametrically opposed to your opinion and all of the available evidence that you have carefully collated to present your case.

What do you do?

We all wish to be brave leaders and step into the breach and fight for what is right. Only, we are only human. Our decisions are influenced by others. We don’t want to be ostracized, or seen as critical of our hard working colleagues. I’m pretty sure most of us don’t make a habit of annoying our boss. In these all-too-natural conditions, making decisions in schools is hard. We are tired, stressed and often lacking in information and evidence: the exact conditions that compromises our making the best decisions possible.

Being a devil’s advocate is difficult hard work, so a successful Research-lead then requires some crucial support factors.

Devils-Advocate

The Research-lead and Changing How We Work

Everyone complains about meetings. Teachers complain about school leaders being in endless meetings, with school leaders lamenting the hours spent trudging through minutes and the muddy waters of messy school decisions. We need to do the very best job of making such meetings productive and ensuring our decisions are supported by the best available evidence.

A Research-lead can prove a boon for any school leadership structure because they can be trained to access and translate useful evidence that can better steer our decision making down a productive channel. They can add useful insights into good planning and evaluation (how about considering using a theory of change‘ model to direct your initial planning, before then trying the Education Endowment Foundation DIY Evaluation Guide on for size for robust evaluation).

Crucially, a Research-lead shoud be able to challenge and critique proposed changes, asking hard questions. To do this, meeting structures and the way we plan, implement and evaluate may need to shift too. And how can a Research-lead support this?

  • The Research-lead supports pre-reading before the meeting takes place. This ensures that leaders have a full picture (it may need some distilling down) of the broader evidence-base any given complex decision. This includes internal evidence, but also robust external evidence.
  • The Research-lead can support other leaders in recognising the biases that attend decision-making, including the unconscious biases that beset our brain. Training to debias‘ our thinking is notoriously unreliable, but merely recognising we may be biased in a given meeting helps mitigate its influence on our school decisions. See this McKinsey guide to Taking the bias out of meetings‘.
  • The Research-lead can overtly play the role of the Devil’s Advocate. No-one likes to be challenged, committed and caring leader or not, but if it the job of a single person to ask such questions people become more willing to accept it.
  • The Research-lead can help share effective meeting protocols. By undertaking specific meeting processes, such as ensuring everyone first reads the agenda item, writes down their reflections and then shares those reflections without debate or discussion, we can cool the heat of meeting debates by first fairly establishing processes that balance the power distributions that determine every meeting.
  • The Research-lead has the time and support to better evaluate prospective decisions, products, policies and school approaches. One of the most debilitating factors that influences school decision-making it that we have too little time and even expertise. Ok, so let’s take a edu-product that improves reading. How much do we actually know about reading? Do we understand the simple view of reading‘ (that ain’t so simple!), reading comprehension, the evidence behind the product, other available products, the evidence that attends literacy, and much more. Usually, we don’t know enough, so with a dearth of knowledge, we sit in a meeting and make the best choice possible, under great pressure.
  • The Research-lead conducts a pre-mortem. Humans hate failing. School teachers and school leaders are no different. As a consequence, we find success in every failure, and, to avoid the gaze of OFSTED etc., we hide our losses and bury our failures. Once we have sunk our effort into something in school, we are likely to let up, wasting yet more energy on it! By pre-empting failure and loss, we may avert sinking our effort into likely failures (see the Sunk cost fallacy‘ here).

Do we really dare be this challenging and this trusting? Do we really want to wrangle with the complexity of our decisions and genuinely battle with the evidence when it contradicts our opinions? These are hard questions we should ask ourselves. A Research-lead, given the right training, time, support, and infrastructure to support and challenge, could help us better answer those questions.

Alex Quigley, Director of Huntington Research School

If you see a role for a Research-lead in your school context, or you are a budding, or existing Research-lead, then take a look at our Building Confident Research-leads‘ programme.

Related reading:

Part 1: Research-leads – Part 1: The Storytellers

Part 2: Research-leads – Part 2: The Brokers

More from the Huntington Research School

Show all news

This website collects a number of cookies from its users for improving your overall experience of the site.Read more