Details

A term which has been on my mind quite a lot recently: ‘sweating the small stuff’, particularly as I approach almost six weeks back in school. There is something interesting about this point in the term. The energy of September has begun to settle, and the routines, expectations and initiatives introduced with such purpose during INSET are now being tested in the reality of everyday school life. What do they actually look like now? What does our attention to detail look like across the school, from uniform to routines and consistency? Have the things we were so focused on in September become part of everyday practice, or have some begun to lose momentum? I think this is where ‘sweating the small stuff’ becomes important, because it is often in these small, everyday details that we see whether something has genuinely become embedded or is simply something we said we would do.

We often talk about the big things in schools. We talk about outcomes, teaching and learning, attendance, behaviour, curriculum, leadership, culture, and the list goes on. Senior teams talk about improvement priorities and the changes that we want to see over time. All of these things matter, but I've increasingly been thinking about whether some of the most important evidence of improvement can be found in things that might initially appear insignificant. A student arriving in the classroom with the correct equipment, wearing their uniform correctly, entering calmly, knowing where to sit, getting their book out, and beginning the task without unnecessary delay might not feel like a particularly significant moment. It is easy to see these as administrative details rather than something connected to learning. But multiply those moments across five lessons a day, five days a week, across an entire school, and they become something much more significant. They become the conditions in which learning takes place. They determine how much time is protected, how predictable the classroom feels and how clearly students understand what is expected of them.

The same is true of transitions. What happens when students return from break or lunch tells us a great deal about a school. Do students know where they should be? Do adults reinforce the same expectations? Are corridors calm? Do lessons begin promptly, or do the first five minutes go to settling students, dealing with uniform, finding equipment, and addressing behaviour that should have been dealt with before the lesson began? None of these moments are particularly dramatic. Rarely does a single incident feel significant enough to define a school. Instead, the experience is cumulative. This is perhaps why I have become increasingly interested in the idea of gradual increments. Standards rarely collapse dramatically. They drift. They drift through small exceptions and inconsistencies where something that should have been challenged is allowed to pass. A shirt is slightly untucked. A tie is worn differently. A blazer is left behind. A student arrives a minute late. Equipment is missing. A transition takes slightly longer than it should. A corridor becomes a little louder. An adult notices something but decides it is not worth addressing. On their own, these things can seem insignificant. The problem is that they don't stay isolated. One small exception becomes another, and eventually what was once an exception becomes familiar. What was familiar becomes normal. What becomes normal becomes culture. And then, dramatically, these become quite big issues in a school and are now detrimental to a school culture. This is where I find Doug Lemov's work particularly useful. ‘Teach Like A Champion’ was the playbook and foundation to my teacher training. Across ‘Teach Like a Champion’, there is a real emphasis on the small, observable actions that make effective teaching more likely. Lemov's techniques are useful precisely because they take some of the things we describe quite broadly in education: strong routines, high expectations, participation, questioning, transitions, checking for understanding, and I could go on. Essentially, the mechanics of a lesson. Instead of simply saying that we need better routines, we can think carefully about what the teacher actually does, what the students actually do and what happens in the few seconds between one part of a lesson and the next. Also, what routine is the focus? I appreciate I am asking a number of questions here, but the question for all leaders is: what is the cultural norm within a school, and why is it the case? It does not happen overnight; the culture created is a result of the decisions made by staff and leaders within the school, which have become the norm.

That attention to detail is important because great teaching isn’t only about the moments that look impressive when we observe a lesson. Much of it lies in seemingly ordinary decisions made repeatedly. How students enter. How books are distributed. How a teacher gets the class's attention. How a transition is signalled. How long students are given to think. How participation is expected. How an incorrect answer is handled. How a teacher brings a class back together. How quickly learning resumes after an interruption. These are small moments, but they happen hundreds of times. The cumulative effect is enormous. It encourages us to look beneath the broad language of pedagogy and examine the practical moves beneath it. I am very much thinking aloud here but all key elements of school structure link with each in one way or another. The terms ‘Good behaviour’ or ‘High Expectations’ are not strategies. We need to translate these ambitions into things that teachers and students can actually do. That level of specificity is powerful because it makes improvement more actionable. It gives us something to practise and refine rather than simply something to aspire to.

A technique which has been on my mind quite a lot throughout all this ‘Without Apology’ and the concept of ‘Sweating The Small Stuff’ (which I mentioned earlier). I particularly like this because it challenges something that can sometimes creep into education: the feeling that we need to apologise for asking students to work hard. We can become hesitant to insist on hard work, focus on knowledge, require students to practise, expect them to listen carefully, or engage with challenging material. We can sometimes confuse being supportive with reducing the level of challenge. ‘Without Apology’ makes a different argument. The idea is that we should not apologise for giving students access to ambitious content or for expecting them to do the work that learning requires. There is a difference between making learning unnecessarily difficult and recognising that worthwhile learning is sometimes difficult. We want students to do well, to go to university or an equivalent career path, and part of that sits with working hard and working through the difficulty of complex ideas or concepts.

The routines of a classroom communicate what we believe about learning. If we expect students to enter ready to learn, that communicates that learning time matters. Another example would be expecting students to have the equipment they need, which communicates that preparation matters or expecting students to practise something repeatedly until they can do it well, which communicates that expertise is worth working for. This is also why the small things matter because they are repeated. A single calm transition does not transform a school. A single student arriving with the correct equipment does not transform a culture. One teacher insisting on a prompt start does not transform a year group. But when those things happen consistently, across classrooms and across adults, they begin to become habitual. The standard stops feeling like something that has to be constantly explained because students know what happens next. Standards rarely collapse dramatically. They drift. They drift through small exceptions and inconsistencies where something that should have been challenged is allowed to pass. One small exception becomes two. Two become routine. The routine becomes normal. Once something becomes normal, it becomes much harder to challenge because people no longer experience it as a deviation from the standard. It has become the standard. The same is true in the other direction. Improvement also happens through gradual increments. A transition becomes slightly quicker. Students become more prepared. Teachers use more consistent language. The start of lessons becomes calmer. Corridors become more purposeful. Students become increasingly clear about what is expected of them. Staff become more confident in using the systems. The things that once required constant adult intervention become increasingly habitual. This is why ‘sweating the small stuff’ should not be confused with being unnecessarily punitive or rigid. It is not about creating a school where adults spend their day looking for reasons to correct students. It is about recognising that standards matter and that standards are maintained through repetition. There should be warmth alongside high expectations. There should be context, reasonable adjustments and professional judgement. But there should also be clarity. Students deserve to know what the standard is, and they deserve to experience that standard consistently.

There is also something important here about the messages schools communicate non-verbally. We can tell students that we value ‘hard work’ or ‘integrity’ but students will understand those values through what happens every day. They see whether adults are prepared and whether lessons start on time. More importantly, students will ascertain whether adults follow through. I have been thinking a lot about this in my role and how to make the everyday details as important as the big-picture priorities. Perhaps this is why the ‘sweating the small stuff’ have been on my mind so much. In school improvement, it is tempting to only focus on the visible and the measurable. These moments tell us something about the gap between our intended culture and our enacted culture. They tell us whether our systems are working, whether our expectations are understood, and whether our standards are maintained consistently enough to become habitual. The challenge for leaders is not simply to identify these things. It is to pay attention to them repeatedly. To notice the small details without losing sight of the bigger picture. To recognise that systems only work when they are enacted well. To keep reinforcing the things that we want to become normal. To resist the temptation to let a small exception become an accepted practice simply because challenging it feels inconvenient in the moment (this is especially important for teaching staff: do they feel confident enough to challenge?). The standards we maintain in the smallest moments often most clearly express the culture we are trying to build.

References

Teach Like A Champion 2.0 by Doug Lemov

Teach Like a Champion 3.0 by Doug Lemov