Top 108 Quotes & Sayings by Andy Hargreaves - Page 2

Excellence is the asymptotic state that never quite reaches perfection.

Educational reforms are like ripe fruit. They rarely travel well.

Leadership is the cigarette that's smoked once the change has been consummated.

There is no morality without temptation; otherwise it is just lack of opportunity.

Economic necessity should be the mother of educational invention

A brainscan cannot interpret itself and neither can a data dashboard in education.

The most important emotion in classrooms is surprise.

It is those who have the distinction of privilege who set the standards of disgust with failure.

Total teachers aren't perfect teachers.

Mentors turn into tormentors if they believe they are always right.

Culture is the possibility and impossibility that bacon and fruit can appear on the same plate.

Walking makes us take problems in our stride.

As we seek to eliminate individualism in teaching, we should not eradicate individuality with it.

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

Strong professional communities risk and sometimes relish conflict.

The economists who have put the spotlight on teacher quality are the ones who most misunderstand it.

Time is the enemy of freedom.

We learn more from people who are different from us than ones who are the same.

Teaching is a passionate profession.

Your most memorable students are in your first classes and your last classes: make your last years the finest of your career.

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

When creativity is the goal, schools must have their own platforms to network and innovate.

The teacher has more power than the Minister.

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

On data: We are the drivers, not the driven.

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

Schools that cannot tolerate interesting & enthusiastic eccentrics who work better alone than together are devoid of flexibility & spirit

Professional trust is a process, not a state.

Schools often get the teachers they deserve!

Implementation of technological change must involve critics as well as advocates.

You cannot understand the teacher or their teaching without understanding the person the teacher is.

Students and their families carry more responsibility for student success in the East.

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.

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

Teachers who don't pull their weight drag down the profession and their colleagues with it.

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

Standardized personalization=universal right to meaningful learning. Personalized standardization=flexible access to mandated learning.

Teachers still command great respect in the families and societies of many Asian cultures.

Students become good learners when they are in the classes of teachers who are good learners.

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

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.

Too often, shared visions really mean, "I have a vision; you share it!"

It's time for the US to widen its circle of learning, not to circle its wagons against hostile ideas in education reform.

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.

When the purge of teacher individualism is unrestrained, eccentricity, initiative and individuality become the casualties.

We should test prudently; not profligately.

Teaching is not the oldest profession. But it is certainly among the loneliest.

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