GROWING LEADERSHIP
When the best answer is a question.
This month Dr. David Porrit is in conversation with Mark Johnson, Head of Primary at Harrow, Haikou, about teaching that focuses less on staff evaluation and more on professional improvement.
From instinct to intention
There are times when giving a clear answer is exactly what good leadership requires. In a busy school, direction matters. Yet answering too quickly can sometimes resolve today’s problem without helping someone become more capable next time. Mark Johnson, Head of Primary at Harrow, Haikou, part of the wider AISL Harrow family of schools across Asia, has become increasingly interested in that distinction: when should a leader tell, when should they guide, and when might coaching be the better response? For a lifelong Stoke City FC supporter and soccer fan, there is an apt analogy: leadership is not always about taking the shot yourself. Sometimes it is about seeing the whole field clearly enough to create the opportunity for someone else.
Mark’s interest in coaching began more than a decade ago while working within another premium school group in China. As his responsibility for professional development grew, so did his interest in conversations about teaching and after moving into a Deputy Headship, he undertook structured coaching training. The principles resonated immediately: listen properly, ask better questions, resist filling every silence and give people space to think.
At Harrow, Haikou he took that further, completing the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) Level 5 qualification in professional coaching practice, which gave him a clearer framework to approaches he had often used instinctively.
“Everyone brings different strengths and experience”, Mark argues, “but training helps us understand and use them more deliberately.”
Building leadership through others
The more interesting question was what happened next. Mark could not coach every middle leader, nor did he want the approach to depend on one person. So, members of the senior leadership team began developing their own coaching capability, working on contracting, listening, Socratic questioning and perhaps the deceptively hardest skill of all: handling silence.
The early struggles were revealing. Some worried about finding the perfect question and kept prompts within sight, much as a novice teacher might keep a lesson plan close at hand. Yet, as Mark points out, teachers already possess much of the raw material:
“We ask questions for a living.”
The challenge was not learning an entirely new way of communicating, but becoming more deliberate about familiar skills, and crucially, learning when to say nothing.
By the following semester, senior leaders were coaching middle leaders. The model began to travel: senior leaders helping middle leaders think more clearly; middle leaders better equipped to support teachers; and teachers with greater confidence and professional agency doing more for the children in front of them. Investment in one person was increasing their capacity to support somebody else.
When and when not to coach
There is an obvious danger, however, in becoming enthusiastic about coaching and assuming every conversation should become a coaching conversation. Mark is emphatic that it should not. Some situations require clarity and decisive action. If a safeguarding concern arises, staff respond according to the school’s agreed policy, procedures and training. Coaching may come afterwards, when colleagues reflect on practice and consider how systems or professional judgement might be strengthened. Likewise, a teacher still developing the fundamentals of effective classroom practice may need modelling, guidance and explicit feedback.
“Not every moment is a coaching moment,” Mark says.
The ‘what’ and the ‘how’?
For him, the most useful distinction is often between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. Leaders may need to be clear about what must be achieved while leaving greater space for colleagues to determine how. That matters particularly in Harrow Haikou’s bilingual educational setting. In mathematics, for example, the challenge was to align elements within the Harrow Maths approach and devise assessment that genuinely reflected the curriculum children were experiencing. Coaching conversations enabled the mathematics leader to interrogate the issue, test possible solutions and develop a bespoke assessment tool suited to the school’s context. Rather than being handed an answer, the leader constructed one.
Mark is rightly cautious about claims of impact. Schools are complicated places and improvement rarely results from one intervention. What he can say is that these conversations have helped colleagues think more deeply, challenge assumptions and make decisions with greater ownership.
From striker to playmaker
Which brings us back to soccer. Earlier in his career, Mark saw himself as the ‘striker’: driving initiatives, leading from the front and scoring the visible goals. Increasingly, he thinks of himself as the deeper-lying ‘playmaker’: reading the game, creating space and putting somebody else in a position to make the decisive contribution. For a Stoke City supporter, tactical metaphors may occasionally require resilience. The leadership point survives.
Better conversations
That shift is now visible beyond formal coaching. Learning walks at Harrow Haikou create opportunities for colleagues to discuss teaching through enquiry rather than judgement, recognising strengths and helping teachers identify sensible next steps.
The ambition is not to create a school full of people carrying the title ‘coach’. It is to make better conversations part of how leadership works: senior leaders helping middle leaders think more clearly, middle leaders strengthening teachers, and teachers becoming better equipped to help the children in front of them.
Coaching is not always the answer, and good leaders still need to decide, direct and demonstrate. The skill lies in judging when an immediate response is necessary, and when a well-judged question might do something more: not simply solve today’s problem, but help someone become more capable of solving tomorrow’s.
That is when the best answer may be a question!
Dr David Porritt is Director of Coaching and Leadership Development at Karen Ardley Associates and a Senior Consultant with Consilium Education. He writes a monthly column for International Teacher Magazine, featuring educators from across the international community.
FEATURE IMAGE: Haikou, China, Port image from: Pixabay
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