School Improvement Episode 55: Instructional leadership with Research Conference keynote Professor David Hopkins

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Hello and thanks for downloading this podcast from Teacher – I’m Jo Earp.

How can we transform education practice to enable holistic growth for all students? That’s the topic for Research Conference 2025, which is hosted by the Australian Council for Educational Research and takes place in Melbourne in February.

One of the keynotes will be Professor David Hopkins. The title of his presentation (and his latest book) is ‘Unleashing Greatness – A Strategy for School Improvement’. He joins me for Episode 55 of our series on School Improvement to talk about one of the 8 steps in his strategy, instructional leadership. I really enjoyed this conversation – he’s got such a lot of expertise in this area, and it was great to hear about some of the work he’s been doing with schools here in Australia, and around the world.

There are also some practical pointers in there, and things you might want to reflect on in relation to your own context and practice. So, it’s a great way to whet the appetite for his conference visit to Melbourne. I hope you can join us there, and I hope you enjoy the episode.

Jo Earp: Hi, David, thanks for joining the podcast. Now, you're delivering a keynote at the ACER Research Conference 2025, which is at the start of February. The theme for that conference is ‘Transforming learning systems: enabling holistic growth for all students’ and, of course, a key part of that transformation is school improvement. You're going to be outlining your Unleashing Greatness strategy. I want to focus on one aspect of that – instructional leadership – but, before we do that, can you share a brief overview of the strategy and what it proposes?

David Hopkins: Yes, of course. And, yeah, I'm really looking forward to working with you and your colleagues next February. As you point out, the name I've given to the strategy is Unleashing Greatness, and I need to give a little bit of background to that name. I think if you take a sort of a bit more of a helicopter view on school improvement, and any form of educational change, [it's] always a combination of top down and bottom up, and change strategies vary according to context. And I feel quite strongly that all schools, and all educational systems, are on some form of developmental continuum, they’re at a particular stage of growth, and you have to sort of design your intervention based upon your diagnosis of where the school or system actually is.

And, typically, we're used to (in Australia and in England and many other countries) very top-down strategies; governments or administrators or boards, you know, impose policies upon schools. And the evidence is that that will sort of raise standards up a little bit, but if you really want to get to the highest levels of performance, you have to ‘unleash greatness’ – you have to sort of make schools more free. And so, the strategy that I've been developing is for schools who are about to [move out of] sort of average levels of performance and to become outstanding.

So, that's the sort of the background to it. And the 8 steps that are in the strategy, they point to a direction that schools ought to follow. But it's not doctrinaire or sort of ideological – it provides a sort of a road map towards outstanding performance for their students and, of course, themselves. And I think … there are 2 key elements to it: an unrelenting focus on what I call the ‘instructional core’, the quality of teaching and learning inside classrooms, and giving more autonomy to students as they learn; and the second is to build capacity in the school for ongoing development, that teachers are engaged in learning at the same.

And I've used this strategy in a number of schools (well, hundreds of schools in Australia, particularly in Victoria and New South Wales) and we’ve found great success, but it's not a sort of a short-term, quick fix, it's a sort of a medium-term strategy with the eyes faced upon outstanding performance for the youngsters.

JE: Like you say, it’s ongoing work isn't it as well, and it's along that continuum. I mentioned in the intro that Unleashing Greatness – a Strategy For School Improvement, that's the title of your new book (Hopkins, 2024), and as you said there, there are 8 steps in there and one of those steps is instructional leadership. So, let's focus on schools, then – when you say instructional leadership, you're not talking about just a single role are you? You’re not talking about just the principal.

DH: No, no, no. Leadership is a function, not a role. Obviously, the principal, the head, the head teacher has an enormous influence, but it's really about how they distribute leadership throughout the school, which is actually quite you know, which is fundamentally important, and how you can create in the school a culture that prizes intrinsic motivation, rather than extrinsic motivation.

… When it's too much top down, there's extrinsic motivation – ‘you do this or you'll be punished’, right? What you want to do is to try to create a culture where people want to do their very best for the young people and for their colleagues. And there seems to be 3 elements to that: that teachers need to be given a degree of autonomy in their work; they need to be in a situation where their skills are being developed, so there's a degree of mastery there; and the third element is purpose – are they doing this for a real reason? And I think really outstanding schools are driven by a moral purpose, which is about equity as well as excellence.

JE: And alongside that [widespread leadership], the distributed aspect of that within the school, you also talk about high expectations, collaboration amongst the staff, and the core aim really, as you say, it's about improving the student learning, isn't it?

DH: Yeah. And one of the one of the techniques that we use, one of the strategies that we use, is something called an ‘instructional round’. I borrowed that term from medicine; when you think about in hospitals, doctors go round, and they look, and they diagnose you. The fact that they do 2 things – they diagnose the patient and then they prescribe a remedy, and that's what we try to do on our instructional rounds.

Groups of teachers will visit another school, go round about 6 classrooms in the morning and observe what is going on. And the really important point is that they don't make any judgements, or they don't make any evaluation, they describe what is actually happening. And, typically, I'll take 2 dozen teachers around 6 classrooms, and that gives you 144 pieces of data about what is going on in the school, what the practice of the school is like.

And in the afternoon, we spend that time trying to analyse that data and generate some hypotheses about good practice inside the school. And these we couch into, we call them ‘theories of action’ – when a teacher does X, then the students do Y – and they become the sort of a description of good practice in the school, and provides a focus for their staff development efforts.

So, we find that really quite exciting and it has quite a powerful impact. It’s the non- judgmental aspects of it which are so important, because we're so used to sort of being given a mark out of 10, being graded, whereas what we want to try to do is find a way of unleashing our professionalism.

JE: Yeah, we've spoken about the importance of all staff being part of this, the distributed thing. But I'm thinking, you know, for the principals who are listening, the ones that are in charge, you've got to have that buy in, haven't you. How much are they driving this? I mean, I know you're saying there's not a top-down approach, but what sort of role are they playing then in this?

DH: The first thing that great principals do is they create a sort of a narrative about the direction of the school, they make a story about where the school is going. And that is really important because the story links the staff, the students and the parents and the community. Typically, really good schools that I go into in Australia and elsewhere, I tend to sort of stand outside at going home time and talk to the parents about what the school is like; and the good schools, they always tell me about where the school is going, what the school stands for. And it's creating that sense of identity and what I would say moral purpose for the direction of the school.

That's the first thing, the second thing is you have to underpin that by a strategy that actually all the staff buy in, and you've got to actually create time for teachers to work together, to collaborate and to work on these theories of action, all right? And to actually plan their journey towards the resolution of their narrative, the resolution of their story. One of the things I do with the schools that I work with – and I've got some great examples from Victoria – I get schools to draw up an image, a poster of their journey so that you can actually visualise where the school is going, and what they're trying to do for their students.

So, yes, leadership is important from the principal in setting direction, in sort of providing the infrastructure for professional learning, but it's creating a collaborative culture which is focused on this sort of, the purpose that they have for their students.

JE: Yeah, that’s a great idea, creating that visual element of where they're going, that poster. Along with your colleagues Kenneth Leithwood and Alma Harris (and it's connected to what we've just been talking about there) you've made 7 strong claims about successful school leadership. It's quite a lot to get through, but could you run through sort of the outline of those for listeners?

DH: Yes, I can, of course. And I've got to say that Alma and I were delighted to work with Ken on this, but he was the senior author, and he did a lot of the heavy lifting on this. … One of the things I'm very grateful for is to have had a lot of very fine colleagues in my career, and Ken and Alma are 2 of those.

We were commissioned by the National College for School Leadership, which I actually established in England back in the late 2000s to prepare a paper on effective school leadership – we did this under the title of Seven Strong Leadership Claims (Leithwood et al., 2008) and we did that I think in 2008, 2009; and it was, I think people say it was the most read paper on leadership in the world at that time. And so, we thought, well, 10 years later we would revisit those 7 claims and see if they still held out (Leithwood et al., 2019). And by and large they did, with certain refinements.

So, very quickly, and we've covered some of these points already, but the first one is that school leadership is second only to classroom practice in terms of its impact upon the learning of students. … We know from all the global evidence that it's quality of teaching that counts first, but it's the way that is organised and managed and led, which is crucially important. So, the role of the principal is fundamental in achieving quality of education.

Secondly, and really interestingly, and perhaps I can say a word more about this later in the discussion, almost all successful school leaders call on the same repertoire of teaching practices. And that, I find, really exciting, that it doesn't matter whether I'm working in Melbourne, or Beijing, or Santiago, the language of excellent teaching, excellent school leadership is pretty much the same, right? And those 4 are about setting direction, which I've talked about, focusing on the quality of teaching, developing staff and then finally creating an organisational structure which is supportive of all those – and perhaps we can talk about those a little bit more in a moment.

But the third one is, and this is really crucial, although those 4 principles hold up around the world it's how they are adapted to context, it's how you enact those principles in the particular community which the school is located, given the particular needs of the students. The skill of leadership is adapting those principles for the school or the community.

Leadership works by influencing practice, so by creating the conditions inside the school, that's the fourth one. The fifth one is about distributing leadership, and we've already discussed that a little bit.

The 6th one is about the pattern of distribution. So, distribution again is not a uniform approach – it'll vary according to the context of the school. And finally, number 7, we found that the best school leaders, they sort of share a sort of a common pattern of characteristics or dispositions. And so, there is a sort of a personality dimension, personality element to this as well.

So those are the 7 claims and as I said we looked at the evidence again a couple of years ago, and they've held up pretty well. So, we're very confident in those as being sort of effective guidelines for leadership and leadership programs.

JE: I'm here with Professor David Hopkins, who'll be delivering a keynote at ACER Research Conference 2025 in February, in Melbourne. We'll be talking more about instructional leadership after the break.

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JE: So quick recap, then, instructional leadership is one of the 8 steps in that strategy for school improvement you'll be talking about at Research Conference 2025 – a reminder, there's much more to that strategy and we're just talking about one particular element of that today. And you describe 4 central domains of instructional leadership, those are: setting direction; managing teaching and learning; developing people and developing the organisation. I think actually, David, we’d run into a whole new podcast series if we look at every one of those in detail, but let's take an example from just one of those areas so that listeners can maybe get more of an idea of the kind of thing you're talking about. So, I want to talk about developing people, let's look at that domain. And I was thinking, I reckon most teachers and leaders listening now will immediately think that developing people is all about staff, right? But this one is also about developing students and parents and the wider community. Can you explain a bit more about that and what it might look like on the ground?

DH: OK. Well, let me start with staff and then I'll move on to the wider community and students as well. A little bit earlier, I talked about intrinsic motivation and I mentioned the word ‘mastery’ and I think, this is really, really important.

Most teachers work very hard, and there's no doubt about that. But teachers who are really good work hard because they know what they are doing and I worry at times that our teacher preparation programs and the way in which we organise professional learning doesn't focus on those core elements of outstanding competency in terms of teaching skill. And we've learnt an awful lot over the last 20 years about what effective teaching looks like, and what quality teaching looks like, and we also know that is the one variable that makes a difference for kids. So, for example, the work of John Hattie (2008) – who is a Professor at the University of Melbourne – his Visible Learning work, John's work there has been really helpful in pointing out the power of particular teaching strategies to impact positively upon students.

So, that's why [when I] talk about developing people, I do look initially about developing staff; can we create the infrastructure in the school where teachers learn as well as students? And the way I do this is through the instructional rounds that I have already described. So, doing the instructional rounds we come up with a set of hypotheses or propositions – I call them ‘theories of action’, about what creates effective teaching in the school?

I then sort of translate those – so they are statements, you know, ‘when a teacher consistently asks higher order questions then students will be more engaged and will develop their thinking’. But then I take that a stage further and try to create, I call it a protocol or a rubric, which are about the practical implications of doing that, that teachers can use … So, I'm translating both John's work and the theories of action from the instructional rounds into practical ways of working that teachers can use in collaboration with each other.

So, if we take one of those theories of action on questioning: we'll design a workshop in the school where people can become expert in that, and they have to then understand what the theory is, they have to see it in action, they have to practise it, they have to get feedback on that. We do that in a workshop inside the school, and then we actually get teachers to work in groups of 3 to actually observe each other using these protocols. So, they're working on developing their practice, they're working on developing their skill inside the classroom.

So, what has happened there is you’ve created an, I call it an ‘engine house’ for teachers to learn at the same time as they’re teaching. Now, what that does is to create, I think, a real sense of dynamism inside the school. The students are learning differently, they know something different is happening to them, you communicate to the community what you are doing, through the narrative that you're developing, and the focus of this narrative is about the learning of kids. And so, we begin to enfranchise parents into the learning skills that the students are developing.

So, you're creating a sort of a (I’ll put it in inverted commas I guess) ‘holy’ circle of commitment towards high quality education. And that's about developing people, because then you'll find that the kids understand more what their teachers are doing, it becomes more of a collaborative enterprise between students and teachers, and you'll find that parents and community will buy in and will come in and at times can contribute to this overarching, you know, journey of excellence, the journey of unleashing greatness that the school is on.

JE: Yeah, makes sense. The 4 domains then that I've just mentioned, the key areas that are outlined (a reminder again, setting direction; managing teaching and learning; developing people, which we've just touched on; and developing the organisation. Now you're saying senior leaders should be spending at least 75% of their time on these 4 areas, right?

DH: That may be me being slightly provocative there. But I do worry that in the sort of the top-down culture that so many systems in schools operate under, too much time is spent on bureaucracy, on admin, which take the time away from developing this culture of teaching and learning that I've been talking about already, which I think is so important. So, three-quarters (75%) may be pushing it a little bit, but I do think we've got to get the balance right in terms of those 4 key areas.

There's another distinction I bring in at this point and I talk about ‘maintenance’ and ‘development’ as being the 2 core functions of any organisation. And I think this is quite true across, you know, from organisational research and organisational theory, that organisations maintain themselves, yeah, which is great, but they also have to put in time and money and resource into developing themselves, all right. And the 2 should be mutually supportive of each other, but often schools (and most probably the schools which are underperforming) focus too much on maintenance rather than on development.

Paradoxically, however, if a school is not doing well you have to get the maintenance function sorted out, the day-to-day interaction sorted out, before you can move it into development. And principals have to understand the dynamic here and they will then apportion their time accordingly. But great principals have got that sorted, [they’ve got the maintenance sorted] and can then spend you know about three-quarters of their time on developing the organisation.

JE: Before we wrap up for today, then, I want to zoom back out again from our talk on instructional leadership. During your career, then, you've been chief adviser to 3 Secretaries of State, actually, on School Standards in the UK, but you've also worked with lots of systems and education ministries around the world. You mentioned there about Victoria and New South Wales, and across Australia actually. Is there anywhere that's particularly impressed you? Is there somewhere that you think is making really good progress at the moment?

DH: Yeah, well, let me give you 2 examples of systems; although, I should say that if you go to sort of districts or to, you know, subsets of a system there is fantastic work being done. So, for example, for a number of years I've worked in Melbourne supporting schools there, and some of the regions in Victoria have been doing outstanding work and were working, you know, at a world class level; but interestingly that was often due to the leadership of the region.

So, the examples that come to mind immediately in response to that question are Finland, first of all. Because Finland has for many years come up top of the PISA rankings – this is the OECD international comparison of educational systems. They've dropped back a little bit recently, but essentially the leaders of the Finnish system created a sort of infrastructure that I have been describing, and they put that into practice, and they spread that out across the whole country.

The other system which has improved considerably over the 20 years that we've been studying this using the OECD PISA study has been Ontario in Canada. And, interestingly, I think one of the main reasons for Ontario going up in the international rankings has been related to the Premier (he's just retired recently) of Ontario, a man called Dalton McGuinty, who was Premier for 12 years. Every speech that Dalton gave, he mentioned education. He created a narrative about education in Ontario and how important it was, so he was reinforcing the importance of education almost daily through those 12 years. He put adequate resource into the Ontario school system. He bought the best advice to help design the system – Michael Fullan, the sort of the ‘guru’ of educational change, lives in Toronto, and so Dalton called on Michael a great deal. And so, you can see even at that sort of state level some of the principles I've been talking about in the podcast are played out by, you know, people at very senior levels.

JE: Finally, then, we are very much looking forward to seeing you in Melbourne in February. I'm going to put links to the Research Conference website in the transcript of this podcast, which you can find at teachermagazine.com, along with some further reading on the topics that we've been talking about today. What are you hoping teachers and leaders will take away from your keynote?

DH: Well, 3 things very quickly, but 3 punchy things (and they'll come as no surprise to you, having listened to me rattle on now for almost half an hour!).

The first is the importance of an unrelenting focus on the instructional core. This is the way in which kids achieve their potential. This is where teachers exercise their mastery and that has to be the sort of the focus of all that we do.

Secondly, it's about creating working conditions where teachers can support each other collaboratively. And our design of peer coaching, which I've described briefly, I think is a very powerful way of doing that.

And the third is to continue to develop the narrative, talk about the journey of school improvement, which emphasises moral purpose in terms of the impact of the school's work on enhancing the potential of every student. And those are the 3 things I'd be very, very pleased if people we're able to sort of reflect on those as a consequence of what I say.

And if I may, Jo, just say that if anyone's interested in what I've been talking about this afternoon, my website is www.profdavidhopkins.com and there's a lot of stuff there which reflects some of the things that we've been talking about.

JE: Yep, I'll pop a link into that into the transcript as well. Brilliant. Yeah, really looking forward to the keynote. There's a lot to digest from today, but so much more that's going to be at the conference. So, we're looking forward to seeing you in Melbourne, as I say. For now, Professor David Hopkins, thanks so much for sharing your expertise with Teacher.

DH: Thank you.

The Teacher team will be at Research Conference 2025 – just look for the bright green t-shirts and come and say hello! Okay, that’s all for this episode but if you’re on a roll and you want to keep listening now there are hundreds more in our archive. Find them wherever you get your podcast, or click on the podcast tab at teachermagazine.com. And please leave us a rating and a review. Bye!

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References and related reading

Hattie, J. (2008). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203887332

Hopkins, D. (2024). Unleashing Greatness – A Strategy for School Improvement. Hachette UK. https://profdavidhopkins.com/books.html

Leithwood, K., Harris, A., & Hopkins, D. (2008). Seven strong claims about successful school leadership. School Leadership & Management, 28(1), 27–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632430701800060

Leithwood, K., Harris, A., & Hopkins, D. (2019). Seven strong claims about successful school leadership revisited. School Leadership & Management, 40(1), 5–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2019.1596077