Andy Hargreaves Quotes

#1. You cannot switch teachers on and off as if they were PowerPoint presentations.

Andy Hargreaves

#2. Trust processes as well as people.

Andy Hargreaves

#3. Teachers create and transform energy. They are the dynamos of educational change.

Andy Hargreaves

#4. On teacher education: induction into current mandates must not turn into seduction away from best practice.

Andy Hargreaves

#5. Strong professional communities risk and sometimes relish conflict.

Andy Hargreaves

#6. Although everyone wants to change the teacher, it's time for the agents of educational reform to change themselves.

Andy Hargreaves

#7. Pompous asses knows how to put the moan in sanctimonious.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#9. Improvement is about doing something better; innovation is about doing something new.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#11. Students are often the last to know about change that is occurring in their own school system.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#13. We must use collegiality not to level people down but to bring together their strength and creativity.

Andy Hargreaves

#14. Blame and betrayal are the emotional enemies of improvement.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#16. Every learner has special needs.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#18. Service to others should be one of the most basic purposes of family life and schooling.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#20. Deadwood did not kill itself!

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#22. Walking makes us take problems in our stride.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#24. Arrogance is the conjoined twin of ignorance.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#26. Leadership is often the afterthought of educational change.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#28. On being: Arrogance is not the prerogative of the gifted.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#32. There is no algorithm for creativity.

Andy Hargreaves

#33. In high performing countries, principals are working with highly qualified teachers who come from the top tiers of the graduation range, who have been rigorously prepared in universities and through supervised practice in schools, and who remain in education for all of their careers.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#35. Adolescence is about digging out the iron inside irony.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#38. On school culture: It's hard to eat something you've had a relationship with.

Andy Hargreaves

#39. Without optimism & self-belief among teachers, classrooms become wastelands of boredom & routine and schools deserts of lost opportunity.

Andy Hargreaves

#40. Change is easy to propose, hard to implement, and especially hard to sustain.

Andy Hargreaves

#41. Courageous leadership is not fearless leadership. What makes you a leader is how you deal with your fears.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#44. Economic necessity should be the mother of educational invention

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#46. Capacity building originally meant helping people to help themselves. Now it means required training to deliver imposed policies.

Andy Hargreaves

#47. Lateral trust among colleagues is as important as vertical trust within the hierarchy.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#49. On technology: The teacher is mightier than the mouse.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#51. The rules of the world are changing. It is time for the rules of teaching and teachers' work to change with them.

Andy Hargreaves

#52. Human growth is not like rhubarb. It can be nurtured and encouraged but it cannot be forced.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#54. On learning: if you really want alignment, go to a chiropractor.

Andy Hargreaves

#55. Teachers are always emotional: by default if they bore us, and by design when they excite us.

Andy Hargreaves

#56. Teaching is a never-ending story. The work is never over; the job is never done.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#59. The teacher has more power than the Minister.

Andy Hargreaves

#60. A first class system of early childhood education is the hallmark of a caring and civilized society.

Andy Hargreaves

#61. One or two bad teachers is a problem with the teachers. A school with many bad teachers is a problem of leadership.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#64. The bags that teachers carry home symbolize their guilt about the endless care they have to give.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#66. High performance leaders capitalize on crises to galvanize the motivation and actions of people in the organization.

Andy Hargreaves

#67. Evaluation schemes that implicate 100% of the staff to detect a small % of incompetents are a waste of time.

Andy Hargreaves

#68. Professional trust is a process, not a state.

Andy Hargreaves

#69. Time is the enemy of freedom.

Andy Hargreaves

#70. High performance leaders know they have to breathe out when they are coming up for air.

Andy Hargreaves

#71. Sustainable leadership does no harm to and actively improves the surrounding environment.

Andy Hargreaves

#72. The most important emotion in classrooms is surprise.

Andy Hargreaves

#73. We should test prudently; not profligately.

Andy Hargreaves

#74. High performing organizations have cultures of creativity and risk. They encourage workers to innovate and play.

Andy Hargreaves

#75. Too many professional development initiatives are done to teachers - not for, with or by them.

Andy Hargreaves

#76. On assessment: measure what you value instead of valuing only what you can measure.

Andy Hargreaves

#77. Every solution has a problem.

Andy Hargreaves

#78. We need standards with flexibility, not standardization with force if we are to get the best from our teachers.

Andy Hargreaves

#79. A successful school has to engage all the people, all the powers, and all the capacities within it.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#81. Education leaders must have the will at times to release leadership to the teachers the parents and the students.

Andy Hargreaves

#82. Don't raise the bar and narrow the gap, but narrow the gap to raise the bar.

Andy Hargreaves

#83. The quality & morale of teachers is absolutely central to the well being of students and their learning.

Andy Hargreaves

#84. Teaching is a passionate profession.

Andy Hargreaves

#85. Excellence is the asymptotic state that never quite reaches perfection.

Andy Hargreaves

#86. We will not achieve high performance in education if we replace teachers with machines or turn teachers into machines.

Andy Hargreaves

#87. Singapore gives 10 percent '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.

Andy Hargreaves

#88. Schools cannot shut their gates and leave the outside world on the doorstep.

Andy Hargreaves

#89. Schools often get the teachers they deserve!

Andy Hargreaves

#90. All teachers are already leaders. It's in the nature of teaching.

Andy Hargreaves

#91. In Finland, within very broad government guidelines, teachers create their own curricula together across schools in every community and district. They don't confine collaboration to their own individual schools and to just implementing other people's ideas.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#93. High performance leaders create an inspiring future by connecting with a classic and honorable past.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#96. 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.

Andy Hargreaves

#97. If one foot is in a bucket of steam, and the other is in a bucket of ice, you are not, on average, comfortable.

Andy Hargreaves

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

Andy Hargreaves

#99. Teaching is an emotional practice: it activates, colors & expresses people's feelings.

Andy Hargreaves

#100. Alberta funds almost all its schools and districts to design and evaluate their own innovations. Teachers are the drivers of change, not the driven.

Andy Hargreaves