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Leading A Learning Culture
with James Nottingham

Developing the leadership, collaboration and visioning skills of all staff is vital for building capacity and achieving a learning culture that impacts learning.   When leaders amplify healthy mental models, and design out the problematic ones, then everyone – staff, students and community – gain significantly. The problem is, those mental models often lie hidden from everyday view and can be resistant to change even when they are uncovered.  In this full day workshop, James Nottingham – a former school leader and now owner & director of six companies – will share the best strategies he has discovered for creating a culture of learning through the wise reshaping of mental models. He will pay particular attention to common mental models about challenge, progress and grades, behaviour, and collective efficacy.

Delegates will:

• Explore how to align students and colleagues towards agreed goals
• Explore how to align students and colleagues towards agreed goals
• Understand how mental models drive actions and how mindsets impact on expectations
• Adjust mental models about challenge and mistakes so that staff and students develop resilience, curiosity and a growth mindset
• Move from a performance focus to a learning orientation (an emphasis on progress rather than grades) so as to enhance collective efficacy

Delegates will leave the workshop with a framework for leading improvement and change as well as protocols for engaging their community in quality dialogue about learning.

James Nottingham

James Nottingham is the creator of The Learning Pit as well as a sought-after keynote speaker and author of 11 books about teaching, learning and leadership. He created our freelance company to share some of the best ways to strengthen learning in schools, nurseries, and colleges. His company now employs 25 staff in five countries: Australia, Japan, Sweden, the UK, and the USA.

In 1999, James appeared in a TV documentary about Philosophy for Children (P4C), leading to an invitation to set up a social regeneration project in North East England. This multi-million-pound initiative won many prestigious awards for strengthening young people’s lives, including “helping young people to become clearer, more accurate, less self-contradictory and more aware of other arguments and values before reaching a conclusion.” Independent research by two universities also found strong correlations between project inputs and national test improvements.

As the European funding for this project wound down, James set up an independent consultancy to share the best practices with a wider audience. This company engages with educators on every continent (except Antarctica!). In a business sense, James continues as the CEO of the company; in education terms, he is the principal keynote speaker, author and innovator.