Author: James Hilton
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Details: 192pp, £19.99, paperback
ISBN: 9781472951502
If you’ve not encountered James Hilton before, he’s the author of Leading From the Edge, a raw and thoughtful account of leadership within education and how he moved beyond a nervous breakdown he had owing to work-related stress. So he definitely has the credentials talk to educators about resilience. However, this is not a book of authorly self-pity, but a much more useful “how-to” for those working in a profession beleaguered by many pressures.
The book opens like many such titles with an entertaining foreword. This time by Andy Cope, the “Doctor of Happiness”, whose anecdotal experience of early teaching leads him to acknowledge the biggest issue for teachers - Dostoevsky syndrome (those with big brains and hearts tend to suffer more!). And like his teacher training mentor, Mr Jones, you have to ask yourself, are you a DILLIGAF teacher or a TWGASF? (Google if you don’t know.)
This opening and colourful glance back to the good old days of the BC era (Before Computers) sets the context for a book that wants to provide the “antithesis of teacher burnout” for the ever-changing world of education that looks markedly different from 20 or 30 years ago. Hilton knows that the current education system will undoubtedly change again and again, and for those reasons, schools must be resilient places.
From start to finish, it is utterly self-deprecating, not pompously academic, or a hard-to-digest textbook study. Hilton has written this book to support leadership resilience, a personal resilience that in his own words, “failed so spectacularly 10 years ago”. I chose very deliberately to sidestep my knee-jerk reaction to lengthy metaphors and looked behind the analogy-filled introduction - winds, storms, balloons and roads were all involved - to see what Hilton proposes. He simply wants more balloons on your basket, and to help you keep the majority of them inflated even if others deflate or get punctured. Why would you just rely on one balloon to survive in teaching?
If you’re not already confused, these balloons are the 10 traits of resilience: a sense of purpose, optimism, trust, courage, decisiveness, asking for help, a sense of fun, curiosity, taking care of yourself and others, and turning adversity into opportunity. Each is an area of leadership that provides resilience. Each balloon keeps you afloat. Each balloon deflates at times, but, hopefully, never all at once. And this is the structure of the book - a guide to keeping each balloon afloat at any given time.
For this point onwards, the book is wonderfully straightforward and clear. Each chapter explores these traits of resilience with examples of teaching triumph and disaster from a range of sources. The research has been done, but the focus is to give the reader (teaching leader) opportunities to learn and move forward.
Practical advice mixed with anecdotal experience - both the author’s and that of others - provides relatable and accessible examples of each trait and how a leader can foster it within themselves and others. The neat example of a list of action points in response to the Ofsted call, for headteachers and senior leaders, seems obvious, but utterly useful.
To end each trait, Hilton provides bullet-point summaries of the key “takeaways” - a must for the busy teacher. However, this should not encourage those who wish to turn this book into hastily presented CPD. Without the context and anecdotes to support and strengthen the “truisms” contained in the summaries, these might appear glib and throw away within a hard-earned professional development scenario.
Hilton cleverly manages to tread the fine line between sharing personal experience and well-meaning optimism that sometimes gets rough treatment in the world of edu-Twitter. The realism and intelligent sharing of advice and examples does not relent, but for those cynical souls reading this, neither does Hilton’s determination to make things better, for your pupils, for you or for education leadership. It’s a strange book to read in the current climate of demoralisation, but a necessary reminder of what our profession is, and why we need resilience to deal with current situations and improve the future.
The overall experience of reading is of a positive coaching or mentoring session that challenges you to look at yourself as a leader and move forward with better ideas or at the very least, the knowledge that you’re not alone, and this isn’t a uniquely difficult experience. Teaching has patterns, leadership has patterns. Your winter of discontent will invariably be shared by others, and especially those who have seen spring return, or a glorious summer.
Hilton concludes his book in the briefest of fashions (the book itself is not overly long at under 200 pages) with a reinforcement of the positivity and possibility of school leadership - “I had about six bad terms out of 70” and one final parable, “The Old Man and the Starfish”, a surprisingly well-trodden but genuinely touching moment to end on. If you don’t know it, then look it up. I have my moments of cynicism with the world of teaching, but at heart, I don’t know any decent teacher or school leader who doesn’t try to make it matter for their students.
Where does this book fit within the canon of educational advice and positioning? Unusually, I found Hilton has not done anything particularly original, but that’s the brilliance of this book. It is familiar and reassuring yet challenging at the same moment.
Like JK Rowling’s or Tolkien’s appropriation of a wealth of myth, legends, existing and familiar literary tropes and characters, Hilton’s brings together a wealth of relevant and undoubtedly useful material and manages to create a new and more powerful effect in the reader. He takes many things you and your colleagues will have experienced or read and gives them to you as a fillip to move forward in your leadership. Reading this book should build your resilience, not because it is well-researched and familiar, but because it reminds you of what is being challenged, and how you yourself will and can overcome those doubts and difficulties.
It doesn’t tell us that there are dragons, but lets us know that dragons can be defeated. Or, to use Hilton’s metaphor, if your resilience balloons feel deflated, read this book to reinflate them and find a way forward this term.
Sam Draper has been head of English in three inner-city London schools and has been teaching for 15 years. He tweets @aLondonBookman
