Education Research Reading Room · Ollie Lovell: Teacher, author, podcaster, blogger, PhD candidate. @ollie_lovell

ERRR #072. Viviane Robinson on Virtuous Education Leadership

·1 hr 48 min·5 clips

Viviane Robinson reveals why leaders' hidden motivations and character flaws can sabotage even the best training programs.

Host Ollie Lovell returns to speak with Professor Viviane Robinson for the second time on the Education Research Reading Room podcast, this time about her new book Virtuous Educational Leadership: Doing the Right Work the Right Way. Robinson explains that her earlier work on theories of action and open-to-learning conversations left something out: the motivational and character dimension that determines whether leaders actually apply what they know. She noticed in leadership workshops that some leaders abandoned difficult practice sessions while others — even when distressed — persisted, and realized the difference was character, specifically virtues. Robinson draws on Aristotle's concept of virtue as a desirable disposition of character that integrates knowledge, right motive, and practical wisdom. Virtues she discusses include courage (speaking honestly even when difficult), patience, sense of duty, and perseverance — each contrasted with corresponding vices like timidity and avoidance. She argues virtues can be developed in role-specific ways: a timid leader can become more courageous in leadership contexts by practicing difficult conversations, receiving coaching, and experiencing the positive cycle of growing confidence and skill. The book's organizing structure is the subtitle: doing the right work the right way. The right work flows from education's three purposes — preparation for life goals, development of autonomous self-regulating persons, and socialization into civic and disciplinary communities. Robinson then asks what science of learning tells us teachers must do to achieve these purposes, focusing on deep learning: knowledge, conceptual schemas, metacognition, self-regulation, and collaboration. From there she derives what leaders must do to enable teachers to teach this way, updating her five-dimension student-centred leadership framework. The right way is where virtues come in — leaders can be doing the ostensibly right things like classroom observations but doing them to surveil or judge rather than to develop teachers, which undermines effectiveness. Her complex collaborative problem solving model has five stages: agree on the problem, inquire into causes, formulate solution requirements (which she argues is what context actually means — not categorical labels like rural vs. urban, but the specific requirements any solution must satisfy), implement and monitor strategies, and evaluate impact. She illustrates with a school with chronic high absence rates where causal inquiry found three distinct cause clusters requiring different solutions.

As heard by us

A careful look at attendance problems as a leadership and evidence problem.

It treats school leadership as diagnosis, asking how chronic absence is separated from the causes beneath it and how a theory of action is tested before schools move.

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Why you'd press play

You want a careful look at why chronic absence calls for real causal diagnosis, not slogans, through a joined-up curriculum lens.

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