How often have you been asked to think about something in a different way or find new ways of doing a task and your first reaction is ‘I can’t do that’ or ‘thats impossible’? People make limiting assumptions all the time and they can hold people back from doing what they want to do or need to do.

I have worked with two Headteachers recently where they have been faced with staff who have responded with limiting assumptions when asked to consider the challenge of being more creative and innovative in their teaching style. In their minds the teachers had a number of reasons why they couldn’t be more creative or innovative – ‘I don’t have many new ideas’, ‘I’ve been doing it this way for years and its been working fine’, ‘I’m too busy with targets to learn something new’. And sometimes people don’t even need to express their thoughts – it can be obvious from their body language what limiting assumptions they have.

Of course you can just tell people to get on and do it and tell them they are clever, have lots of ideas and of course they can fit this in with all their other work but this on its own will probably not work as the assumption is eating away at them, stopping them from moving on. What helps is to ask a different question, an incisive question, that gets people to think and which replaces the limiting assumption with a freeing one. In the examples below I have tried to deal with the common assumptions people have such as self-doubt, not as good as other people and fear of failure to provide some examples of incisive questions.

If you knew that you will be successful how would you start to be more creative?

• If you were not to hold back in your teaching, what would you be doing?
• If you were the Headteacher what would your first steps be to encourage creativity and innovation in teaching?
• If you knew that you can think about this as well as anybody else what would your ideas be?
• If you already knew you are creative and innovative what would you be doing?
• If you knew that its true that you have the courage to step outside of your comfort zone what thoughts would you have about being innovative?

So go on – ask some incisive questions and see what the results are!

If you want to know more about asking incisive questions, including getting the teacher to think of their own positive alternative to a limiting assumption, then I recommend you read Time to Think by Nancy Kline.

Thank you so much to Lucy Falkner for writing the first of, what I hope will be many more, guest blogs that I have planned for you this year.
Lucy is an Associate Coach at BlueKiteCoach and currently supports and challenges headteachers to grow in and around Kent.

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