The first book that I ever learned to read was The Three Billy Goats Gruff – the classic Norwegian fairytale about three goats who encounter a troll while trying to cross a bridge in search of sweet green grass to eat.
For those unfamiliar with the tale (or who haven’t read it in a while because…you know…adulting) the premise is simple: three billy goats are eating in a field when they spot a lush green meadow filled with delicious grass. However, to reach the meadow, the goats must cross a bridge over a fast-flowing river. The smallest billy goat is the first to cross and is abruptly stopped by a ravenous troll who lives under the bridge. The troll promptly threatens to “gobble him up!” and, in a panic, the smallest billy goat convinces the troll to wait for his big brother to cross the bridge, because he is larger and would make a more satisfying meal. Greedily, the troll agrees and lets the smallest goat cross into the meadow to enjoy to fresh green grass.
Next, it’s the turn of the medium-sized goat. As soon as he begins to cross the bridge, he is stopped by the troll and given the same threat- “I’m going to gobble you up.” Again, in a panic, the second billy goat tells the troll to wait for their eldest brother who is even bigger still and will make the best meal of them all. Again, the troll greedily agrees and the second billy goat crosses into the meadow to enjoy the lush green grass.
Finally, the largest billy goat attempts to cross the bridge and is faced by the hungry troll. However, unlike the other two goats, the largest billy goat drops his head and charges the troll with his horns, knocking the monster clean off the bridge and into the river, which carries him out to the sea. From then on, the bridge is safe and all three goats are able to enjoy the lush green grass of the meadow together.
The Three Billy Goats Gruff- an Overcoming the Monster Story
To anyone familiar with the basics of narrative structure, the fairytale of the Three Billy Goats Gruff is a classic example of an Overcoming the Monster story, where an underdog hero is forced to face an evil that threatens them or their world. Generally, this evil is something larger and greater than the protagonist and will take great strength and courage to defeat. From Beowulf to Dracula and from Jaws to James Bond, Overcoming the Monster stories are everywhere: they are Gilgamesh; they are David & Goliath; they are Terminator and Star Wars and every installment of the Marvel franchise- and every Overcoming the Monster story follows exactly the same structure:
| Exposition: Where the facts of the story are established. | e.g. three goats see a meadow across a bridge. |
| Inciting Incident: where the monster becomes known and the hero is forced to act. | e.g. a troll emerges and threatens to eat them. |
| Rising Action: where events occur that prepare the hero for the final conflict. | e.g. the first two billy goats talk their way around the troll. |
| Climax/Confrontation: where the monster or the hero is defeated. | e.g. the third goat knocks the troll off the bridge. |
| Falling Action/ Denouement: where the consequences of the hero’s actions are played out for all to see. | e.g. they all live happily ever after. |
More importantly, however, Overcoming the Monster Stories, broken down into the component parts above, also perfectly characterise the challenges that we face in our schools and hopefully teach us valuable lessons about how to overcome them.
Inciting Incidents: the Monster becomes known
Fairytales like The Billy Goats Gruff are always beautifully sanitised: it’s really clear what the monster is and where to find it. Real life, of course, isn’t that simple and sometimes it’s not entirely clear what the monsters are or where they live- but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there.
Imagine for a moment that you are the hero-protagonist in your own school-based fairytale (your own personal exposition, if you like) and that each of the challenges that you face is a monster threatening your world: attendance, student punctuality, truancy, uniform, litter & phones are just some of the monsters that you might face on a daily basis- and that’s just kids in the corridors. By the time you get to registers, behaviour management, quality of instruction & accuracy of assessment, the list has become almost endless. And then, of course, you have the ‘uber-monsters’ of poor literacy and numeracy rates to contend with. And low levels of academic aspiration. And intellectual and cultural poverty. And actual (economic) poverty. And any of the other things that underpin your particular context. Suddenly, the ‘monster’ that you face isn’t one cohesive troll, but rather an army of gremlins, casually destroying the machinery of your hallowed institution with total abandonment.
And then imagine that, in the midst of all of this, some of your colleagues are also employing strategies specifically designed to avoid tackling these monsters head on: talking their way around the problem, ensuring their own passage to the blissful paradise of the green meadow beyond, leaving it to the biggest billy goat to deal with the troll on their own- and suddenly a fairytale about a goat trying to cross a bridge doesn’t seem that far removed form the reality that some school leaders live every day.
I catastrophise and exaggerate to a certain extent to make the point, of course, but I also know from experience that each and every part of the scenario described above is possible because I’ve experienced it- and I’m certain that others have too. In some ways, that is almost irrelevant though because the real question always has to be “what are you going to do about it?”
Is this the Monster that you are looking for?
At this point, I again refer back to the fact that in fairytales like The Billy Goats Gruff (the central conceit for this piece) the monster is always cohesive and clear. When we apply this to the real world of schools, however, the monster is usually far more slippery: it has many tentacles and can hide in many places. So how do we find it?
Andy Buck, the author of Leadership Matters, uses the metaphor of ‘camels and shadows’ to describe how sometimes we can mistake the thing that we are looking at for something else. We might look at the shadows in this image and think that they are actually the camels: they aren’t. In the same vein, we can look at circumstances in schools and believe that what we are looking at is objectively accurate, or strategically important, when it isn’t. Depending on which lens you are observing things through, your perception of reality will inevitably be warped and biased- which is possibly fine, provided that you don’t perceive something as unimportant when it really should be.
To use a further real-life case study, I was intrigued by the recent Teacher Tapp Survey asking teachers what they thought their school leadership’s top priority should be in the coming year. Overwhelmingly, behaviour inside and outside of lessons was seen as a highest area of priority for most respondents from secondary schools. Yet, when those same results were broken down by respondent’s roles within school, senior leaders and headteachers were far more likely to say that curriculum and/or assessment (and not behaviour) were the biggest areas of need. Now, this is by no means conclusive, but it speaks to a situation where two separate groups in schools are finding their biggest monsters in very different places. So which is the more important to tackle head on? Which one is the ‘thing’ that matters (the camel) and which one is just a shadow that is cast by the ‘thing’?
The ‘Two Meadows Fallacy’
In my own context, I’ve started to anecdotally refer to this idea as the ‘two meadows fallacy’ – namely that there are two (or possibly more) groups that are quite happily going about their school day(s) with completely and distinctly separate versions of reality at play. In one meadow, there is group that is enjoying the fresh green grass because (for them) the monster has effectively been dealt with or is actually entirely irrelevant. Over in the other meadow, however, the monster is very much real and needs tackling before the greener grass can truly be enjoyed. And it’s worth noting that, although the assumption might be that it is senior leaders that are stuck in the meadow tackling the monster, in my experience this isn’t always the case- school leaders are just as prone to talking their way around a problem as front-line staff are. In some cases more so, because they have offices to hide in.
In many ways, although I’ve given it a silly name, the ‘two meadows fallacy’ is effectively a variation on the ‘two truths fallacy’, where two distinctly different truths are permitted to coexist in different contexts, despite clearly contradicting one another. In the context of school, however, either the monster matters and needs to be challenged, or it doesn’t and, therefore, as leaders (by function or title), it’s our job to reconcile the two meadows and establish one clear version of reality.
Making the Case for Situational Awareness
A few weeks ago, I came across a brilliant blog by Matthew Evans, looking at models for shared situational awareness. Undoubtedly, this piqued my interest, as it describes precisely the conundrum that I describe above- how do leaders create circumstances where there is a shared sense of what is actually going on, not just in terms of exchanging information but also sharing how that information is perceived as a foundation for collective sense-making?
Matthew touches upon lots of key areas that seem pertinent to such a question, including the fact that school leaders can often perceive things very differently to other members of staff and that they tend to be very solution oriented (leading them to take the fast lane when it comes to fully assessing the circumstances in front of them). Overall, Matthew proposes a model that he has called ‘PERO’ (problem, possible causes, evidence, expertise, risks, resources, obvious options & one thing) as a basis for bringing people together to tackle bigger issues. The thing that interests me, however is the first bit- how do you even identify that something is a problem worthy of tackling in the first place? How can you identify where the monster truly lies?
Delving a little deeper into Situational Awareness (SA) as a concept, the term describes the understanding of an environment, its component elements, and how these change over time, with the purpose of ensuring that decision makers are equipped with the right information to make critical decisions in time-sensitive circumstances. Although specific models vary, SA can generally be typified as a “state of knowledge” that takes into account our perception and understanding of a situation, and which also allows us to project those ideas into the immediate future, predict possible outcomes and act accordingly.
To that effect, although SA was originally a term coined for use in the military and has since spilled over into emergency services, law enforcement, aviation, cyber security, healthcare and more, SA as a model for perceiving, understanding, projecting and acting within a limited time-frame almost perfectly encapsulates what it means to be a teacher or to work at any level of a school. We spend our days perceiving, understanding, projecting and acting: gathering sensory data, identifying patterns, applying schema and making decisions under time constraints. So, surely, this must shed some light on the way that we perceive and consequently overcome challenges in our schools.
Core Functions & Contextual Factors
As well as the core fundamentals of perception, understanding and projection, the thing that I like about SA as a model is that it also takes the influence of environmental and personal factors, and how they influence our perceptions, into account: things like stress levels, workload and the complexity of tasks on the one hand and our specific goals, expectations, prior experience, training and individual abilities on the other. These factors, as is shown in the model above, can positively or negatively impact any stage of decision making process- and it is here that I think the root cause of the ‘two meadow fallacy’ lies. Of course, none of this is new – we all know that these factors have a huge impact on why we behave the way that we do. The difference here is to provide a model that codifies that relationship and makes it clear and explicit how these things relate to one another.
Similarly, it also makes me question how often we make these things explicitly clear, even to ourselves? How often are our specific goals (not strategic vision- which seems to be everywhere- but tactical objectives) stated with absolute clarity? How often do we articulate our preconceptions to others or reflect on how our experiences have influenced our beliefs and then communicate this to others? I know implicitly that reducing my workload helps me to feel less stressed – but how often do I overtly and explicitly link that to my ability to make good decisions or to perceive circumstances with greater clarity? Would I make more of a concerted effort to reduce my workload and that of others if I codified this as having an objectively positive effect on my other work activities- like teaching, for example- rather than it being something that I hold as a general and subjective belief? Do I ever actually think about HOW I make time-sensitive decisions, and the data that I base them on or am I just doing it based on subconscious perception?
If I stopped to ask myself: what are we actually trying to achieve, what are the causes of stress right now, how complex is this task at hand, what preconceptions do we have of the problem and what do we already know before I try to implement a solution to my perceived problem, would I be able to overcome the monster more effectively?
Would this also be the case if I expanded that same logic across an entire team- or an entire school? Would I spend more time focused on camels and less time chasing shadows? Would I find that fewer people were tempted to talk their way around the problem and sneak into the lush green meadow under the false pretences? Would they be more likely to help me instead?
You’re going to need a bigger goat
To return to my central conceit again, if Overcoming the Monster stories like The Three Billy Goats Gruff teach us anything, it’s that ambiguity is a deeply unsatisfying state of being. There can only really be closure once the monster is gone, even if only temporarily. Likewise, having two realities co-existing, where some experience the benefits of monster-free living and others don’t can only ever delay the final confrontation, it won’t make it go away. Even worse, it might even convince us that the people in the other meadow are the problem and lead us to ignore the real monster entirely.
However, as we know, the monsters we face are very much real, and in some cases they are only getting stronger- so it’s imperative that we make better, more conscious decisions in order to overcome them. Hopefully, an understanding of the SA model is just the first step and there will be many more to come.
Educated Thinking 
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