Top 90 Andy Hargreaves Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We will not achieve high performance in education if we replace teachers with machines or turn teachers into machines.”

— Andy Hargreaves

52. “High performance leaders know they have to breathe out when they are coming up for air.”

— Andy Hargreaves

53. “You cannot understand the teacher or their teaching without understanding the person the teacher is.”

— Andy Hargreaves

54. “The bags that teachers carry home symbolize their guilt about the endless care they have to give.”

— Andy Hargreaves

55. “Lateral trust among colleagues is as important as vertical trust within the hierarchy.”

— Andy Hargreaves

56. “The teacher has more power than the Minister.”

— Andy Hargreaves

57. “Teachers are always emotional: by default if they bore us, and by design when they excite us.”

— Andy Hargreaves

58. “Mentors turn into tormentors if they believe they are always right.”

— Andy Hargreaves

59. “Total teachers aren’t perfect teachers.”

— Andy Hargreaves

60. “Teaching is not the oldest profession. But it is certainly among the loneliest.”

— Andy Hargreaves

61. “Economic necessity should be the mother of educational invention.”

— Andy Hargreaves

62. “Implementation of technological change must involve critics as well as advocates.”

— Andy Hargreaves

63. “If one foot is in a bucket of steam, and the other is in a bucket of ice, you are not, on average, comfortable.”

— Andy Hargreaves

64. “Time is the enemy of freedom.”

— Andy Hargreaves

65. “Blame and betrayal are the emotional enemies of improvement.”

— Andy Hargreaves

66. “Singapore gives 10 percent ‘white space’ time to all of its teachers to come up with their own innovations outside of the official curriculum. This encourages teachers to turn to their colleagues for inspiration and ideas.”

— Andy Hargreaves

67. “The Common Curriculum can easily become the karaoke curriculum, where everyone just follows the bouncing ball of the script.”

— Andy Hargreaves

68. “We must never return to the Julie Andrews curriculum where we teach “a few of my favorite things”!”

— Andy Hargreaves

69. “On data: We are the drivers, not the driven.”

— Andy Hargreaves

70. “Students are often the last to know about change that is occurring in their own school system.”

— Andy Hargreaves

71. “It’s time for the US to widen its circle of learning, not to circle its wagons against hostile ideas in education reform.”

— Andy Hargreaves

72. “Trust processes as well as people.”

— Andy Hargreaves

73. “It is those who have the distinction of privilege who set the standards of disgust with failure.”

— Andy Hargreaves

74. “On being: Arrogance is not the prerogative of the gifted.”

— Andy Hargreaves

75. “We should test prudently; not profligately.”

— Andy Hargreaves

76. “We disagree with the assertion that great teachers can be replaced by online alternatives. The futuristic claim that technology will triumph over teachers ignores all the social and relational dimensions of teaching and learning.”

— Andy Hargreaves

77. “In Finland, within very broad government guidelines, teachers create their own curricula together across schools in every community and district. They don’t confine collaboration to their own individual schools and to just implementing other people’s ideas.”

— Andy Hargreaves

78. “As we seek to eliminate individualism in teaching, we should not eradicate individuality with it.”

— Andy Hargreaves

79. “High performance leaders create an inspiring future by connecting with a classic and honorable past.”

— Andy Hargreaves

80. “Service to others should be one of the most basic purposes of family life and schooling.”

— Andy Hargreaves

81. “Culture is the possibility and impossibility that bacon and fruit can appear on the same plate.”

— Andy Hargreaves

82. “In high performing countries, principals are working with highly qualified teachers who come from the top tiers of the graduation range, who have been rigorously prepared in universities and through supervised practice in schools, and who remain in education for all of their careers.”

— Andy Hargreaves

83. “It is not the time to put school districts up for auction. Now is the time to galvanize them into action.”

— Andy Hargreaves

84. “The economists who have put the spotlight on teacher quality are the ones who most misunderstand it.”

— Andy Hargreaves

85. “We need to establish platforms for teachers to initiate their own changes and make their own judgments on the frontline, to invest more in the change capacities of local districts and communities, and to pursue prudent rather than profligate approaches to testing.”

— Andy Hargreaves

86. “When creativity is the goal, schools must have their own platforms to network and innovate.”

— Andy Hargreaves

87. “On learning: if you really want alignment, go to a chiropractor.”

— Andy Hargreaves

88. “Schools cannot shut their gates and leave the outside world on the doorstep.”

— Andy Hargreaves

89. “Leadership is the cigarette that’s smoked once the change has been consummated.”

— Andy Hargreaves

90. “In healthy individuals, emotions don’t distort rationality, they enhance it!”

— Andy Hargreaves

91. “Alberta funds almost all its schools and districts to design and evaluate their own innovations. Teachers are the drivers of change, not the driven.”

— Andy Hargreaves

92. “Strong professional communities risk and sometimes relish conflict.”

— Andy Hargreaves

93. “Deadwood did not kill itself!”

— Andy Hargreaves

94. “Your most memorable students are in your first classes and your last classes: make your last years the finest of your career.”

— Andy Hargreaves

95. “Evaluation schemes that implicate 100% of the staff to detect a small % of incompetents are a waste of time.”

— Andy Hargreaves

96. “It’s important to be innovative when times are prosperous. It’s essential to be innovative when they are not.”

— Andy Hargreaves

97. “Physically, teachers are often alone in their own classrooms with no other adults for company. Psychologically, they never are.”

— Andy Hargreaves