Rizvana Abdul Reman

In this story

1. The question beneath the title
2. A difficult conversation without a simple verdict
3. From classroom expertise to developing teachers
4. When experience meets another school culture
5. Making expectations visible
6. The result that needs another question
7. Building a fuller picture of learning
8. The lessons she had learned to obey
9. What her children needed to see
10. Giving pupils something to influence

The question beneath the title

Rizvana Abdul Reman expected leadership to test her ability to plan, improve teaching and manage change. What unsettled her first was a more personal question: did the people she led like her? In her essay for The International Educator, she describes entering leadership after working alongside people whose judgement and presence she admired. She inherited a strong team and wanted to earn its trust. Yet she began judging herself through acceptance rather than the work she was responsible for leading.

She had brought a teacher’s belief in connection into the role. Building relationships seemed a sensible place to begin, particularly with colleagues whose backgrounds and experience differed. The difficulty came when protecting a relationship started to compete with challenging practice. Wanting the best for pupils and recognising a colleague’s potential did not remove the need to say that something needed to change.

That admission gives her account of educational leadership its particular character. She does not describe a smooth transition from expert teacher to confident manager. She describes discovering that expertise, care and authority do not automatically settle the human questions of leadership. The work required her to examine the measure she was using for her own success.

A difficult conversation without a simple verdict

In the same essay, Abdul Reman recalls challenging an approach that a colleague believed was working. Her judgement was that the evidence required another look. The conversation was harder because the person had previously been told their practice was acceptable. She says she did not avoid the challenge, but the response made her question her influence and whether she was being respected.

She considers several possible explanations. Was the difficulty connected with being new? Would the challenge have landed differently if she had risen through that team? Would a male leader have received the same response? She leaves those questions unanswered. Her refusal to turn uncertainty into a settled accusation is important to the account: she records the doubt without pretending to know another person’s motives.

What she does identify is a gap between responsibility and control. A leader can gather evidence, make recommendations, offer professional learning and develop a plan without having the final say over what happens next. She found that influence had to operate upwards and sideways as well as within the team. Her own professional learning was therefore about more than finding a better answer. It involved learning how to help an answer become something others would act on.

From classroom expertise to developing teachers

GESS identifies Abdul Reman as Head of Maths and Science Departments at Nun Academy Primary School in Jeddah and as a Chartered Teacher. The International Educator’s author biography corroborates that role. Her published career account traces her early teaching across English, mathematics and science in the UK before her work in international education. The combination places subject teaching alongside a growing responsibility for how other teachers develop.

In the Insights Success profile, she describes a shift from improving her own teaching to creating conditions in which colleagues could improve theirs. That changes the task. A leader who can provide every answer may still be leaving a team dependent on her. Her stated aim is to develop confidence with the competence and judgement that make independent action possible.

The methods described in that account are practical: modelling an approach, asking questions, giving teachers opportunities to rehearse and offering honest feedback. Support does not mean leaving someone alone to discover everything through trial and error. Accountability does not mean prescribing every step. Her account places both inside the same relationship, with professional learning treated as a normal part of work rather than an admission that a teacher is inadequate.

Her supplied profile also distinguishes mentoring from sponsorship. Advice can help a colleague think through a decision, while sponsorship involves someone opening an opportunity that might otherwise remain out of reach. Abdul Reman recalls that another person opened a door for her and describes a responsibility to do the same for others. That gives a practical edge to her emphasis on development: a leader can support someone’s learning while also considering whether she is willing to put that person forward.

When experience meets another school culture

Abdul Reman’s international experience also changed how she understood the transfer of teaching expertise. In her essay on school culture, she describes teachers arriving with successful routines and substantial experience, then finding that familiar approaches do not work in quite the same way. Behaviour expectations, relationships with parents and ideas about accountability may differ even when the curriculum seems recognisable.

She calls this a form of context shock. The teacher’s knowledge has not disappeared, but the environment in which it must work has changed. A once-confident professional can begin questioning methods that previously seemed dependable. Her concern is that leaders may respond only by increasing observation or adding training, when the problem also involves understanding the organisation and its expectations.

The argument is grounded in her stated experience across educational settings and in working with colleagues from different professional cultures. It also runs through her public professional writing about teachers moving abroad. She asks leaders to consider whether they overestimate how easily good practice transfers. That is a more specific position than a general appeal to welcome international staff: it asks what the new school has made clear, what it has left implicit and how those gaps affect the teacher’s ability to contribute.

Making expectations visible

For Abdul Reman, school culture is not adequately described by a handbook or a statement displayed at reception. Her essay directs attention to daily communication, behaviour management, decisions and collaboration. These are the places where colleagues discover what an organisation actually expects, particularly when previous schools have taught them different versions of the same professional language.

One lesson she identifies from her leadership is that communicating an expectation does not prove it has been understood. Leaders need to demonstrate and reinforce it consistently. Otherwise, teachers can believe they are following the same principle while acting on different interpretations. Pupils then experience mixed messages, and leaders spend time dealing with problems that clearer shared expectations might have prevented.

The GESS biography and session description connect her speaking work with this concern about international teachers’ belonging, development and opportunities to contribute. The emphasis is on what happens after recruitment. Bringing a capable teacher into a school is a beginning rather than proof that the conditions for effective work are in place. Her writing asks leaders to examine the setting around the teacher before assuming every difficulty belongs to the teacher alone.

The result that needs another question

A different strand of Abdul Reman’s writing starts with an apparently reassuring sign: strong attainment. In The Illusion of Achievement, she asks whether a high result always represents secure understanding. She describes observing how pressure around parental expectations, reputation and visible outcomes can shift assessment towards performance rather than learning.

Her concern is the pupil who succeeds within a familiar question format but struggles when asked to use the same knowledge differently. Repeated preparation can make a particular test manageable without establishing how well the underlying idea has been understood. She is interested in that gap because it changes the decisions a teacher makes about readiness, next steps and support.

She does not frame these observations as an accusation against one named school or as a claim that achievement is unimportant. Her argument is about how achievement is interpreted. A result should invite professional enquiry as well as celebration. In her published approach, the question is whether learning can be retained, connected and applied beyond the situation in which the pupil first demonstrated it. That keeps the assessment discussion close to the work of a mathematics and science leader rather than treating scores as a complete account of progress.

Building a fuller picture of learning

The alternative Abdul Reman sets out is to bring evidence together over time. She names classroom discussion, retrieval practice, observation, independent work and formal assessments as different ways of understanding what a pupil knows. A single assessment cannot answer every question. The task is to compare what those forms of evidence reveal and identify misunderstandings before they become established.

This also places demands on teacher development. Her essay notes that strong subject knowledge does not mean every teacher has had the same preparation in pedagogy or assessment. She asks leaders to make time for professional dialogue and build shared understanding across classrooms. Assessment becomes a collective learning issue rather than an isolated technical responsibility assigned to one department.

Her career profile links this thinking with curriculum sequencing, learning walks, pupil voice and scrutiny of work. Those activities are described as ways to understand where support is needed and where effective practice can be developed more widely. The connection matters to her approach: improving pupils’ experience and developing teachers are parts of the same responsibility. Her writing is concerned with what evidence helps people notice and change, rather than with accumulating evidence simply to demonstrate that monitoring has occurred.

The lessons she had learned to obey

Abdul Reman’s reflections on education extend into her own childhood. In Who Taught Girls to Ask for Permission?, she recalls striving for achievement and validation while wondering why she had to work to be seen as equally valuable as her brother. Alongside the subjects she learned at school, she identifies another set of lessons about speaking, disagreeing and occupying space.

She describes learning that being a good girl meant being cooperative, considerate and agreeable. She values those qualities, but questions what happens when agreeableness becomes more important than being heard. As an aspiring leader, she says she had experience and knowledge yet struggled to make her voice count. Fear of being wrong, rejected or considered difficult could make silence seem safer.

Her essay does not present that difficulty as an absence of ability. She understands it as behaviour learned over time. That distinction links her personal story with her professional interest in culture: repeated interactions can shape what a person comes to regard as normal or possible. The question is no longer only whether an individual has confidence. It is also what her environment has taught her to do with it.

What her children needed to see

Motherhood makes that argument personal in Abdul Reman’s account. She writes about wanting her four children to see their mother exercise leadership, including making difficult choices, disagreeing respectfully and setting boundaries. She did not want to model a version of acceptance that required remaining quiet or avoiding disappointment at any cost.

The example she wanted to provide was not perfection. It included mistakes, changed decisions and the ability to refuse. In her telling, representation means more than seeing a woman in a formal position. It means seeing how she acts when a decision is uncomfortable or when being heard requires a departure from an old habit.

She is careful, too, about the place of culture. Her argument is not that belonging, family or tradition must be rejected. It is that inherited expectations should be open to examination. She separates choosing a responsibility from complying with it because alternatives have never seemed possible. That position gives her writing on women’s agency a personal foundation without turning her own choices into a prescription for every woman or every family.

Giving pupils something to influence

Abdul Reman brings these reflections back into school through a distinction between voice and agency. A pupil may be allowed to speak without having any meaningful opportunity to influence what follows. Her essay asks what children learn from who receives responsibility, whose ideas are taken seriously and how adults respond when someone challenges an assumption.

She therefore argues for experiences of decision-making rather than encouragement alone. Being trusted with a task, supported through a mistake and given another opportunity can provide evidence of capability. The leader’s responsibility is to make those experiences possible, not merely to tell a child to believe in herself. This extends her concern about the classroom’s unspoken lessons into questions schools can examine in their everyday practice.

Across her writing, the same enquiry returns in different settings. A teacher needs more than recruitment into a new institution. A pupil needs more than a reassuring mark. A woman needs more than a place in the room. Abdul Reman is interested in what allows each person to contribute with understanding and influence. Her own account begins with wanting to be liked; the leadership she now describes asks a more demanding question about what other people are able to do because she has helped create the conditions.