You know the iceberg slide. Someone puts it on screen, lets it sit for a moment, and says something like: most of what shapes culture sits below the waterline.
The room nods. It is true. It’s also, by now, one of the most familiar images in professional learning.
The model works because the point is sound. What we can see, measure, describe, and copy is only a fraction of what explains why an organisation behaves as it does.
But there is something missing from the picture.
Penguins.
Bear with me.
Schools spend a lot of time looking at other icebergs. They visit outstanding schools. They attend conferences. They listen to admired leaders. They recruit people from high-performing schools and trusts. They ask what works elsewhere, what can be adapted, what might be brought back.
The people who do this work are the penguins.
They travel between icebergs with genuine curiosity and good intentions. They look around carefully. They notice the visible things: routines, meeting structures, classroom habits, leadership language, examination results, staff culture, strategic clarity.
Then they come home and tell the story of what they saw.
The problem is not the penguins.
The problem is what penguins can actually see.
They can see the surface. They can see the shape above the waterline. They can see what another school has learned to do. But they usually can’t see the structures that made those visible practices possible: the assumptions, habits, histories, trade-offs, relationships, tensions, and decisions sitting underneath.
So the school tries to import the visible practice without the hidden conditions that gave it meaning.
That is why copying good practice so often disappoints. Not because the practice was weak. Not because the visit was superficial. But because the real work was happening below the waterline, in a place the visiting penguins couldn’t reach.
The iceberg model is often used to explain other people’s organisations.
What is visible?
What is hidden?
Why does copying the tip not work?
Those are useful questions.
But in professional learning, the more interesting question is closer to home.
- What is already shaping the way we teach, lead, decide, avoid, notice, and respond?
- What are we consistently drawn to?
- What do we consistently step around?
- Which assumptions have become so familiar that we no longer experience them as choices?
That is a different kind of iceberg work.
Recently, a colleague took the Learning Deck into a PD session with limited time and no elaborate facilitation plan.
She laid out cards from different strategy sets and let teachers engage with them.
What happened almost immediately was that different colleagues were drawn to different card sets. She said it “sparked really deep conversations between people sitting next to each other without any guidance from me at all.”
That matters.
The cards weren’t giving people another school to admire at a distance.
They were giving people a way to notice themselves, and a shared language for talking about learning without having to start from scratch.
One person was drawn to strategies around questioning. Another to support for EAL learners. Someone else to metacognition, structure, challenge, feedback, or classroom talk.
Each choice said something. Not in a diagnostic way. Just in the ordinary professional sense that what catches our attention often reveals what we are already thinking about, what we value, what we are wrestling with, and what we may have stopped noticing.
The conversation was no longer: what does another school do well?
It became:
- Why did this catch my attention?
- Why did that feel less relevant?
- What does this reveal about the way I already think about learning?
- What might be useful for someone else in the room?
That last question matters too.
Because once people have something shared in front of them, good practice can travel without becoming imitation. A colleague can say “this is something I use”, or “this is something I avoid”, or “this would help in my class”, and the conversation has somewhere practical to go.
That is not penguins comparing notes on another iceberg.
It’s people beginning to see the shape of their own.
School visits, conferences, and good stories still matter. They give us perspective. They show us possibilities. They remind us that our own way of working isn’t the only way.
But they don’t, by themselves, reveal the structures beneath our own practice.
For that, people need something closer to hand. A prompt. A card. A conversation with the colleague beside them. A way of noticing what they are drawn to, what they resist, and what they have quietly treated as obvious.
The iceberg slide is right. Most of what matters is below the surface.
The harder question is whether we have a way to see it in ourselves.
If the kind of professional learning you want is less about importing ideas and more about making your colleagues’ thinking visible to each other, the Learning Deck was built for that.
It’s a set of visual cards covering pedagogy, learning design, and classroom practice. Small enough to lay out in a PD session. Specific enough to give people something real to react to.