Recent advances in our thinking about thinking are brought to bear here in our thinking about school improvement. Some ways in which our thinking hobbles education and educational leadership include: a results bias, a quantification bias, attribution of causality, substitution and intensity matching, predispositions, a confirmation bias, premature decision making, having agendas, the press of time, loss of interest, innovation fatigue, and more. Language processes such as deficit thinking, anthromorphisation, reification, collectivisation, and objectification are shown to interfere with schooling, and the actualization of children and of teachers as social actors. Tentative suggestions are offered to address these shortcomings of ours.