1:00
We're still going to be exploring the spiral,
because this is around the idea of new professional learning.
And, now though we will be applying
the questions, what's going on for our learners?
What's going on for our adult learners?
They may be educational assistants, they may
be teachers, they may be head teachers,
deputy heads or principals or vice-principals as
we would call them in our setting.
What's going on for these people in terms of their learning?
How do we know what's going on for them, and why does this matter?
And, a lot of this work from a research perspective, comes from the
studies and the thinking of Professor Helen Timperley.
We commend her book Realizing the Power of Professional Learning
because it has many of these research findings in it.
And also, you can see on the screen that
Teacher Professional Learning and Development was an extensive study.
I think we should do a bit of a shout out
to New Zealand educators, because their ministry has engaged the research
community in summarizing large chunks of professional
knowledge and those of us who read in
English have been able to take those findings
and utilize them in our own settings.
And I think that's an exciting opportunity for all of us around the world,
one of the really good global possibilities.
So, let's think about this idea of
professional learning being core business in a school.
2:45
I mentioned earlier that my parents were both teachers in country schools.
That's how they started their career.
Really, as teachers in those settings with large class
sizes, what they had to concentrate on was routine expertise -
learning how to manage large numbers of students from rural backgrounds, get
them into the idea that they were going to learn as a group,
doing some routines around getting the older ones to help the younger ones.
And, they were very much in a world of routine expertise
as I was and as Judy was when we started our careers.
But now, what we need is adaptive expertise, because
the challenges are there in front of us with learners.
They're great diversity.
The desire to move into more innovative learning environments.
This calls for an adaptive mind set.
And, here's what adaptive experts are good at doing.
They're deeply knowledgeable about
both the content of what they're putting in front of young people,
and they're also deeply knowledgeable about how
to teach it and make it engaging.
They are aware of their own assumptions and know how to question them.
And, if they find out that their assumptions don't fit
the group that they're working with, they know how to let them go.
And I think as teachers, sometimes that's a very hard step, to let go our
favorite unit, or our favorite approach to our favorite strategy.
4:13
And - we will know that this is a familiar refrain, but it, we think you can't say
it too much - that team teaching and team
planning can really help us with developing adaptive expertise.
Because, when you plan as a team and think
as a team, you have to work with each other's assumptions.
And that, we think, really helps us grow.
4:48
Without exception, our experience has been, no matter what country you visit,
that you can find a school where the adults are always learning.
And there's a culture of curiosity
about learning and teaching and how to do it better, how to
do it as a team, and meet the needs of young people.
And that's a very exciting feeling.
Some cultures, we think the New
Zealand and the Australian cultures are particularly
good at making sure they do lots of study visits, even when they have
to travel long ways to do that and we wish that we did
more of that in our culture. I think its a great way to learn.
5:21
So, what will we focus on?
Well, if we are going to make this principle come to life in our
professional planning as a team, we have to engage in inquiry and knowledge building.
Because what we've been finding in this realm of study
is that's what helps us develop that adaptive expertise.
I'm sure you find that your own teaching, that it's a complex business - we hope
you do - because it's challenging to teach well, and to help a very diverse
group of learners move forward in their own learning, really owning it.
5:57
How can we cultivate professional curiousity?
In the schools that we find, where there's a
culture of curiousity, we find that the formal leaders,
whatever their titles are, make it a central part
of their work to develop professional planning and teamwork.
They don't think that's something that
you know, we'll have a professional development
day on the side, and somebody else will figure that out.
They see this as the central core of their work as a formal leader in a setting.
And the other part of it is - and we've seen this
and we're very proud of the fact that some of our district
leaders and LEAs, they're called in some parts of the world,
in municipalities, they actually have their
own inquiries, which they make public.
This is what I'm curious about seeing I can accomplish.
I'm letting you know I'm interested in yours.
And people are moving forward together.
So, yes, teacher leaders step up to lead much of
the professional inquiry, but they have this intense feeling of support.
And recently, we were in a conference in
Manchester and we meant some educators from Bay House,
which we haven't visited, but we have been on
their website and talked to the people who work there.
It's a school with about
2,000 secondary learners in a small town in the south of England.
They got their own technology based learning
journal, which is open to the public.
I was able to read what they were learning, what
they were researching themselves and with whom they have research partnerships.
They got student leaning detectives who moved through to the school,
figuring out from a student point of view, how much
learning is going on. I think I just love that idea.
They've got teachers who are very, very actively involved
in generating their own knowledge and sharing it actively.
And in our own province, we have an elementary
example of a school like that as well,
where a teacher leader really has stepped forward,
supported by her formal leaders over a long
period of time, and has created for school is really a center of inquiry for a whole
part of the province.
Because as word of mouth of the literacy practices that
they created at this school, people were drawn to visit.
And we think that those
two examples are really good examples of places
where professional inquiry, professional learning, knowledge building and
sharing knowledge publicly are our way of life.
And that's what we think we need to create.
So,
8:21
here are some questions for you to think about in your own setting.
Revisiting the theme.
We know that still many teachers teach alone.
And, have you found or could you
find a learning/teaching partner, even for part of
the day, we think that would deeply
enrich the notion that we're trying to build.
Which is that we're going to do these things together and think together.
If you're already arguing that, could you help
to lead an inquiry group in your setting setting?
It always takes somebody to step forward, and if you step forward to take
a Coursera programme, perhaps perhaps the world
needs your leadership, the world that you're in.
And you could start engaging with one or two colleagues to
form an inquiry group around some important learning need in the school.
And if that's not possible, because we know that many teachers
work in one-room school houses in many parts
of the world, could you use technology in some way?
Skype or FaceTime or a cell phone to link with
a like-minded teaching colleague in a different setting than your own?
Could you find somebody out there, because there probably is
somebody in the universe who's thinking along the same lines.
And maybe you're thinking in quite radically different ways.
And don't
find an opportunity to have an appreciative dialogue in your own setting.
Well then, we would say, reach out.
9:47
The last thing I think we think about in today's
session is what's going to come up in the next session.
And what we're going to do is, we're going to explore the idea
in a little bit greater depth about how learner needs, need to drive professional
learning, a notion that seems, on the surface, easy to put up on the screen.
Sometimes our practices interfere with taking this as
a focus and we want to explore it.
So, remember, connect, challenge, extend.
Think about how you could make this meaningful, for yourself through your
thinking and discussion and reading, and we'll look forward to next session.
[MUSIC]
Dr Judy HalbertCo-director of the Centre for Innovative Educational Leadership
Dr Linda KaserCo-director of the Centre for Innovative Educational Leadership
Professor John MacBeathProfessor Emeritus
