[MUSIC]
Welcome back.
Really hope you're finding it interesting to think about professional
learning and connect it to your own thinking about planning and teaching.
I think you probably have the feeling by
now that there's a lot to the planning process
and that we need to take our own adult learning on the
job, and at the site specific place that we work,
just as seriously as we take the learning of young people.
And that, for us, at least in our setting, is a fairly
new notion that we need to spend as much time thinking about
how we're going to be learning, as how our young people are.
So, this session, our final session in this week,
we're going to be thinking about open-to-learning conversations
and how we can make them a
way of life as part of our professional practice.
And I just want to preface this by saying, this
is not the easiest thing for us to do,
because, as teachers, there are so many people--
all of our students are looking at us,
their families are looking at us,
and in our setting, at least,
the public and policy makers are looking at us.
And sometimes I think that makes us shrink in a little bit,
almost take a bit of a defensive stance because they're not necessarily
saying what they think about our work to us, face to face.
They're perhaps saying it in the press, or we feel some sense that
teachers are under professional scrutiny in a
way that other generations of teachers weren't.
So, again, we're in this place
of professional learning and taking action and
also checking to see whether we're creating
the kinds of cultures that we want.
So, productive conversations, how do we hold them and
what are some of the factors in productive conversations that
we really need to be paying attention to?
And in this work we've drawn on some of Helen Timperley's thinking
from the University of Auckland in her studies of global practices, really.
And also some work from Australia that we think is
helpful and we'll mention in some of our print materials.
Adults Learning Through Talking Together.
How can we create more professional conversations?
How can we create the conditions, just as we want
to in our classrooms, for honest, open and challenging conversations?
Where we perhaps disagree, but not in disagreeable ways,
and so we illuminate other ideas.
And what have we learned about what's necessary to do this really
well, so that it becomes a culture and a way of life?