Lecture 4: 'Open to Learning' Conversations are a Way of Life

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Del curso dictado por Commonwealth Education Trust

Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Planning for Teaching and Learning

91 calificaciones

Commonwealth Education Trust

Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Planning for Teaching and Learning

91 calificaciones

The Foundations of Teaching for Learning programme is for anyone who is teaching, or who would like to teach, in any subject and any context - be it at school, at home or in the workplace. With dynamic lessons taught by established and respected professionals from across the Commonwealth, this eight course programme will see you develop and strengthen your skills in teaching, professionalism, assessment, and more. As you carry on through the programme, you will find yourself strengthening not only your skills, but your connection with colleagues across the globe. A professional development opportunity not to be missed. This course will help you consider how to develop appropriate learning goals for individual and groups of students. You will learn how to plan learning activities to engage your students in ways that will achieve these goals. Enhance your course by joining the Commonwealth teaching community on our website, Facebook and Twitter.

De la lección

Teacher Professional Learning

As teachers, we usually think about planning from the perspective of how we can better teach our students. This week we are going to focus on planning for the learning needs of the adults in our schools. One of the most important findings from the research on teacher professional learning is that it must be tied to the learning needs of the students. We are going to provide you with some practical examples of what this might look like. By the end of this week you will know how to apply current research knowledge to your own professional learning and planning. We hope that you will continue to reflect on new forms of ongoing professional learning as part of your teaching life.

Lecture 1: Teacher Professional Learning: Professional Learning is Core Business10:45

Lecture 2: A Focus on Learner Needs and Highly Engaging Adult Learning11:01

Lecture 3: Adult Learning is Frequent and Focused11:51

Lecture 4: 'Open to Learning' Conversations are a Way of Life11:32

Conoce a los instructores

Dr Judy Halbert
Co-director of the Centre for Innovative Educational Leadership
Vancouver Island University, British Columbia, Canada
Dr Linda Kaser
Co-director of the Centre for Innovative Educational Leadership
Vancouver Island University, British Columbia, Canada
Professor John MacBeath
Professor Emeritus
University of Cambridge, UK

[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?

Well, here is some of the things that-- some

of the factors that we now know are really, really important.

Perhaps the first thing is we need to make it safe

to reveal our honest views in discussion.

And people aren't always used to doing that.

Sometimes it's the dominant voice and sometimes what

happens when somebody takes a risk to say their

honest views, humour is used in kind of a negative way to put that view down.

And so we have to construct discussions and conversation opportunities

that make sure that honesty is a feature, but mockery is not.

And that takes, sometimes in our experience, some work.

The second thing is we have to develop our capacity to listen.

Now we, Judy and I, have talked about learning

from our aboriginal cultures in our country of Canada.

And one of the things that you really notice when you adopt more of

an indigenous worldview, is that indigenous people

really know how to listen to each other.

It's an oral culture, and it's a listening culture,

and that's something that we really are learning as a lifelong practice,

is how to really listen to understand what somebody has to say.

Cultures that have survived a long time

and they've thrived in their environment have

people learn how to do this and I think that's something that the world needs.

The third thing is, we need to make sure that

our conversations demonstrate that we care about each other and

sometimes those are simple things like thinking about what

food or what beverages we might have in our meetings,

constructing the discussion environment in a place that shows you know what, you

are cared about individually, we hold you in high positive regard.

We want to provide you with something that you'll like, that will make you

feel good, if it's a book, or a beverage or an item of food.

And the fourth thing that is really

important in creating open-to-learning conversations is that if

we are playing a facilitative role within one

of those conversations, whether it's a very informal

setting or a meeting setting, that we remain open and model the process

so that we explain our own thinking, if we put a point of view on the table and

we are comfortable if somebody says - or we invite,

not even just being comfortable - but invite people to express

a point of view that perhaps is contrasting or extends

our own thinking or in fact challenges our own thinking.

Those are important ways of, of looking at how to talk together.

Obviously, I would think you would appreciate that we

have seen that people who hold good adult conversations, ones that

are productive in moving learning forward for young people, are actively

curious and that they ask questions out loud about their practice.

And, we have seen schools actually, secondary schools in our

province, transform when one courageous teacher in one school that we're

thinking about in the northern part of our province just

said, "You know what? I am trying a new assessment practice.

I'm trying to shift to be more of a coach,

and less of just a transmitter of information.

I'm struggling with this part.

Does anybody have any ideas?"

And, even though it was quite a difficult year

in many ways because of some things happening in

the provincial culture, that opened his school up and opened up

that whole staff up to having very different kinds of conversations.

Conversations that have really shifted this school and has made it become a bit

of a model about how to do inquiry and how to use the community intelligently.

There was a brave act of teacher leadership just saying, "You know what?

I don't know and I want to know, and does anybody else know?"

Seems like a simple thing to do, but it's not

always as easy in the reality of working in

an environment where you know your peers really well, and

where other models of discussion are a way of life.

And I think that the sixth thing that we've

really noticed and that is there in the research

is that the teacher leaders, if it's two or

three of you who are organising a meeting in which

adult conversations are going to be a part of

it or dialogue, is that we have to model

right from the beginning enjoying diverse views, and in

our culture, two of the things that seem to

be very helpful in creating a place

where people put diverse views on the table

is using a strategy that aboriginal people use,

also the Quaker tradition uses it, of checking in.

That is, before you engage in a meeting, everybody says

something briefly about where they are with the matter under discussion.

It doesn't have to take very long.

But it really makes sure that every voice is going to be heard in discussion.

And if it's ten people, you hear from all ten.

The indigenous populations have taught us how to

use listening circles where it's the same thing,

except, you know, the way that protocol works is you all speak in a turn

and sometimes, you go around the circle two or three times.

And each time that you do, if you've had that experience,

you're thinking and you're listening, and your willingness to

put out what you're feeling and thinking, seem to deepen.

Well, there are some other things that we need to think about.

Not a lot, but some.

Here's the seventh.

We have to take a stance where

we view contribution thought the lens of contribution.

So, if we have a habit in our own mind of immediately judging things as right or

wrong, or thinking "Well, no wonder it's not going well", kind of a blame stance,

you will find if you observe a conversation that's going

well, that that stance of viewing contributions through the lens of

how is the whole being helped, it's a very powerful stance, and

this is where I think teacher leadership plays such a a powerful role.

So, when we think about the territory that we've been in this

week, it's a very important territory, and we're hoping that as you're looking

at this slide all of this sounds familiar and you're thinking about

how you can bring it into your own setting if it's not there.

In strong professional learning, and the people who

are working together and who are planning professional learning,

you have to take where the learners are and what they

need as the central focus of what you're going to do.

If learners need to be more engaged, that's where you focus.

Secondly, what you design has to be highly

engaging for the adults with whom you're working,

and for you too, so that you feel a

real sense of interest as you're going through it.

Somebody has to figure out how to provide

the time that high quality professional learning takes.

Linda Darling-Hammond has found that teachers to

learn something complex like teaching math problem solving well,

it takes several years and, if we're going to learn

that, then the meetings need to be highly productive.

We need to create a culture of open

to learning conversations, and those have to just

be something that happens all the time in

that highly, kind of, productive way.

So, that's the territory we've been in.

If we're going to leave you with a bottom line,

we'd say, make sure your professional learning is really well planned.

Because if it's not then teachers get discouraged because it becomes

a waste of time and that is really damaging to our profession.

Next week, I'm really looking forward to meeting with you again, and Judy's going to

take the lead in discussing an exploration of

creating more engaging and innovative learning environments.

We're finding this work fascinating and we

think that you will too.

[MUSIC]

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