With the passage of time the world of education changes, your school changes, you and your colleagues change, and your pupils change. You cannot ever have a repertoire of teaching or leadership skills and qualities guaranteed to suit every situation you face. It makes sense to keep thinking about how your pupils might learn more effectively and how your colleagues and teams might continue to adapt and evolve. As a teacher your core task is to help your pupils learn as well as they can. As a leader, manager, mentor, teacher educator, adviser or consultant your core task is to help pupils learn by helping teachers teach as well as they can. This HOW TO piece focuses on how a range of activities can contribute to this ongoing professional learning.
Deciding how to extend and adapt your thinking and practice
If your school is a training school or contributes to initial teacher education, you may be well placed to share experiences, projects, research and ideas about teaching and leading with colleagues, trainees and other professionals. Whatever opportunities you have, the crunch comes in your trialling ways of teaching and leading. Here are prompts to help you tackle your immediate concerns and pursue your medium- and long-term interests.
- Think about what you would like to see happening less often, and what you would like to see happening more often in your teaching or leadership.
- Define how you and others will judge the usefulness of your experiments; and periodically review your criteria.
- Gather information about and plan new ways of doing things, whether these be big or small changes or innovations.
- Talk to colleagues about your plans and how your efforts work out.
- Examine what difference changes make; be systematic about collecting and analysing positive and negative evidence.
- Keep track and examples of your experiments and their results. These can play a part in your conversations with mentors, performance managers, and your applications for promotion and jobs. They might also might help you lead training sessions for colleagues and communicate with wider audiences.
While you may not be able wholly to determine how your performance management is organised and run, you should be able to help decide the kinds of continuing professional development activities you pursue. These are some of the options, with prompts for analysis and future planning.
|
|
When this worked well |
Why it worked well |
How to develop this |
| Working as pairs or small teams to plan or develop lessons, study units, projects, strategies and systems |
|
|
|
| Co-teaching and co-working |
|
|
|
| Observing lessons and activities, and being observed |
|
|
|
| Taking the role of learner in colleagues’ lessons or participant in meetings and events |
|
|
|
| Looking together at examples of pupils’ work or products and records of colleagues’ activities |
|
|
|
| Working with colleagues on shared problems and issues |
|
|
|
| Being coached/mentored, and providing coaching/mentoring |
|
|
|
| Discussing alternative practices, both formally and informally |
|
|
|
| Sharing feelings about teaching, learning and leadership: e.g. discussing values/ aspirations/concerns … with or without outsiders’ facilitation |
|
|
|
| Carrying out personal or collaborative action research |
|
|
|
| Revising policy and responding to statutory or policy changes |
|
|
|
| Visiting and learning from other schools |
|
|
|
| Working with colleagues in networks, clusters or pyramids of schools |
|
|
|
| Engaging with professional groups, associations, commercial agencies responsible for education, and higher education institutions |
|
|
|
| Studying for qualifications |
|
|
|
One approach is to have meetings of interested colleagues. You agree a focus, which may be ways of involving and motivating pupils or colleagues, team work, using new technology …. You share ideas and experiences. You may visit one another’s lessons or activities, perhaps pairing up to observe and be observed.
Some people give this kind of shared action research a framework such as the one created by Patricia Ashton, Pamela Hunt, Stephanie Jones and Gillian Watson (1980). For teachers this involves arranging to step back at least once a week from the action of what is happening in a lesson in order to notice and note:
| About your pupils | About yourself |
| What are my pupils actually doing? | What was I doing before I stopped to reflect? |
| What are they learning? | What was I learning? |
| How worthwhile is it? | What do I intend to do now? |
As a leader you can ask yourself equivalent questions about how things go in meetings and working groups you are responsible for. Then at convenient intervals you and your colleagues meet to share findings and pursue implications. Those who have this kind of experience say it improves their day-to-day working and morale.