Cycles of enquiry are often used as part of school improvement processes. They can have a number of stages but usually begin with participants establishing a vision for what they would like to achieve. Participants then set out their baseline – the here and now picture. Following the establishment of vision and baseline, participants then seek to establish a plan for how they can close the gap between the here and now and where they would like to be. In the case of RLCs this plan is informed by research evidence. The plan is then implemented and its impact monitored, with refinements helping to ensure the plan stays on track to meet participants’ goals.
Starting with the end in mind
Professional development activity is most effective when it starts ‘with the end in mind’ (Stoll, Harris and Handscomb, 2012). In other words, there should be clarity concerning intended outcomes before commencing on action (Stoll, 2015; Taylor and Spence-Thomas, 2015).
There are two key benefits to this approach: first, starting with the end in mind provides a point of focus – a goal or vision to strive for. Second, thinking about one’s destination also provides a way to measure impact and so assess how effective efforts have been in helping teachers reach this destination. To introduce participants to this approach we employ a technique often used within the the IOE’s London Centre for Leadership in Learning (Taylor and Spence-Thomas, 2015), asking RLC participants to consider, ‘what difference do you want to make?’ and ‘what will success look like?’ Specifically, we encourage participants to think deeply about, in relation to their given teaching and learning focus area, what pupils will be ‘achieving’ and ‘ doing’, ‘how pupils will be feeling’, ‘what will pupils be saying’ and ‘how will pupils be responding’ if the new approaches that participants will be developing prove to be effective.
We then ask participants to repeat the exercise in terms of the actions and behaviours they would be engaging in that would lead to this change in pupils. Getting participants to think about future success in this way meant that they came to a common understanding of, and a vision for, what needs to be achieved: this helps ensure the views of school leaders and opinion formers were in alignment and so provides a foundation for action. We also ask participants to start framing the difference they want to make as a question or focus area, by getting them to consider statements such as ‘...how can I ...how can we... what strategies... what conditions... what can we do to ...so that...?’ Next is to ascertain the current actions and behaviours of pupils and teachers. Crucially, this involved turning each of the changes envisioned above into measurable qualities and gathering ‘baseline data’ in relation to these, either by harvesting readily available data or by collecting new data.
Developing new interventions
Once baseline and vision have been established, in workshop two we work with participants to develop innovations or new practices to address their research questions; with a necessary requirement being that these should be informed not only by the research they engaged with in workshop one but also their own personal practice based knowledge and the knowledge of other RLC participants.
In order to then help participants develop expertise in the use of these practices they are introduced to the notion of Joint Practice Development (Fielding et al., 2005; Sebba et al., 2012): that is, approaches to the trial and iterative refinement of new practices that involve collaboration with others. Approaches to Joint Practice Development (JPD) include ‘Lesson Study’, ‘Learning Walks’ and ‘Peer Observation’ (see Sebba et al., 2012 for further examples and detail). In between workshops two and three, the main intersessional task for participants is to use one JPD-type approach to help them trial, develop and improve their strategy in response to a variety of situations.