Getting more personal and creative!
In this reflection, I draw on my work as a Teacher Educator with my network of student teachers, NQTs and more experienced colleagues over the last year since lockdown one. Lockdown certainly necessitated a re-thinking of teacher development. However, it also provided scope for an investigation into professional opportunities from which I have identified an increasingly diversified approach to teacher learning and development generally. I am interested in what I perceive as growing teacher preference for a personalised route in their professional development in which teachers have a choice.
I prefer the term ‘professional opportunities’ as used in the Core Content Frameworki, because my conceptualisation of ‘development’ tends to conflate with ‘outside- of -self’ developers whereas professional opportunities signify choice and agency for teachers in their learning routes. However, the article will, rather loosely, use a variety of terms for teacher learning in this refection although my emphasis is on teacher personalisation and agency.
The pandemic necessitated the acceleration of changes to online teaching and learning. Teachers have, in fact, proved themselves resilient and focused in adapting to new ways of teaching, learning and assessing. The teachers I have worked with have shown a proactivity and determination to adapt at pace with creative solutions in their subject teaching to the disruption of the status quo.
Fast technological upskilling
Disruption of procedures was and remains, arguably, at its greatest with the need for appropriate technological upskilling. Although IT- literate in the regular classroom, teachers have been propelled into fast learning in technology for online purposes. A huge amount of training has been undertaken, some as whole school training, some in subject learning communities, some tailored to individual needs. Local Authorities, the school staff, federations of schools, specialist support and, indeed, tech- knowledgeable lead individuals have all contributed to a groundswell of teacher learning in the field.
Examples of teachers taking a lead include this primary school teacher with ten years’ experience: ‘I taught some colleagues how to use Teams and Google through my own research. I signed up for some online training that I found, some online live videos about creative literacy then did a demo for colleagues’. Another teacher, with five years’ experience, reported: ‘After some whole school input, subject leaders were then asked to provide sessions in their departments. I ran a session on Teams for my colleagues. We have a Teams space for sharing documents’.
This picture of teachers rapid learning to operate in new on-line contexts has been reprised in the latest Winter 2020-21 lockdown scenario. If anything, lockdown has necessitated even more radical thinking about moving from what Neyland, in her study of Australian teachers learning to teach online, identified as the shift from the adaption stage in the use of technology to the transformation stage.ii This transformation stage is crucial as teacher focus is reoriented away from the technology itself back to the child and to subject pedagogy in meeting the child’s needs.