One of the last large research project on classrooms in UK, Learning How To Learn, demonstrated two important elements for this theme of treating teachers as learners. Current classroom practice on promoting learning autonomy shows a large values-practice gap with teachers’ values (James & Pedder, 2006). Teachers who stay in the profession nowadays have a wider vision than simply a focus on current practice. Also, the only school practice which helped teachers develop an explicit focus on learning in their classrooms was inquiry (Pedder, 2006). So greater agency for pupils develops with greater agency for teachers.
And this point also links the levels of learning among all those who are present in the school setting. As key workers in this field have put it: “We have come to see that it is not possible to either fully or sustainably promote the agency of the school or the teacher without the knowledge and skill to promote the agency of the pupil” (Reed & Lodge, 2006: 5).
- Personal Inquiry.
- Try to identify some occasions in your professional experience when you have felt like a rich professional learner.
- Identify some of the key elements which created those occasions.
- Discuss and compare with colleagues.
An immediate parallel follows: if we treat teachers as learners, then staff development activities for teachers should display the same characteristics as were explored in the other HOW TO pieces for effective learning in classrooms: active, collaborative, learner-driven, learning-focussed. When these processes are in place teachers start to make changes in their classrooms which are against the grain of the dominant patterns.
How are your professional development activities doing currently:
- Are you involved as an active learner, i.e. reviewing practice, making sense of the patterns, planning new practice?
- Are you involved as a collaborative learner, i.e. involved in dialogue with colleagues, creating more together than you would individually?
- Are you involved in a learner-driven way, i.e. influencing the agenda and the activities?
- Are your activities learning-centred, i.e. focused on pupil learning, teacher learning, school learning?
Implications for leadership were summarized in Southworth’s (2005) “Essential tasks for leaders” as:
- Making learning central to their work.
- Consistently communicating the centrality of student learning.
- Articulating core values that support a focus on powerful, equitable learning.
- Paying public attention to efforts to support learning.
Tensions with the external will arise. An inspiring account of a school regaining control of its agenda comes from an Oldham school where they noticed something important about the external agenda: “We suddenly spotted that they were all making it up. And we said ‘What if we made it up?’”. One of the many activities which followed involved pupils asking “What if we were wizards?” and creating an inspiring list of qualities of wizard learners (Arya et al, 2007).