The changing face of schools and professional learning
Teachers and schools are currently facing unprecedented opportunities as well substantive challenges. New forms of school governance and organization, such as multi academy trusts and teaching school alliances, combined with shifts in national policy direction, mean that school improvement activity is now very much seen as something that should be done by teachers for teachers. Furthermore there is a very real expectation that teacher professional development needs to result directly in improvements to pupil outcomes.
The move to teacher and school ‘self-improvement’ has been accompanied by a growth in consultants, ‘movements’ (such as researchED), organizations (such as the Chartered College of Teachers) and knowledge brokers (such as the Education Endowment Foundation), all of which are seeking to support schools with their professional development endeavors. But to what extent do these potential partners help schools achieve genuine impact through meaningful teacher learning?
PDT at the forefront of change.
With this manifesto for change we are signaling the addition of something extra into the mix; something we believe can provide a genuine, collaborative and supportive platform that offers meaningful opportunities for teachers to grow and learn; and vitally something that will enable teachers and school leaders to develop the skills and capacities now required for 21st century teaching and learning. It is intended that this will mark a significant change in the nature of Professional Development Today so that it will become a resource for doing professional development, as well a place for reading about and reflecting on thinking and practice. This has been pioneered in the pages of PDT through our HOW TO section and will now be built upon to provide an on-line development resource.
Representing a partnership between the Carnegie School of Education at Leeds Beckett University, the School of Education and Childhood Studies at the University of Portsmouth and Imaginative Minds (the publishers of Professional Development Today) our approach will take state of the art thinking in terms of effective professional development practice and present this in a way that can be easily accessed, understood and applied by time pressured teaching professionals.
Metamorphsis approach to professional development
At the centre of our approach sits the idea that professional development (PD) should be collaborative, inquiry driven, should involve the use of research evidence and data as much as professional knowledge and should result in the iterative development of impactful strategies for improving pupil outcomes. These ideas are represented by our metamorphosis model of PD (see Figure 1, below). The metamorphosis approach is grounded in the notion that professional development should encourage and attend to three core aspects of teaching: creativity, authenticity and solidarity. Combined, these ideas refer to the need for school leaders to establish cultures, structures and systems in their schools that enable teachers to collaborate in order to share and engage with knowledge and ideas. The intention is to promote being part of a learning network which experiments, takes suitable risks and innovates. Here trust is instrumental, since a key part of any learning activity is that teachers are able to admit that they need to tackle a problem and feel able to seek support to do so. It is important that teachers believe that their perspectives will be heard and considered rather than dismissed. Also crucial is an overarching and commonly understood vision for improvement that is bought into and supported - and where teachers understand that they are collectively responsible for the learning and outcomes of all pupils. In this way it is intended that teachers engage in deep rather than superficial collaboration in order to truly support one another to continuously develop and improve.
Central to the metamorphosis approach is that professional development takes place as part of a cycle of enquiry. Here a vision for improvement is set out and a baseline picture established before teachers plan action and design interventions that will close the gap between vision and current situation. Such interventions are likely to have at their core both understanding that is derived from practitioner knowledge as well as research evidence on effective approaches to teaching and learning. They will also be based in an understanding of their wider school context and grounded in a theory of action: i.e. a shared understanding between colleagues which guides thinking in terms of the changes to knowledge and practice, that any given intervention is intended to bring about. Once interventions have been designed they can be trialled and evaluated and then refined in order to ensure they meet their desired goals. Then when the efficacy of interventions is established such interventions can be subsequently rolled out more widely within and across schools.