Some challenges in being a learning profession

I thought I might be a little provocative in my thinking in this entry. Over the last few weeks I have had some interesting conversations with people about conferences and research.

A couple of things have struck me from the conversations; and I’d like to offer a couple of challenges as much for myself as for others.

1. There is a tendency for educators to attend conferences and expect to get something from them.
Often I hear attendees express disappointment that they have got nothing new from the conference. This may well be so. It seems to be an extension of the pragmatic approach I often experience of teachers: give me something I can do tomorrow that will be useful. Often this response is from the sheer business of teaching.

The challenge:
I do think that it is important to gain something from the conferences attended. I also believe that it is important to be active in building the knowledge across the profession.

At one level I find it affirming that what I hear is what I believe I already know and do.The challenge for me is to build on the knowledge. The focus I believe needs to be very much one of “so what?” “where to next?”

This also challenges me to think about what I can contribute to the thinking either as a presenter or as a participant to engage in the professional discourse beyond my own site of involvement.

The networking of people, ideas and practice is central for me.


2. There is a tendency to disregard or "reactively challenge" the best available research, evidence and thinking at a superficial level.
I often experience a tendency at the local level (school and/or district) to often disregard or challenge evidence and emerging concepts when the evidence or concept challenges the status quo. This seems to often be done from a defensive and personal stance.

This is expressed in a number of ways:

1. Picking of the eyes out of what is presented: "I like this part but don’t like that – so I’ll take the part I like."
2. Blocking: "Well that won’t work here." Or, "They got it wrong."
3. Comfort in the belief that it is already happening: “We’re already doing that. There’s nothing new here.”

The challenge
I believe that it is important to bring a critically reflective eye to the research. New research and thinking, that is recognised as the best or most significant available, should challenge my view of the world.

Significant professional learning doesn’t happen by accommodating the new thinking into my framework and theories, disregarding the pieces I don’t like or ignoring it (maybe hoping it will go away!).

The significant learning happens in the dissonance, when our safe theoretical and experiential frames are rattled and we are invited to see things differently and to re-frame our theories and make sense of the experiences from another perspective.

Depersonalising teaching
Recently I was part of a discussion about the need to not only deprivatise teaching but also to depersonalise teaching if we are improve the quality of teaching and build professional knowledge across the profession. This is not about removing or denying the relational aspect that is an important part of teaching; but rather to separate the person as teacher from the act of teaching.

The focus should be on improving the act of teaching.

In a conversation I had with Tom Bentley (former director of DEMOS - a British think tank), we talked about teaching being a Community of Practice (rather than a Community of Learners) whereby teachers:

- focused on their professional activities - what they do
- engaged in mutually supportive forms of professional exchange.

Such Communities can serve to reinforce our bounded professional identities as teachers and as a profession.

There is a danger of these communities of practice following the existing institutional contours (the way things are done) rather than trying to break out of these. We continue to keep doing things in pretty much the same way rather than exploring new ways.

Of course we can’t constantly be involved in deep or significant learning. But I fear that too often the opportunity to learn as teachers can be prematurely shut down in the name of pragmatism and a belief that it is a comment about me as a teacher, rather than about teaching.

Maybe teachers are just suspicious of research and new thinking that challenges the status quo. Maybe this has always been the case; but maybe the accountability and merit pay agendas have heightened the suspicion. Maybe increased external accountability and rewards such as merit pay get in the way of learning as a profession.

What do you think?

Disciplined dialogue to build capacity

I spent the last 2 weeks working with the Team Leaders and Teaching Educators who are part of the team with whom I work. Several of the team members were new.

One thing that struck me from the two weeks was the importance of talk in getting to know each other and in developing leadership. The talk allowed for us to get insights into how each person thinks about teaching and learning, the language we use to describe our thinking and our theories of learning.

At the recent ICSEI conference I attended a session on Teacher Leadership conducted by John MacBeath from the Leadership for Learning network. The session identified the need to move from professional discussions (conversations that dissect and pull apart) to disciplined dialogue (conversations that flow through developing thinking and ideas).

Disciplined dialogue takes time but it is essential for effective distribution of leadership and the building of capacity in the profession of teaching. Engaging in disciplined dialogue is hard work.

Disciplined dialogue assists in developing a shared language for talking about learning. The conversations reflected understandings held by others. They allowed for theories of learning to be surfaced and for assumptions to be tested.

For me it reinforced the importance of professional talk about teaching and learning undertaken in a focused and disciplined way.

Engaing in disciplined dialogue takes time. Too often time is not given to conversations as time is viewed as a something to be consumed, rather than as an investment for the future.

Frameworks for improvement – Hill, Crévola and Fullan

There is nothing as practical as a good theory and nothing as theoretical as good practice.

The following are just some thoughts on what I have learnt over the years about improving literacy and numeracy.

Develop a whole school approach

From my experience a whole school approach to improvement is the only way. In designing the numeracy strategy for the 114 Sydney Catholic systemic schools (and more recently pushing that up into lower secondary), Hill and Crévola’s model, Design elements for effective school improvement, was used.

The model was also used in improving early literacy through the CLaSS project from Victoria, Australia.

The model identifies 8 elements that lead to improvement across the school. When the 8 elements are developed it leads to a change in teacher beliefs and understanding and improvement in student learning. It is an evidence-based approach.

Develop pictures and images of what it might look like on the ground
Perhaps this is vision.

Part of the design of the numeracy strategy included developing a set of Descriptors of effective implementation,based upon the elements of the Hill and Crévola model, to assist schools in developing numeracy plans.

The descriptors provided a picture of what practice might look like in improving numeracy learning.

The Breakthrough Framework

In more recent years the Hill and Crévola model has been further developed through their work with Michael Fullan. This model is referred to as the Breakthrough framework.

Their book, Breakthrough outlines the framework and approach.

What is interesting to me is the shift away from beliefs and understandings which was at the centre of the Hill and Crévola model to Moral Purpose with precision, personalisation and professional learning (3-Ps) at the centre.

This, to me, indicates a shift away from changing teachers to improving teaching practice.

Don’t underestimate leadership
One of the constant surprises, yet at the same time stating the bleeding obvious, is the importance of leadership and coordination.

Within the primary sector, with the numeracy strategy, it was sometimes the case that this leadership would "be given" to a numeracy coordinator (Numeracy Focus Teacher). It was described as distributive leadership with the principal and assistant principal stepping back.

Where there was little or no direct involvement from the senior positional leaders in the school the effectiveness of the strategy appeared to be diminished.

It could be argued that the depth and breadth of the leadership with a clear moral purpose, supported by the elements of the framework, will lead to better learning outcomes and opportunities for all students.

What is required is both senior leadership of the school and distributed leadership across the school.

Teachers leading improvement

Earlier this week I attended a showcase of work, undertaken by about 30 schools in the Sydney Catholic schools sector. The work was focused on improving learning for students in Years 5 to 8 (middle years) in mathematics. I was impressed by the quality of what had been achieved and more importantly by the quality of the thinking of teachers.

The work commenced last year under my leadership until I changed jobs in July. What was exciting was seeing the growth in teacher confidence and their capacity to engage in the professional problems they are faced with in mathematics.

For a while now I have been of the opinion that school improvement is essentially about improving the quality of learning. At the heart of this are teachers. This sounds obvious.

The challenge for me is how to connect teachers in authentic ways with improving schools by improving learning.

Some of my thinking was sharpened when I attended a range of sessions at the 2003 International Congress of School Effectiveness here in Sydney on teacher-led development work. It was there that I came across David Frost from the Leadership For Learning consortium at Cambridge University who had done some interesting work in the area. In 2006 I was fortunate to spend a week with David Frost and his other colleagues Judy Durrant and Gary Holden. (Resources below)

What appealed to me most about the framework was that it connected teachers' professional learning interests with student needs and the school’s identified needs. Often I found that action research remained at the realm of “teacher hobby” often undertaken by a passionate and dedicated teacher, but frequently in isolation from the school’s improvement agenda.

Teacher-led development work allows for rich, context-based learning. It is a process that builds teacher capacity through strategic engagement in professional problems with a focus on school improvement at the classroom/learning spaces level.

Underpinning the teacher-led development process are:

• Action research approaches to professional learning




• Reflective practice




• Evidence-based school improvement




• Teacher leadership.

It was great to see the results of two years work by teachers in using teacher-led development work in building their capacity to lead improvement through the mathematics projects.