Enabling factors for robust frameworks to develop teacher agency, creativity and innovation

Recently Greg Whitby had a reflection on his blog Bluyonder titled Bogged down by accountabilities. This caused me to revisit my thinking from my Churchill Fellowship. A strong motivation for the trip was a concern that I had that accountabilities were stiffling creativity, innovation and the profession.

I share Greg's view that too often accountability is about blame rather than responsibility. I believe that teaching needs to become the learning profession. This means that teachers need to be the key decision-makers, but that decisions need to be made from a position of informed professionalism. Elsewhere in this blog I have expressed a concern with an emphasis on measuring and reviewing schools, and less of a focus on improvement.

Greg indictates that schools need robust frameworks from which good decisions about learning and teaching are made. I believe that these frameworks require teacher agency, creativity and innovation.

SOME ENABLING FACTORS
These enabling factors are not always recognisable in large scale reforms of schools and public accountability agendas. Further information on each of these enabling factors can be found in the ACSA paper I presented in 2007 and in my Churchill Report (see links).

What might be some enabling factors that allow for the creation of these robust frameworks?

1. Trust the professionals.
2. Build flexibility and adaptive capacity within and between schools.
3. Create a culture of professional authority.
4. Develop teacher agency and leadership.
5. Develop informed professionalism.
6. Strengthen collaboration across the profession.
7. Foster networks for learning.
8. Evolve communities of learning.
9. Promote disciplined innovation.
10. Harvest intellect and capture new knowledge.
11. Build professional knowledge.
12. Build capacity across the profession.
13. Develop next practice.
    

FACTORS THAT APPEAR TO LIMIT
A number of factors were identified that appeared to limit the development of robust frameworks that promote teacher agency, creativity and innovation . These include:

• A political cycle and motivation that is focused on short-term reforms and lacks authentic engagement of the profession as well as the community;
• An absence of incentives, rewards and acknowledgements for teachers engaging in improving the profession;
• Focusing on the tools and processes of school improvement rather than the profession and people;
• Over-emphasising the importance of positional leadership to bring about school improvement and under-valuing teacher leadership;
• Emerging managerialism at the expense of leadership;
• Focusing on reforming schools rather than transforming systems of learning;
• Bureaucratic inertia and linear policy thinking that prevents the evolution of systems of learning;
• Assumptions that education systems do have a strong focus on learning and have a learning culture;
• Innovation fatigue with a few involved in doing the work.
  

Voyage into the unknown

I feel like I am on a voyage into the unknown.

Recently I was part of 3 days of professional learning with members of the team with whom I work.

The focus was on how we understand learning and support professional learning of teachers. We reflected on our work over the last term.

Two themes emerged from the reflections.

The experience of

• Facing our own fears in learning
  
• Facing our own fears in being a leader of learning.

Learning is, in part, about stepping out into the unknown. As the team I work with seeks to support schools in shaping learning in the 21st century we are feeling increasingly more vulnerable, living with the uncertainty of what could be. There is the expectation to know the answers - but the challenge lies in the questions.

Over the next few weeks I will reflect more on the possible frameworks to support shaping learning in the 21st Century through teacher inquiry, knowledge building and learning conversations.

Redesigning Learning

The redesign of learning spaces is linked to rethinking and redesigning schools. This clip from Teachers.tv, System Redesign - How to Transform Your School is an excellent resource for opening up the thinking and conversations about redesigning the system of schooling. I'd be interested in others responses to the clip.

There has for a long time been a sense that there is a lack of congruence between school buildings/learning spaces, teachers/teaching and learners/learning.

A former colleague and mentor of mine, Kate Clancy (an outstanding educator and now Principal of Santa Sabina College, Strathfield, Australia) has, for many years, described this problem as learning taking place in 19th Century schools, with 20th Century teachers and 21st Century learners.

The video clip is a nice synthesis of some of the current thinking around redesigning. It draws upon some recent work from the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, an organisation I was fortunate enough to visit in 2006 to examine innovation. iNet is the international network that evolved from SSAT. It connects nicely with the concept of Next Practice – an area I am particularly interested in exploring further with schools.

What if … ? questions can open up thinking beyond current practice and shape new practices.

I was recently in a school that has established a strong working partnership at the leadership level with it’s neighbouring primary schools and the secondary school. The possibilities are endless for redesigning learning by exploring some of the "What ifs?".

What if …

• There was shared leadership across the schools to improve numeracy for all students

• Stage 3 and Stage 4 teachers worked together to address transition in investigating, planning, implementing and evaluating programmes

• Teaching expertise were shared within and between the schools and was made available to other teachers and to the students

• The network of neighbouring schools saw themselves as a learning precinct with shared responsibilities to the communities they served.

The list could go on!

Designs on Learning

Recently I was part of a conversation about a school building project. The design of the learning spaces is quite exciting, doing away with traditional classrooms as isolated boxes. The design has curved shaped walls defining a number of spaces opening out into a large central area.

In the course of the conversation I was struck by the danger of replicating existing structures and places within this new design. It was stated that a desk for every child is required so that the children can learn to write.

So there is the new design, recent technologies and traditional classroom furniture; and low and behold, before too long we have the familiar and recognisable classroom.

It was put to me that the school leadership needed to see what was possible elsewhere so that they could imagine school in new ways, rather than recreating what was in new spaces.

Of course there are schools that are exploring new ways of doing schooling - not just in design of buildings, but in the design of learning.

Of interest is what is happening at Wooranna Park Public School. The school has designed learning spaces within the shell of a traditional school. The school describes itself as having

... endeavoured to create a learning environment for students that prepares them to live in a rapidly changing world, caters for their personal needs and passions, and excites their thirst for learning.

Another school that has the most amazing design is the Hellerup Skole in Denmark.

What both these schools have in common is a recognition that before considering the design of schools serious consideration needs to be given to the principles of learning that should inform and shape what the learning looks like. The learning spaces should be designed to support the desired learning.

This caused me to ask, "If we were to do school that wasn't to look like school, what might it look like?" This, I think, would be an interesting area to investigate with students.

This another clip that is provocative in opening up thinking: