This section is designed to offer amplification for Indicator 5.2
5.2. Professional Learning Communities.
How and the extent to which the school supports communities of learning enquiry to develop and reform teaching & learning practice.
Developing students as better learners is a long term innovation. It requires far more than an Inservice training day and ‘away you go’, it has implications not just for student learning, but for staff learning too. Teachers’ habits as learners have to become part of the picture; how they go about changing is as relevant as what changes they want to bring about.
Here’s a brief overview of how the development of staff mirrors the development of students as learners, involving not just new knowledge but changes in teaching habits. It explores the importance of creating communities of enquiry (or Professional Learning Communities), and considers how they might support small-scale enquiries.
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How Professional Learning Communities work
Professional Learning Teams, or more generically, teacher learning communities have the potential to provide teachers and support staff, with the information and support they need to develop their practice in deep and lasting ways. Furthermore these communities are designed to build school capacity to support individual and whole school change over time.
Teacher learning communities provide a forum for supporting staff in converting ideas and desired changes into “lived” practices within specific subjects and classrooms. They provide a safe forum in which to;
- kick around ideas,
- unpack meaning when it’s unclear,
- consider what’s do-able and appropriate for your students
- make plans for what and how you might incorporate the ideas into your practice
- share and unpack what you have tried in the classroom
- relate your triumphs and tribulations
- reflect on what you hope you might do differently
Because teacher learning communities are embedded in the day-to-day realities of classrooms they provide a time and place where staff can hear real-life stories from colleagues that show the benefits of adopting these techniques in situations similar to your own. They provide local reassurances. As staff adjust their practice, they are risking both disorder and less-than-accomplished performance on the part of their students and themselves. Being a member of a community of teacher-learners, engaged together in a change process, provides the support they need to take such risks.
Professional Learning Communities help schools to learn their way forward together. No need for expensive external support – just teachers trying things out, sharing good practice and growing together.
Why changing professional habits is hard
When teachers want or need to improve it actually involves them in changing their teaching habits. It’s not just about knowing new stuff, it is about doing what you do differently. That’s much harder. It involves changes to;
- what you know – knowledge
- what you believe – feelings or attitudes
- what you can do – your skills
- what you actually do – putting it all into practice
So changing how you teach is a delicate, complex process……...that’s why it’s hard!
And the hardest thing isn’t getting new ideas into teachers’ heads
It’s getting the old ones out…….that’s why it takes time and effort.
It takes time and practice to undo old habits and become graceful at new ones.
What are Small Scale Enquiries?
Small scale enquiries are action research, with a small ‘r’, not the kind of ‘R’esearch undertaken at universities. It is about teachers making a small change to their practice, and monitoring the impact of this change on themselves and their learners. Small scale enquiries invite teachers to explore what works, at this time, with our learners. Individual teachers, experimenting in their classrooms to see what happens, and,critically, sharing the outcomes of these experiments with other colleagues in a safe learning environment – the Professional Learning Community.
Formalising Learning Enquiries: an intentional and systematic attempt to explore how changes in teacher behaviours can lead to positive changes in student learning behaviours.
1) Typically, such enquiries begin with an itch of dissatisfaction – ie my students give up too readily.
2) It may be that the teacher suspects that they are contributing to this by the way they behave – ie by providing too much support,
3) Teachers may explore what recent research into this area tells them – are there any hints as to what might be done differently?
4) And from this, the enquiry question emerges, usually in the form ‘if I do ‘x’, will they do ‘y’ ?
– ie If I enable my students to develop and use Stuck Posters, will their inclination to persevere improve?
Two key steps follow that formalise the enquiry and take it beyond the level of ‘trying something different’:
5) The precise nature of the intended intervention(s) are decided – what will be done differently, how will it be done, for how long, who with? Also interventions need to be do-able, manageable and time bound, and have anticipated outcomes for student learning within the period of the enquiry.
6) Strategies for monitoring impact on both students and the teacher are decided in advance of the interventions in terms of:
- what will be watched and recorded in students, whether there will be a control group, how student perceptions will be tested, whether there will be a pre and post intervention questionnaire, will there be an attitude survey, focus group interviews, an observation proforma, video evidence, some data analysis, a scrutiny of written work.
- what will be monitored in the teacher’s actions, how the evidence will be collected, whether peer support is needed, whether a learning log, a diary, or video evidence will be collected.
The critical thing is that these monitoring strategies attend to both the changes made in the teacher behaviours and the resulting changes in student behaviours, and both are decided before the intervention starts.
The planned, focused nature of such Learning Enquiries, supported by a range of qualitative and/or quantitative data arising from ongoing monitoring, provides a rich seam of evidence on which to base future action for the teacher and, depending on how the enquiry outcomes are publicised, for the school also. Enquiries of this kind are the cornerstone for schools who wish to grow as communities of enquiry and to learn their way forward together, and when coordinated at whole-school level they form the basis for Teacher Learning Communities.
Nothing grand – just teachers experimenting and monitoring in order to learn about their own craft.
As John Hattie says:
The biggest effects on student learning occur when teachers become learners of their own teaching, and students become their own teachers.