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Although Curriculum for Excellence requires us as secondary teachers to make greater efforts to offer our students more interdisciplinary experiences and to place a greater emphasis on the development of their skills, there will still always be a role for subject specialists in the secondary school. It is important to remember that the changes under CfE should be a shift. A correction in balance. A movement towards. It should not be a pendulum swing. We need to find the right balance between subject content knowledge and interdisciplinary learning & skill development, not jump from one extreme to the other.
With this in mind, how can subject specialist teachers be supported to implement and develop Curriculum for Excellence in their subject? More than changing the content of the curriculum, Curriculum for Excellence is about changing teachers’ approach to learning in their classrooms. It is about returning some of the freedom and autonomy which teachers need if they are to operate as professionals. With this in mind, we need a new approach to the way we as teachers are supported through curricular change. Rather than attending courses/seminars/conferences which are led by ‘experts’ and taking away the materials produced by these so called ‘experts’, we need to begin to see ourselves as the experts and work together to implement the changes we feel need to be implemented in the way we know they should be implemented. This was true before the financial crisis, but now we have no choice as the old model is unaffordable.
How could this work? We could group ourselves into small ‘learning communities’ of no more than about eight teachers from various schools. We would share a common interest, which we would most likely already be working on either on our own or in our departments. This shared interest could be something like using formative assessment to improve learning, using the web in our subject, effective use of homeworks, transition from P7 to S1 in our subject, delivering literacy experiences and outcomes, using active learning in Higher, using outdoor learning in S1/2…the list is endless. We would come together in our community to evaluate our current progress, possibly even sharing evidence such as pupils work/photos/video/record of observations. From this the community would come up with ideas for improvement and decide who will try which idea and how we will know which ideas have been successful. The community could meet regularly, either in person or online, to discuss and support. When evidence has been gathered this can be shared and discussed to decide whether the intervention has been successful. Outcomes from the community could be shared more widely online. The community could continue looking at the same area into the future, or could migrate onto another focus, or could even break apart and the members could move onto form other communities. The communities would be fluid and owned by the teachers in them, not the Local Authority.
When would we meet? In East Lothian, there are already two Friday afternoons allocated to subject support meetings. I would like to see these allocated to the learning communities instead to allow them at least two two-hour meetings per year. However, given that the learning community could become one of the most substantial forms of CPD available to teachers, this could easily take up much of the 35 hours of CPD time allocated to teachers. Assuming an active community met for an hour each month and for every meeting each teacher was doing an hour of work, such as reading/preparing activities/gathering evidence/reflecting on progress (which is likely to take more than hour per month), then that’s 20 of the 35 hours gone!
Who would coordinate this? The underlying principle of the communities is that there is no appointed leader or expert. Each member is an equal participant. However, we all know that it is much more likely for something to happen if there is someone to encourage and motivate the others. I would therefore like to propose the training of facilitators for the communities. A community could have more than one person who had attended the facilitator training – which might in fact be beneficial. The facilitator’s main role would be to ensure the community maintains its focus in working together to develop and evaluate solutions. They should not be expected to organise/chair all of the meetings or upload everything to whatever web tool the community is using. Their training would involve exploring the principles of learning communities, models of reflective practice, roles of a facilitator and how the web could be used to support the community. Initially, this training will need to be delivered by the local authority. Perhaps in the long-term some facilitators could take on this role?
Who would want to be a facilitator? Facilitators would not be paid any extra, so why would they want to do it? Some may want the opportunity of attending the training. Some may feel that learning communities are a good idea and wish to support them. There are very few leadership opportunities in schools these days, this would provide an experience which could be used towards career development. It could also be a great opportunity for Chartered Teachers and those on the Chartered Teacher programme to use and share their knowledge and skills with colleagues. I would hope that Principal Teachers would join communities but would not become facilitators – this should be an opportunity for others.
If this sort of work will be happening in other local authorities, won’t we all just be reinventing the wheel? This term ‘reinventing the wheel’ is being used more and more frequently just now – I’m hearing it a lot. I really dislike it. It is used to suggest that rather than all of us working to develop solutions, we should do nothing and allow someone else to solve it for us. For me, this approach is not in keeping with an empowered and autonomous profession. If we develop our own solutions we will have ownership over these solutions and they are much more likely to be appropriate to our own schools. We certainly should not be working in isolation, we should be looking for ideas from our colleagues. These colleagues could be in our school, our local authority, other local authorities, National bodies (such as LTS, HMIE, SSERC etc), colleagues in other countries, books and research journals. And in return, we could be sharing our own ideas, and their success, with these colleagues. However, we should not be sitting back and waiting to be given the answers.
These ideas aren’t new. Much of this stems from Dylan Wiliam’s ideas for implementing AifL and there are many examples in the literature of these communities being used in the USA & Canada. What do you think? Will it work here? Will it work for CfE implementation?
Excellent article, and so much to agree with!
Absolutely fantastic article which sweeps away so much of the nonsense around CfE. But may I suggest that a Glow Group would be an excellent virtual meeting place and Google Wave could also play an important role.
If you want a facilitator let me know as I have done online facilitating for several years with some success.
Thanks guys,
I just hope it’s as well received in East Lothian! Clearly Glow Groups would be an ideal virtual community space – however, that’s for each community to decide. They may wish to use EduBuzz instead or as well…
I think your ideas are amazing but I’m not sure how many people will ‘sign up’ Maybe it’s just at my school but teachers are feeling very frazzled and I’m not sure they could give an hour a month. The ideas are just fab but it would be a time and commitment issue
Thanks JL,
An hour per month was only a suggestion to show how, if a community was very keen and active, it could contribute massively to the 35 hours CPD requirement. I would imagine that very few communities would ever reach this level of commitment. I would imagine most would use the two Friday afternoons and maybe a couple of other meetings.
There would be no real time or commitment issue as I see it, as it would be up to the community to organise what works for them. And it’s exactly because people are frazzled that we need these communities. We need some space to get together and work to address the issues we’re facing – it’s about reducing workload not adding to it.
Sounds really good – does it need to be by local authority, or could it be a scotland wide approach? Finding like minded subject specialists when you are in a single teacher department, in a smaller school, is difficult.
Thanks Emily. I could see this becoming wider than local authorities – I think this would bring fantastic advantages to learning communities. I think initially, it’s probably best to set the communities up in local authorities and allow them to grow organically and make wider links.
Hi Fearghal
We’re already doing this in Stirling Local Authority where we have both a Biology and more recently a ‘Science S1-S3′ GLOW Group. Teachers can share ideas, tips and resources, especially our lessons as they are being developed for the new curriculum. Along with two colleagues, I presented on this at SLF 2009. We concluded that a similair National group would be unmanageble but WOULD work if schools in different authorities could view and then request access to resources from similar groups in other Authorities- in GLOW speak- become ‘readers’ rather than ‘contributors’ . We hope that this ‘network of networks’ idea is how it will evolve.
Paul Rodger
Thanks Paul,
It sounds like you’ve been making great use of Glow – something I’ve still to manage.
To be honest though, I feel that there is a difference between what I am proposing here and a glow group. I’m hoping that Subject Learning Communites will allow teachers to move beyond sharing ideas, tips and resources. The really powerful communities would be those which focused on a specific issue, gathered evidence to ascertain the current position – tried out ideas to improve – and gather evidence to evaluate impact.
I do see a role for Glow (and/or Edubuzz) to support this, but for the time being I think that most teachers would need face to face meetings to be able to achieve this method of practice.
Some very interesting comments coming out of your great article, Fearghal. I take your last point about face to face, rather like Teachmeet. There is to be an online TM this Sunday so it will be interesting to see how that works. However, if you are to have any sort of online presence for your communities, it might as well be in Glow where the group can be tailormade to suit either as just a document store or something more and it can be expanded as required.
I would furthermore suggest that if there is to be any idea of linking between different local authorities then a group should start at national level even if all its members are initially from one LA. The reason for this is that it is so much easier to bring colleagues in from other parts of the country than the hassle of linking them to authority level groups.
Thanks Bob,
I didn’t realise it would be difficult to knit this up further down the line.
To be honest, I think I’d rather keep it local at the minute. We’re trying to build this up from the ground up and a National Group wouldn’t be right just yet. Id also be worried as the term ‘learning community’ means lots of different things in different authorities. I know for example in South Lanarkshire it refers to their cluster of schools plus other services such as libraries etc. – very different from our small groups of up to eight teachers.
I appreciate the potential benefits of Glow, however EduBuzz can offer other features which Glow cannot. For that reason, I intend to leave the decision very much up to the teachers themselves. This is very much in line with our philosophy in East Lothian as demonstrated by David’s recent article:
http://agent4change.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=454:the-innovators-7-dave-gilmour&catid=90:the-innovators&Itemid=460
I read your article and the responses you recieved and I was impressed with your commitment and obvious knowledge. I am a Technical teacher working in South Lanarkshire. 5 years ago SLC made raising attainment within schools one of their priorities in education. In order to achieve their goal, with the help from Dylan Wiliam,an initiative was developed known as the Tapestry Group, perhaps you are familiar with this.Teachers from every school in SLC were invited to become part of this Group. As a member myself, I am part of an Area TLC. The information I gather at local level allows me to share with colleagues within my own TLC at school level.
I have been facillitating such a group for the last 4 years. My advice is as follows;
work with a maximum of 10 members of staff as this allows time for every one to have their say during meetings.
Work closely with the DHT who has responsibility for AiFL.If you need help or advice on setting up a group etc, this is where it will come from, so don’t think you have to go it alone.
I hold meetings at lunch time. People don’t want to stay behind after school.
I hold meetings every 6 weeks. This gives people time to try out ideas over a relatively short period of time and feed back their successes and failures to the group. This keeps people focussed. If meetings aren’t as frequent people tend to become apathetic.
Conscripts are a bad idea,I know from experience, only work with volunteers.
I pair teachers up at the beginning as learning partners. Between meetings each partner has to visit the other and observe each other in practice then feedback their observations with an emphasis on how to make it better.
Take it small steps at a time. I tell my group we are not trying to ‘eat the elephant in one bite’. Change one small thing at a time and put it into your teaching until it becomes ‘habit forming’ before moving onto something else otherwise all that happens is that teachers try something knew a few times, realise that it works before moving onto something else and eventually forgetting all about the first change they made. There is no rush here. I know I will spend the rest of my life as a teacher (already clocked up 26 years with 14 to go) trying to improve how I do things.
Try google searching Dylan Wiliams website for more info on this, especially the Tapestry Group.
I’ve just realised that I haven’t linked to this from here:
http://edubuzz.org/blogs/subjectlearningcommunities/
This is a little blog site we’re using to support the launch of Subject Learning Communities in East Lothian.
[...] teachers. Fearghal Kelly gives a much more comprehensive description of what constitutes a Subject Learning Community than I could ever manage, so I won’t try to describe them in detail, but I have stolen his [...]
[...] written before about the approach we decided to take, and you can check up on our progress [...]