Tag Archive for professionalism

Professional Development and Professional Learning

07/05/2011 cfe, learning communities, MEd, Reading 2 comments

I was at Uni this afternoon for the final session of my penultimate MEd module – and the last CTeach module for a while!

At one point we were having a particularly interesting conversation so I thought I’d put up a wee tweet:


Discussing the difference between professional development and professional learning #MEd #CTeach
07/05/2011 2:18 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite
@fkelly
Fearghal Kelly

Which generated an interesting reply…


@ I thought about that for 5mins and tied my brain in a knot.Must be cyclical relationship no?Hope you will blog your answer later :)
07/05/2011 2:28 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@dotcoe
Dorothy Coe

Unfortunately I don’t have time to do a full blog post, but I couldn’t ignore such a request!

We were discussing this in the context of leading our collaborative professional enquiry and the need to try to encourage our colleagues not to view participation as a passive CPD opportunity, but rather an opportunity for them to actively develop their own learning. Loughran’s (2010) definitions were really useful to explain a possible difference in the two phrases:

Professional Development has typically been understood as the more traditional approach to in-service that teachers often experience when they are asked to implement a new curriculum or some other policy initiative. In many cases, the waves of change that regularly flow over the profession generally involve some form of up-skilling in relation to the new things that we are expected to do or to deliver. Therefore, traditional professional development is often linked to the implementation of some form of educational change by doing something to teachers, that is, telling us about the change and expecting it to then be carried out. In this way mandated changes are presented, we are trained in those changes in terms of technical requirements (sometimes as simple as re-labeling existing curriculum and practice) and then we are expected to implement those changes. It is a top-down approach and it functions in a similar way throughout the education system whether it be in the form of policy initiatives from the central education bureaucracy or at local school level from the principal’s office.

And professional learning…

Professional learning operates in a different way. Professional learning assumes that we have some commitment to the change(s) – that the change might be driven, or developed and refined, by us. In essence, professional learning works on the bases that change is a result of work with, and/or by, teachers. Further to this, professional learning also carries an expectation that we are able to bring our expert judgement to bear on how change might best be implemented in our own context and practice. Therefore, professional learning is more about the learning that occurs through the process and how that learning is then able to be applied in our practice. Involvement in professional learning is therefore more likely to be voluntary, and the subsequent learning is personal and appropriately shaped and directed by each of us as individuals.

What do you think Dorothy?

Second thoughts

27/03/2011 active learning, assessment, cfe, change, Featured, MEd, reflection No comments

In a recent post I outlined my proposal for the final part of my MEd. In it I provided a rationale for my intention to involve pupils in planning learning in order to increase their engagement and described the steps I intended to carry out to achieve this. However, as I’ve mentioned – I’ll be going to a new school pretty soon. So, should I continue with my plans?

My initial thought was that I would…and the school was very supportive of this, but that Cramlington visit has really begun to change my mind. The school is really going for implementing the accelerated learning cycle and learn2learn and I’ve become concerned that whilst my proposal is complimentary to these developments, it is coming from a different angle and could well become a bit of a ‘bolt-on’ for anyone I managed to convince to become involved.

So, what am I going to do? I’ve decided that I need to shift the emphasis of the intervention to be much more aligned to the direction of the school and the needs (and workload) of the staff. So I’m considering instead coming from the perspective of evaluating the impact of the learning cycle on learning. This could be in terms of knowledge, understanding and skills development, but also in terms of pupil involvement and engagement.

I’m even finding some really useful literature on this, such as Geoff Petty, Black et. al. and Paul Rose. Through this reading I’m becoming increasingly convinced that my intervention could end up becoming much enhanced by this change by adding a much greater depth to the learning process, and therefore the enquiry.

Having said all that, it is pretty daunting to make such a fundamental change after writing and submitting a 5000 word proposal…but I have to respond to the needs of my new school…

Writing critically

20/03/2011 Featured, MEd, reflection One comment

As always on my MEd, we’re being encouraged to both think, and also write, critically. We spent a lot of time on this on our previous module and I feel that I’m making progress with this, but I’m nowhere near being confident as yet – as demonstrated by yesterday afternoon…

There are two primary aspects to the work I am doing towards completing my MEd. One is surrounding evaluating the impact of involving pupils in planning learning in terms of their engagement in lessons. On this side I feel I have made significant progress in my ability to write. My ideas are getting to the point where they are informed by research and I even manage to do so critically occasionally.

Yesterday we were focusing on the other side of the work, which addresses working collaboratively. When writing about working with others I find that I am still some way short of where I’d like to be. To try to simplify the steps I need to take to make my writing more sophisticated I’ve devised a three part scale:

  1. Appending references: This is what a lot of my writing on collaboration is like at present. This involves writing what you’ve done or are planning to do, and then dropping in a reference which is vaguely related at the end.
  2. Literature informed: I have managed to do this occassionally. This is where I start with the reference and use this to plan and explain what it is I’m doing rather than tagging it on afterwards.
  3. Critically informed: I’ve not made it here yet. I imagine this is where you start as above but you don’t simply then follow on to explaining the positive link between the literature and your actions. You include a critique of the literature, outlining the limitations and explain why you’re still using this to inform your work – perhaps bringing in further literature to support your point.

I’m not sure if this is correct or not, but I think if I can move my writing up this scale then I’m likely to be more successful. It then dawned on me however, that this is not actually about the writing. It’s about the doing. The real point is to actually do the reading critically before planning what to do with others and then evaluate the outcomes against this reading. If I can embody this approach, then the writing will naturally fall into place. This is what I’ve begun to do with the other side of the work, and I need to bring this into the more intuitive aspect of the enquiry also – collaborating with others…

Cramlington

17/03/2011 active learning, cfe, change, secondment 19 comments

Ok, so I’ve got some news.

As you’ll probably be aware, I am currently seconded from my post as a Biology Teacher to work as a CfE Development Officer for East Lothian Council. Well, this secondment was coming to an end and I decided that I would like to take on a new challenge and move to a new school. So I applied for a teaching post at Preston Lodge High School and was successful!

There’s more. I then applied for the Acting PT post in the same department and was successful once again…so I’ll be moving on to this new role in the relatively near future!

An exciting aspect of this move is that my new school are beginning the process of working with Cramlington Learning Village to implement a Learn to Learn programme at Preston Lodge. As a result of this involvement, I was lucky enough to spend the day at Cramlington yesterday. What an impressive place.

About twelve years ago, the staff at Cramlington were inspired to implement an accelerated learning cycle into their planning, and therefore their lessons. Gradually over time, this process has led them to develop their current teaching and learning model. This in turn has resulted in them changing the layout of their classrooms, the length of their periods, the structure of their week, the design of their buildings, the names of their buildings, the names of the courses students study, the school bell, how they plan, how they teach…and ultimately how students learn.

The school itself is mind blowing – including a botanic gardensesque biome, recording studios, phenomenal science labs, amazing VLE – but the really impressive outcome of their journey is the young people themselves. We had a number of opportunities to discuss with a range of young people – primarily year 7s – and their confidence, maturity, understanding and engagement was evidence enough for me that their approach works.

There are exciting, and challenging, times ahead – and Cramlington has provided inspiration enough for the journey to begin…

TED-ED Brain Trust

09/03/2011 change One comment

It surprises me how many teachers still haven’t heard of TED. Some of the stuff on there is amazing, such as Ken Robinson on creativity (and the animated version), Dan Meyer on maths teaching, Clifford Stoll on evertything, Adora Svitak on Learner Voice and so on…

I think part of the problem has been that there has been no distinct education category on the site, and so these buried gems tend to emerge through twitter. Well, not for much longer as TED are launching the TED-ED Brain Trust:

Click here to sign up and find out more…

What is knowledge?

22/02/2011 change, Featured, reflection, science One comment

Academics often have a real knack for hurting your head. They can take a word that you use every day and turn it inside out, upside down and really challenge some of the most fundamental assumptions. I had one of these very experiences this week at the first of the University of Stirling‘s ESRC Seminar Series entitled ‘Curriculum for the 21st Century’. The focus for seminar one was ‘Knowledge and the Curriculum‘ and the word which had some serious analysis was knowledge. It’s a word we use a lot in our profession, but what do we mean by it? How we view this word can have a massive influence on our approach to curriculum.

Although Michael Young couldn’t make the seminar due to illness, we were treated to presentations from Mark Priestley, Gert Biesta and Laura Colucci-Gray on this topic followed by opportunities to question each of them in small groups. All of the presentations and discussions were very stimulating, but it was Professor Biesta who really got my brain working, as demonstrated by the following tweet:

Gert’s presentation was heavily influenced by the work of Dewey and I am clearly going to fail to summarise what he was saying here. So I’m not really going to try to do that. I’m instead trying to summarise what I took from his presentation. During his presentation I had four inter-related recent thoughts swimming through my mind…

  1. Mark concluded his presentation by pointing out that although school subjects were derived from the disciplines, they were not in themselves disciplines as such…
  2. This then got me thinking about a post I wrote once on teaching science…
  3. This in turn reminded me of another post I wrote on teaching doubt…
  4. This then linked to something which occurred on Sunday at an SQA CfE QDT [acronym triple point score!] meeting when a teacher suggested that we needed to include the definition of species into the National 5 Biology content to general approval in the room – except from one member. He represents a University and asked to be informed exactly what the definition of a species is once we’d worked this out [if you're not a biologist, have a look at this].

Gert was using pragmatism to resolve the objectivism vs relativism debate – which focuses on the existence of knowledge as either fixed truth, or subjective to each individual. This notion of objectivism stems from a philosophical position that the mind is immaterial so cannot therefore ever contain the material world – there will always be a gap between the two. Apparently Dewey stated that this is the wrong starting point for the discussion. The mind and world are not separate. We interact with the world and change it. At its most fundamental, this could be exemplified by breathing – but extends to knowledge also.

From this starting point, Gert led us to a point whereby that it was ok for all knowledge to be socially constructed and subjective and any gap between knowledge and truth is temporal – between current actions and future consequences. The only problem arises is when we have to work with others and we all have our own subjective knowledge. In order to get round this, we develop an inter-subjective, shared, coordinated world.

So what does all this mean for education? Gert stated that as a result of these ideas, the key process for learning is experiences, or transactions. It’s only by doing and undergoing can we develop our understanding of the world. I think that it’s also clear here that even though we can view knowledge as inter-subjective, this does not decrease its value. Curriculum can still include knowledge, and in fact must, if future generations are going to be part of this shared understanding of the world.

It does however mean that we need to constantly remind ourselves that we are not imparting truths, but sharing our subjective understanding of the world. We need therefore to provide learners with the opportunity to learn the limitations of our models and encourage them to question – which relates back to my teaching doubt post.

This then caused me to reflect on my own understandings of knowledge. Whilst I was at school I accepted knowledge as truths and did my best to regurgitate these on the lines and in the boxes provided to me in large silent halls. By the time I finished my degree however I realised that there was no such thing as proof and that we were all just slowly collaboratively constructing best fit models to explain the world, some of which we all agreed upon and others less so.

Somehow however after eight years of teaching I’ve somehow reached the point where it seems acceptable to state that students need to know what the definition of a species is – even though ten years ago I would’ve strongly questioned this. This in turn leads me back to the difference between school subjects and the disciplines.

It feels as though I should now be reaching for some sort of conclusion to this blog post, but I’m not sure what the conclusion is quite at this point. I think I know what this means for my own practice as a teacher, but what impact this should or might have on the curriculum is another question…?

ACTS Winter Conference 2011

16/02/2011 acts, cfe, change, MEd, reflection One comment

The timing of this year’s ACTS Winter Conference was very interesting. Given the recent publication of the Donaldson Report, the ongoing negotiations of the SNCT and the launch of the McCormac review there is a lot for Chartered Teachers, and aspiring Chartered Teachers such as myself, to talk about. The ACTS committee had done very well indeed to arrange for Graham Donaldson himself to keynote the conference as well as the ever inspiring (real) David Cameron. I also attended Frank Crawford’s excellent workshop on managing change.

Whilst most of the messages from the day were inspiring and encouraging for someone like myself who is working hard on the route to Chartered Teacher Status, it was frustrating that despite all of these positive messages there is an ever looming gloomy backdrop to the future of the programme. It is clear from the conference that there is a consensus that the attributes outlined in the standard for Chartered Teacher are the right ones for the future of Scotland’s (and indeed the world’s) teaching profession. There was also a common theme of these attributes needing to be espoused by the entire profession, not just a minority who are financially rewarded for doing so. I understand and share this point of view. The big question however for me is, how do we get there?

Could we get there by growing on the successes of the Chartered Teacher programme and developing it for the future? Could McCormac work with the GTCS, Universities and ACTS to develop a long-term programme for transition to this ideal? Could we capture the enhanced capacity of those teachers and lecturers who have undertaken and led the programmes and use them to help spread this enhanced professionalism until it is no longer seen as enhanced?

Or shall we stop those who want to become enhanced practitioners from getting involved? Shall we prevent those who have already invested significant portions of their own time and money from completing what they’ve started? Shall we remove the goodwill and enthusiasm from those who were willing to be pioneers in this laudable movement? Shall we strip out the growing capacity in the schools and the Universities to support the development of a 21st Century teaching profession for Scotland? Shall we limit the professional development of today’s teachers to the detriment of today’s, as well as tomorrow’s, learners?

Unfortunately it would appear that we’ve opted for the latter…

Some thoughts on formative assessment

30/01/2011 active learning, assessment, cfe, change, Featured, learning communities, reflection 2 comments

Are your traffic lights doing anything? What happens after your two stars and a wish? Do your pupils listen to their peers?

For some time now I’ve been concerned by the frequent utterance of the phrase “AifL is embedded”. There is often a perception that schools and teachers did all that work sharing formative assessment techniques as part of the AifL programme, and now we’re onto CfE so all is fine. I’ve often struggled to articulate my concerns with this point of view…but I’m clear that I have not fully embedded all aspects of the AifL triangle into my practice and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. I’ve also demonstrated in the past that BtC5 raises the bar in terms of expectations of pupil involvement in assessment.

A couple of things recently have really helped clarify my thoughts on this. Firstly, I’m very lucky to be working with Myra Young to develop some Assessment & Moderation Circles with Secondary Teachers in East Lothian. She has a great way of describing the difference between formative assessment and formative assessment techniques. For example, if your pupils peer assess each others work with traffic lights then while this has the potential to be formative it only becomes formative if the recipient of the feedback does something with it. They need to make a change and learn from it. Otherwise you have a multicoloured piece of peer summative assessment. Likewise, if you give the pupils a prelim examination and then provide an opportunity to reflect on this and improve as a result – then this is formative assessment.

I think perhaps we have too often allowed the techniques to become synonymous with ‘formative assessment’ and we’ve forgotten that doing the techniques isn’t enough – the pupils need to learn from them.

This weekend, I’ve also discovered a fantastic Research Briefing from the TLRP programme which addresses this issue also. In it they state:

Assessment for Learning helps teachers promote learning how to learn in ways which are in line with their own values, and reduces excessive performance orientation. But it is difficult to shift from reliance on specific techniques to practices based on deep principles.

Advice on Assessment for Learning techniques is useful to teachers in the short term. But progressive professional development requires teachers to re-evaluate their beliefs about learning, the way they structure tasks, and the nature of their classroom roles and relationships.

From TLRP RB17: Learning how to learn – in classrooms, schools and networks

That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to say. AifL provided many of us with the techniques, but CfE is asking us to take the next step to deeper principles. How do we do this? The Research Briefing suggests:

Classroom-focused inquiry by teachers is a key condition for promoting learner autonomy.

Sound familiar?

On Reading

09/01/2011 cfe, change, Reading, reflection One comment

One of the greatest impacts my Chartered Teacher/MEd journey has had on me so far has been my approach to reading. Before starting on this process I rarely read anything to do with my professional life. If I did, it was much more likely to be biological than to do with teaching and learning. However, the MEd has opened my mind to the vast array of texts available which can really challenge thinking and inform practice. I surprised myself by continuing to read during the year I had out from the MEd programme – this to me demonstrated a sustained impact.

However, I have recently had to reconsider just how embedded my new approach to reading really is in my practice. I was lucky enough to get a meeting with Mark Priestley just before the holidays and we naturally got to talking about the Secondary curricular models which are developing as a result of Curriculum for Excellence. I have spent quite some time on this issue in my current role and so felt I was able to contribute to just such a discussion reasonably well. Mark stopped me short though with a very simple question…he asked my if I’d read much on this.

I hadn’t. And even worse, I hadn’t even considered it. It would appear that while I have got into the habit of reading around learning and teaching, this hasn’t yet extended much beyond this. He made a couple of suggestions so I went straight to the library to get hold of what I could. One of his suggestions which I was able to borrow was “The Curriculum” by A.V. Kelly. I’ve made little progress through this over the holidays, but what I have read so far makes a lot of sense in the context of Curriculum for Excellence.

One quote in particular which leapt out at me was:

the teachers have a ‘make or break’ role in any curriculum innovation. Teachers have been known to sabotage attempts at change; certainly it is clear that such attempts can succeed only when the teachers concerned are committed to them and, especially, when they understand, as well as accept, their underlying principles.

To what extent has this been achieved with Curriculum for Excellence so far?

What’s in a name?

14/12/2010 cfe, change, MEd, reflection One comment

I’ve finally submitted my most recent MEd assignment, which means I can try to get back up to speed with my blog. Just in case you missed it, the assignment was a proposal for a collaborative professional enquiry which I’ll undertake with some colleagues in my school early next session. I’ve chosen to try to further develop the idea of involving pupils in planning learning in order improve learner engagement, and ultimately their learning.

Obviously, as part of the proposal I had to provide a rationale for the enquiry including a literature review. In my searching I discovered lots of books and journals supporting this approach – much more so than the last time I tried to do this for this area. This is clearly a hot topic just now. I’ve already mentioned the excellent book by Chris Watkins which I came across in the library which is a must read if you’re at all interested in this pedagogy.

However, what has shocked me is that since searching so extensively I’ve come across two amazing blogs in this field which didn’t come up in my searches. The first was Shelley Wright’s blog sharing the fantastic work she has been doing with her biology classes. And then I stumbled upon Darren Mead’s inspiring Sharing Pedagogical Purposes blog. Both of these appeared at random on twitter.

What I’ve been thinking since is that part of the problem for those of us who are interested in these approaches is that we don’t yet have a common language to describe what it is we’re trying to achieve. Is this an extension of AifL, or are we creating “Classrooms as Learning Communities”, or maybe we are “Sharing Pedagogical Purposes”. Some of the other terms floating around here include “involving”, “engaging”, “metacognition”, “learn to learn”, “inquiry”, “personalisation”…

For the purposes of what we’re trying to do in our classrooms it doesn’t really matter what we call it, but now that we’re trying to share our experiences I’m finding the lack of a common language is hindering our ability to network as effectively as we might.

Having said all that though, this is a new, messy and complex business – which is exciting – and I’m sure we’ll get there…

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