[MUSIC] Welcome to Course 7, Being a Professional. This is week 5, being part of a professional learning community. And lecture 1 is on the power of professional learning. A few things we need to say at the outset. The first is that student learning is heavily dependent upon teacher learning. As we've mentioned a number of times, the teacher is the biggest in-school influence on student achievement. Teachers' professional learning has been found to have a large effect size in prospective student learning. Hattie provides an effect size of .62, which is in the large category. Again, to remind us also what we're here for, it's about student learning and development. [MUSIC] Now the professional learning that teachers undertake needs to have a strong foundation in evidence about what works in teaching. We need to be confident. The techniques that we're going to adopt through our professional learning have been found to be effective. Let's have a look at two broad types of teacher learning. What we could call traditional, and some more emerging approaches, which have also been found to be effective. The traditional type of teacher learning is almost linear. In that we begin with our formal pre-service training, we do some on the job learning and if we're lucky we have colleagues to support us in that but if not we may be left to our own devices. Some of us may belong to professional associations, for example Secondary English Teachers Associations, Maths Teachers Associations. They can be important ways of keeping our professional learning up to date. We might do some informal self-directed learning. I need to know more about ICT. I need to know more about how to teach literacy for example. We'll do that often at our own initiation. We might have formal inservice programs and professional learning provided by employers, where we can attend and keep our professional learning up to date. And finally we may decide to enroll in formal post graduate study to learn more about teaching or a particular aspect of teaching. That sort of pattern is experienced by most teachers today. However, there are some alternative approaches which are quite exciting in terms of how they deliver enhanced teacher effectiveness and student learning. Action research has been around for some decades. It basically consists of teachers often with colleagues researching aspects of their practice, and also measuring the impact of some of the things they may attempt to do in schools, such as introducing new techniques or programs. Action learning is a variation on action research and is more recent. Its focus is more on the professional learning that can occur from teachers working collaboratively on issues of importance to them in their school. And I'll talk more about action learning as a particular process a bit later on. Rather than leaving teachers' learning to chance formal mentors may be appointed. This is someone who's more experienced, possibly more knowledgeable. This person may not be our supervisor, but can act as a sort of coach or critical friend. Increasingly we're seeing mentors being used with both beginning teachers. But also with people such as principals who are just beginning in the role. We've mentioned the use of professional standards at various levels and the issue of teacher certification. This can also be a stimulus and a framework for professional learning. Professional learning modules are something like you're experiencing at the moment. These are not formal university courses as such but are modules or courses designed to help teachers upskill themselves in various ways. They may be short courses, they may be online they may lead to credit for university course or they may not. Learning communities is a concept about people learning together and adding to the overall store of knowledge of a particular organization, corporate knowledge if you like, of an organization like a school. We're going to look at learning communities a little bit later on. Communities of practice are about groups of individuals working together on particular tasks or particular priorities. Not just within the individual organization, but often across organizations. So, we may see, for example, teachers in different schools working together. We may even see teachers working with other groups of professionals. We may see a school linked with an overseas school. These are all examples of communities of practice, that is professionals working and learning together. I've provided a slide for you looking at some of the trends in teacher learning that might be useful. On the left hand side are the more traditional approaches, and on the right hand side are some of the more emerging approaches which we've found to be quite effective. Without going through all of these, traditional approaches to teacher learning have been in many cases centralised, seen as a responsibility of a system. One size fits all, in other words, one program for everybody. The learning's been fairly passive. The expert has come in, maybe, or we've gone away to a session where an expert has told us what we should be doing. The emphasis is more on individual learning. Often theory based. And it's about learning by seeing and hearing. There's also an emphasis more on using research that other people have actually conducted. And often the effect is hopefully a fairly broad one. On the right hand side, however, we see some of the emerging approaches to teachers professional learning that are quite effective. For example, decentralizing learning, and placing it in the school is quite common. Learning being seen as an individual and, increasingly, a collective responsibility. As a professional I have a responsibility to keep learning. With my colleagues we will lead together. But learning is often tailored to a particular issue or problem of importance to us and is contextualised. So, what does it mean to address the issue of literacy in our particular school context? Here we're more concerned with outcomes and the learning is more interactive. Instead of the external expert, we may have the external partner who is more a guide than someone telling us what to do. Often rather than the learning being theory based, that is, learning more about something, it's problem based. How can we, for example, engage our lower ability mathematics students in the early years of high school? Often, this learning is relation, it's about changing what people know, what they can do, even what they think in some cases. Often there's an action learning focus. In other words, let's work together on a problem of importance to us and our school. Rather than let's just learn more about something. Instead of using research, then, the focus is more about doing research, teachers as researchers. Teachers researching their practice. Measuring the impact of what they do. And finally, rather than a broad focus, our focus is very much about student learning. And importantly today, what evidence do we have that students have actually learned or developed as a result of our learning and what we've done in school. I've provided for you an example of a particular approach to professional learning, where teachers work together in cycles of inquiry. This comes from the work of Helen Timperley from New Zealand, and has been widely adopted. There are various examples for you of these cycles of inquiry, and how they might operate. I'll encourage you in conjunction with your peers, your colleagues, your fellow teachers, to examine these particular approaches and to see whether they've got some relevance for you. I might also encourage you at this point, to think about the various aspects of professional learning we've been talking about in this lecture. And the degree to which they apply to you and your school. How do teachers mainly learn in your school? How do you determine what teachers need to learn in your school? How do you go about it? Do you rely on external experts, do you rely on going away to courses? Do you rely on working together within your school to solve problems in an action learning type approach? I've also provided you with several examples of further reading in the area of teachers professional learning that may well be useful. In our next session, we're going to look at the issue of professional learning communities in education, and how they can operate effectively to improve teaching and improve learning. [MUSIC]
