There are so many devilish temptations when offered an open brief for an educational blog post in May 2016.  I could try to right some policy wrongs, perhaps by offering a critique of the hastily written and ill-informed White Paper. I could propose a more lucid and coherent approach for organising teacher training because, from where I am standing, it couldn’t get much more chaotic. I could lament the experiences of family and friends whose own children are exposed by the debacle that is this year’s SATs. Alternatively I could celebrate the good stuff. I could reflect on the contact I have had with people interested in our new Lecturer in Education posts, and how each conversation or email opens up another imagined future of what skills, interests and experiences each candidate could bring to our Newcastle University staff and offer our students.  I could share the annual irony of the wonderful weather breaking to coincide with the national season of intense exam revision. The list of potential topics is enough to create writer’s block. On this occasion my decision has been refined because unlike most other blogs I contribute to I do at least have a sense of the readership, so I am able to choose something to write about which I believe is highly relevant to you as school leaders; and in that context I have chosen to write about teachers’ professional learning. It may not be as obviously topical or as politically fraught as any of the possibilities above, but it has a perpetual resonance, and carries the allure of something that school leaders can conceptualise and act upon.

Having left secondary teaching to join the PGCE team at Newcastle University 16 years ago much of the school landscape I now experience feels like unfamiliar territory. My current role as the Head of Education and my family life mean I do not reside in the stereotypical ivory tower and am never more than a few footsteps away from the realities through the school gate.  In our brave new educational world there are certainly an ever expanding range of outcome measures and political ideals that are deemed to need the might of school management applied to them, and as a result there is a burgeoning of new leadership titles and roles.  Despite these changes there remains a constant, perhaps increasingly significant, leadership responsibility of supporting and enabling the professional learning of teachers.  As a university-based teacher educator it would not be unusual for school-based colleagues to assume that I mean professional learning opportunities offered by university provision and qualifications.  I do believe that PGCE, Masters and Doctoral courses offer unique spaces for new and established professional educators to learn about, reflect on and develop their work. Indeed I am humbled by the fact that our programmes continue to attract part-time students many of whom are full-time teachers and school leaders. However as a practitioner and researcher my interests in the last decade have often coalesced around professional learning in and for the workplace. It is that which I want to focus on.  This is also timely because one aspect of the white paper I am trying to believe will make a positive difference is the fact that ‘a new standard for teachers’ professional development.’ My hope (perhaps naïve) is that this will offer a genuine chance for the profession to reframe the opportunities for teacher learning. My fear is that this will simply be a vehicle for more off the shelf, commercially-led, training packages.

In my recently completed PhD I developed a ‘practice development-led model for individual professional learning and institutional growth’. The model itself represents an ideal, but is also a tool through which those responsible for teachers’ learning can reflect on their own workplace practices.   My assertion is that a core role of any Headteacher and senior leadership team is to ensure that their school becomes a productive learning organisation in which their staff have genuine and transformative learning opportunities. I have evidence that many professional learning opportunities can be derived from cycles of practice development, such as offered through structured coaching, lesson study and action enquiry.  The difficulty can be in ensuring that this learning then sustains positive change, that improved practice is embedded (not discarded for the next teaching fad), and that it accumulates into enriched conditions for further professional learning.  So in the spirit of the model here are some questions to ask yourself, your leadership teams and your staff.

Firstly think about how well teachers are supported to learn through practice development:

• Are both the vehicle for and objective of professional learning the development of educational practices?
• Does this offer a chance for teachers to deliberately focus on the details, characteristics and outcomes of practice through engagement in cycles of action such as coaching, lesson study or action enquiry?
• Is collaboration with others encouraged and capitalized on such that educational power can be derived from a genuine sense of solidarity?

Now consider whether your teachers are encouraged to develop democratic (rather than managerial) professionalism and whether their learning allows them to offer you a critical perspective (not the same as being a constant critic).

• To what extent is teachers’ professional learning through and for practice development based in articulated values and critical enquiry?
• Does it allows teachers to relate their practice to their values, or does it fall into the trap of expecting them to uncritically adopt new workplace procedures?

Finally think about how productively you are helping create opportunities through linking learning which goes on at both individual and organisational levels.

• How does your teachers’ learning improve the potential for institutional growth and have you fallen into the trap of assuming that this is automatic?
• How conscious is the integration of the individual’s growth with the school’s supporting infrastructure?
• Is the flow of professional learning, from foundations to outcomes, reciprocal and cumulative, in that as professional learning is generated and the conditions supporting it are enhanced more professional learning can be sustained; for wider and deeper impact on practice?

So my challenge to school leaders of the North East (and beyond) is to consider these questions in order to better gauge how successfully you are enabling desirable professional learning that impacts on the quality of practice and thus has positive repercussions on students’ learning outcomes and experiences.  Think about the attributes of your school as a workplace and whether they guarantee an environment in which teachers continue to learn.  And while you do that please remember that ‘training’ is only part of learning, and that not everything that has been learned can be ‘measured’, and sometimes being so busy monitoring our teachers stops us from recognising nuanced and sometimes unpredicted learning and practice development that is so wonderful we should be celebrating it.

Taken from Schools North East

Dr Rachel Lofthouse, Head of Education, Newcastle University. 

Follow @DrRLofthouse on Twitter!

The UK is a divided society and many current educational systems maintain inequality and rivalry. Intergroup tensions underpin international conflict. Instead of prioritising competition and achievement, should cooperation and understanding be at the heart of education?

Education as currently conceptualised and operationalised in the UK clearly doesn’t engage, include or provide meaningful educational opportunities for all young people.

We are a society that resolutely groups and classifies people. In relation to the current impact and outcomes of education, grouping and classification can be self-perpetuating and socially harmful.

Wilkinson and Pickett’s (2010) study showed that the size of the ‘gap’ between the wealth of the richest and poorest in society is strongly related to educational outcomes and social well-being, and low family income has been found to be causally related to children’s well-being and educational development (Cooper & Stewart, 2013).

The recent survey by CPAG (2015) estimated that 3.7 million children were living in poverty. It also happens that children eligible for free school meals are 4 times more likely to be excluded from school than those who pay for their meals. Excluding children already at risk because of poverty is adding insult to injury.

educational systems also mimic and perpetuate socio-economic stratifications

Whilst socio-economic disadvantage can be self-perpetuating, educational systems also mimic and perpetuate socio-economic stratifications. Thus, the ‘ability’ grouping of children in school is clearly of little advantage to any but disadvantages many, as well as creating groups that are hard to motivate and teach. Just labelling groups, can adversely affect teachers’ expectations (Gibbs & Elliott, 2015; Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968).

However, it is also important to consider the effects being put in a group. Tajfel (see Tajfel, 1982) showed how being arbitrarily placed in a group generated behaviours favouring in-group members. More recent studies have shown how beliefs about social groups, become essentialised and prejudicial. In schools this is becoming a major issue with respect to children’s behaviour. Guidance for schools (DfE & DoH, 2015) now locates problematic behaviour within the province of ‘mental health’. Thus teachers may more readily judge challenging behaviour as a sign of mental ill-health (and thereby not the responsibility of school staff) and young people become fearful of being labelled ‘mental’.

Whilst the studies of intergroup processes did not, for Tajfel, leave much scope for optimism, the future does not need to be bleak. Cooperative working can reduce conflict. In dialogic teaching, for example, the collaborative and critical interactions generated between teacher and students, and between students, can have profound positive social and educational effects (Mercer & Howe, 2012). Thus, if members of differing groups are encouraged and enabled to interact with each other greater mutual understanding and respect can follow. More than ever we need greater understanding and acceptance of difference within our society, between nations and toward those who migrate in fear of their lives.

Education fails if it does not engage and motivate learners and provide them with understanding and skills that enable them to contribute as creative social beings now and in the future. At the moment education systems are not fit for that purpose.

We should ask if we want educational systems to perpetuate social and economic inequalities. It is possible for schools to engender understanding and tolerance, include all children and enable them to learn together. Today education segregates and divides. It is clear we don’t need more inter-group antipathy. We could choose to have different purposes and outcomes.

References

Cooper, K., & Stewart, K. (2013). Does Money Affect Children’s Outcomes?: A Systematic Review: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

CPAG. (2015). Child poverty facts and figure.   Retrieved 13/01/2016, fromhttp://www.cpag.org.uk/child-poverty-facts-and-figures

DfE, & DoH. (2015). Special educational needs and disability code of practice: 0 to 25 years. London: Department for Education.

Gibbs, S., & Elliott, J. (2015). The differential effects of labelling: how do “dyslexia’ and “reading difficulties’ affect teachers’ beliefs. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 30(3), 323-337. doi: 10.1080/08856257.2015.1022999

Mercer, N., & Howe, C. (2012). Explaining the dialogic processes of teaching and learning: The value and potential of sociocultural theory. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 1(1), 12-21. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2012.03.001

Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom. The Urban Review, 3(1), 16-20. doi: 10.1007/BF02322211

Tajfel, H. (1982). Social identity and intergroup relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2010). The spirit level: why equality is better for everyone: Penguin UK.

Taken from BERA

Simon Gibbs is currently Reader in Educational Psychology in the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, Newcastle University. He has worked in education for more than 40 years starting as a maths teacher. He then retrained and worked as an Educational Psychologist in the NE of England. Since 2007 he has been Director of Training in Educational Psychology at Newcastle University. His research is preoccupied with the psychology of education and teachers’ beliefs in their efficacy. Prompted by increasing concerns about the ‘medicalisation of childhood’ and the faltering progress of inclusive education, he has most recently been conducting investigations into the effects of labels (such as ‘Dyslexia’ and ‘ADHD’) on teachers’ expectations. He is married and lives in North Yorkshire.

Let’s say you have the chance to design a University module on learning and teaching; which terms, pedagogues, theories would you include as part of the content? What would your ideal reading list look like? Would you focus on things like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, would you try to include some e-learning, or would you go as far as including anarcho pedagogy?

A few weeks ago, I attended a two-day Introduction to Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (ILTHE) workshop that was facilitated by Sarah Chesney. Throughout the two day event, I tweeted my thoughts, notes, and opinions using #ilthenu

With interactions like these, Sarah and I started a little joke: #PedagogyBingo was born!

After the workshop finished, Sarah and I stayed in touch on twitter, continued our joke for a bit, but then got serious after the following interaction occurred:

After this, I e-mailed Sarah my thoughts on the project and she responded, quite enthusiastically, that we should make this happen.

Together, we developed an action plan to figure out how we could go about crowdsourcing #PedagogyBingo, and now we need your help!

The concept

The idea we had was to crowdsource key terms that should be included in a perfect learning and teaching module at university. This will happen publically on twitter where (hopefully) lots of people will get involved to share ideas, theories, and resources with us and the rest of the world using #PedagogyBingo.

Benefits

This is not only a fun activity to do to get some insight into the traditional and novel pedagogies and theories out there, but it will hopefully also be beneficial to us and the larger education community on twitter. Some of the benefits of bringing together twitter experts on the topic include:

• Discovering new practitioners to follow and grow our own networks
• Discovering new resources and possibly new/emerging learning and teaching terms
• We will learn something new about Twitter and crowdsourcing

When the list is compiled and published it will hopefully be a useful resource for:

• Educational Developers who want to cross check their own key terms with the list
• Lecturers, tutors and professionals supporting student learning who want to informally develop their practice
• Applicants for HEA Fellowship who are assembling their claim for recognition
• Participants on ‘Learning and Teaching in HE’ courses
• Students studying Education at any level trying to get an overview of important terms, theories, and pedagogies

Taking part

Since this is a crowdsourced effort, this will only work if people take part!

Step 1: Tweet, tweet, tweet about your thoughts and ideas, share theories and resources, and don’t forget to use #PedagogyBingo.

Step 2: ‘Like’ and ‘Retweet’ any tweets that you see in the hashtag. Reply to tweets that you want to respond to and/or add any resources you have on the specific idea expressed in the tweet.

Sarah and I will collate a list of interesting resources, names, theories and share our results in a number of places (primarily over at flourishlearning.co.uk though). We aim to start collating the responses in the week beginning the 10th of April, so there’s lots of time for you to get involved!

(We’re thinking about what to do with this list beyond simply collecting and collating it – there are thoughts and conversations about creating an app, interactive website, or even trying this out in a course at some point!)

Both Sarah and I are really excited about this project, so please help us out in this hopefully valuable and fun activity.

Cheers,

Angelika x

Sarah Chesney is a guest tutor for Newcastle University’s Staff Development Unit. She is one of the ILTHE workshop facilitators and a tutor for CASAP.

Angelika Strohmayer is a PhD student interested in digital technologies, informal critical pedagogy, and participatory research methods and methodologies. She is registered in ECLS but is based in Open Lab, working on various projects related to homelessness, sex work, and informal peer sharing for learning and support. 

This blog is a good news story in terms of teacher collaboration from The Hermitage Academy, a North-East Teaching School. The Academy has deliberately and steadily built a culture of teacher collaboration. It is not perfect, but it is tangible. In this blog we focus on the contribution of teacher coaching to the collaborative culture. At Hermitage teacher peer-coaching is in its third year with a coaching development programme running to support each cohort of new coaches and coachees. All participants are volunteers and each coaching partnership involves teachers working across subjects. Our roles (the blog authors, a university-based educational researcher and a senior leader in the school) are to design and facilitate the coaching development programme, to ensure coaching becomes operational in the school and to create meaningful opportunities for formative evaluation and coaching development. Most recently this has been achieved through an interim review to which all current participants contributed. It is this evidence that we draw upon to suggest some of the reasons for the successes so far.

Coaching at Hermitage seems to be a ‘feel good’ activity, and this is not to be sniffed at. Coaching has been established in such a way that it builds on and further enhances the trust that exists between colleagues. This was highlighted by the teachers as a note-worthy characteristic. Megan Tschannen-Moran makes a strong case for trust as critical for building healthy relationships and positive school climates, and suggests that between teachers this can evolve from a stance of ‘empathy and inquiry’. Coaching conversations at Hermitage have been framed around this stance – participants are asked to engage in non-judgemental professional dialogue and appreciate that this may be different from many other episodes of observation and feedback. In their review the teachers stated that they were “not frightened to make mistakes” are willingly “more experimental” and work in a “problem-solving mode, with a focus on teaching and learning and trying to do what is best for the students”.

The coaching relationships produced a growing collective sense of where expertise and areas of interest resided in the staff

In busy school environments it is easy to find reasons not to engage in something new or voluntary, so how coaching feels matters as without enjoyment resistance would develop. In their review teachers reported enjoying building relationships through coaching, getting to know people in other departments and knowing more about their work. Coaches stated that they felt good about having learned more about teaching and learning by acting as a coach and were taking this learning into their own practice. The coaching relationships produced a growing collective sense of where expertise and areas of interest resided in the staff. This is reported as having spin-off benefits, with new and productive collaborations in teaching and learning emerging organically.

At even this basic level it could be said that coaching is contributing to teacher agency. Mark Priestley has written about this in his BERA blog post, reminding us that a focus on the individual capacity of teachers might overlook the significance of the ‘social context for teachers’ professional work’. The teachers were keen to extend this further, by actively bringing coaching participants together more often as a group to share what was being learned and developed in practice. In 2015 The Sutton Trust produced a report called ‘Developing Teachers; Improving professional development for teachers’. One of their conclusions was the significance of collaboration at two levels – between schools in a school-led self-improving system, and also between individual teachers engaging in professional learning activities. Recent research into teachers’ experiences of collaboration(Lofthouse and Thomas, 2015) reveals why collaboration might be so valuable. Collaboration for the development of their teaching practices allowed teachers and student teachers to engage in informed decision-making and to construct a shared understanding of the nature of desired learning outcomes for students and how these might be achieved in their own contexts.

As evidenced in an earlier BERA blog coaching does not always live up to its promise, but so far Hermitage seem to resolving tensions that can exist in managerial systems. In our review we considered the extent to which the practice was supported by enablers for effective professional conversations as described by Helen Timperley. She described the importance of resources, processes, knowledge, relationships and culture in enabling teachers to ‘examine the effectiveness of their practice and be committed to appropriate changes for improvement’. This might best be summed up by a group in our review who stated that the vision for coaching at the school was to create a “collaborative problem-solving culture to enable all teachers and pupils to be successful”.

Taken from BERA

Recently the UK Government’s Education Select Committee opened an inquiry into the purpose and quality of education in England. Evidence was invited and all 167 written contributions are now published on their website. This blog captures some of the evidence that I submitted.  My first comment was that it is not possible to identify a single purpose of education, as education has many desired outcomes. So of course, the question is a complex one, but as such it is deserving of an inquiry.

Earlier this year I used the same question as part of a Secondary PGCE lecture and the post-it notes that were sent to the front of the room and displayed using the visualiser illustrated the diversity of student teachers’ responses.  When I responded to the select committee I wanted to acknowledge this complexity but also highlight that in my opinion there should be no purpose of education which in itself undermines a determination that education creates positive changes for social justice.  I wanted to stress this because it is so much more than an ideal. It matters for individual pupils and students, their families, their communities and the wider society (national and international).

I believe that social justice through good education means that all children and young people should be able to become enthusiastic and capable learners and that they should experience success based on a curriculum which challenges them but also engages them.  As a parent and educator I want children and young people to develop healthy and affirming relationships with peers and adults that they encounter through education, which means that they should be treated with tolerance, understanding and respect and learn why they should offer the same for others.

Demonstrating learning matters so I would expect that all young people should be able to gain qualifications which are multi-faceted and recognised for their value by employers, education providers and society.  However there is growing evidence of the physical, mental and emotional strain being placed on many students by our current examination systems and the repercussions at school level, so I would also emphasis that children and young people should be taught, learn and assessed in a way that is not detrimental to their mental or physical health.

Fairness matters to children and young people and it is not sufficient to argue that ‘life’s not fair’ when we are considering their experiences and their life chances.  I would hope that all children and young people could state that their education was ‘fair’, that their achievements were deserved and their ability to make their way in life had not been hampered by injustice in their educational offer or experience.  As a response to a fair education it is reasonable that all children and young people should be enabled to make a positive contribution to society and the resources it depends on (environment, economy, community) before they have left formal education in order to develop the traits and skills which will help them to continue to do so into their futures.

One of the roles of universities, through their research, teaching and engagement is, in my opinion, to support the development of education systems which deliberately and continually adapt to ensure social justice.  In the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences we have projects, programmes, colleagues and students who are part of this contribution. The spaces, dialogues and activities that result may not change the world alone, but they do help us to make a difference.

A blog by Dr Rachel Lofthouse