Tag: Professional Development

Checked into
A recent staff seminar day ended with a presentation by Dr. Adam Fraser. Here are my notes.

Dr. Adam Fraser. is involved in work around topic of wellbeing.

Dr Adam Fraser is a peak performance researcher who helps people strive to achieve better performance in everything they do. In his time he has worked with elite athletes and sporting teams, special forces soldiers and business leaders.

Source: About Research Based Wellbeing Keynote Speaker — Dr Adam Fraser

In regards to education, he has developed The Flourish Movement program:

The Flourish Movement program, which began in 2016, is an internationally award-winning program, designed with and for school leaders. Driven by data and grounded in research, Flourish offers practical strategies aimed at helping school leaders develop sustainable leadership practices by improving both their effectiveness and overall wellbeing.

Source: The Flourish Movement™

The focus of the program is to:

  • Build recovery
  • Prevent burnout
  • Manage emotions
  • Improve leadership and culture

Through his work he has found that he gets different results based on methodology. In particular, his work often focuses on action research. For example, rather than getting participants to complete a single survey capturing a single point in time, he gets them to complete a ten day survey.

With a lot of change occurring at the moment, his particular focus was on disruption and how we can be manage this. After reflecting on what we thought were our biggest challenges at the moment (missing functionality? clean data?) he shared end-of-life research which suggests that at the end of their life, we regret not being more courageous. Associated with this, the things that we are proud of (excluding raising children) is often based on the hardest thing we’ve done.

Extending on from the ‘hardest thing’, he explains that ‘happiness’ is a challenge just outside our reach, it is learning something new, where we have to grow and evolve to achieve it. The opposite of ‘happiness’ is chronic boredom. Bored employees are dangerous! In the end, growth comes from those who can sit with the discomfort. Often sitting with such discomfort comes from culture.

For Fraser, culture is “how we do stuff around here.” He the example of George Mohler’s work around predicting crime and the problem associated with cultural bias of police officers to elaborate on this ‘stuff’. At the heart of it, our behaviour and mood are contagious. The question is whether our mood worth catching? (According to Fraser, the poorest work habit is contempt and lack of respect. We need to be very careful of this.) Small behaviours lead to big outcomes. To demonstrate this, Fraser argued that one of the biggest developments in medicine was nurses being able to question doctors.

As an extension of this, Fraser argued that there is no such thing as a trivial behavior. He used a survey of American schools in which the most common item to be raised in staff meetings were the dirty cups left in the sink as lack of respect and humility. Another example was two small actions that Craig Bellamy made that has changed the culture at Melbourne Storm, that is, to socialise with/as a family and get a job in the off-season.

Like many players before them, 13 of our new boys ventured into the world of full-time, labour-intensive work alongside their pre-season training duties as a part of the New Recruit Work Program.

Started 18-years ago by our very own head coach, Craig Bellamy, the program sees new Storm recruits – regardless of reputation or experience – take on two 40-hour work weeks.

The goal? Teach them about hard-work and gratitude.

Source: Gratitude, Humility & Hard Work – Our Work Program by Melbourne Storm

Every person impacts culture.

One of the problem, Fraser stated, with culture as “the way we do things around here” is that it works like an immune system. When new people and ideas come in from the outside and try to change things, the system fights them off. The only way to change culture is to get a ground swell. Too often their is a lack of alignment between behaviour and values. The danger is trivial things that go unquestioned or unnoticed can often set things back. We will forgive a lot, but what we do not forgive is a lack of alignment, that is where trust dies.

Associated with our behaviours is the challenge of our emotions. We have a big brain hardwired towards pessimism. In addition to the positive and negative ripples that we create, we need to consider how we respond. Fraser referred to Shelly Gable’s four responses to good news to explain this.

Let’s imagine you have just told a colleague that you’ve been promoted. Here are Gable’s four possible responses:

  1. Active-constructive: the responder is enthusiastic, interested and supportive. They might say, “That’s brilliant news! I’m so pleased for you. Can I help you prepare?”
  2. Passive-constructive: they seem positive but their response is muted and with no enquiry. They say, “That’s nice,” with no real interest or enthusiasm.
  3. Active-destructive: in this scenario, they energetically belittle or reinterpret your good news, focusing on any negative implications. They might say, “Seriously? It looks like more work for not much money, and the people there are boring. It doesn’t sound that great to me.”
  4. Passive-destructive: they barely acknowledge your announcement or changes the subject. A typical response might be, “I see. Anyway, guess who I saw on my way in?”

Source: Gable’s Four Responses to Good News by Mind Tools

The question that we were left with is what small things we are going to do to help support change?

Replied to Loosening the Shackles: Empowering Growth and Innovation (andreastringer.blogspot.com)

After the demanding requirements of finishing my doctoral thesis, the mere thought of delving into another scholarly endeavour feels drainin…

School leaders must be empowered to take the reins and drive meaningful change in the realm of PL. They need the autonomy to design PL experiences that are tailored to the unique needs and context of their school community. This may involve fostering a culture of collaboration, leveraging technology to facilitate ongoing learning, or creating opportunities for job-embedded coaching and mentorship. Furthermore, school leaders require the support and resources necessary to bring their vision for PL to life. This may entail investing in PL opportunities for staff, providing time and space for collaborative enquiry and reflection, or partnering with external organisations to access expertise and resources. The success of any educational initiative hinges on the commitment and vision of its leaders. By empowering school leaders and leadership teams with the autonomy, time, and support needed to reimagine school-embedded PL, we can unlock the full potential of our educators.

Source: Loosening the Shackles: Empowering Growth and Innovation by Andrea Stringer

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I read this piece a few weeks ago Andrea and it has really stayed with me.

Firstly, I feel I can relate to your point about once having a window into school via social media and blogs. However, my lack of investment in social media and the changes in that space have left me feeling far less connected. Sometimes I feel like a species caught on the wrong side of continental drift.

On your second point about leaders adapting PL to the needs and context of their school, I recently read Joel Selwood’s autobiography and he discussed the way in which he needed to transition how he lead to accommodate the needs of different group of players:

I was finding it difficult managing the transition from being part of a tough and tight premiership-winning group to needing to teach an emerging group often struggling to find what was right for them. Connecting with people inside and outside the club required more of my energy, and the standards I set for myself were not always met by others.
…
Although my relationships with teammates were strong enough to avoid animosity, I began to sense I needed to adapt, or my message would stop resonating. What underpinned success for me was not necessarily the same as what drove others, and I was beginning to have conversations with people inside the club about how I could be a better leader.
[Brian Cook] wanted me to develop what he labelled ‘influential skills’ on top of my ‘lead by example’ policy. He could see the young players on our list requiring more of everyone’s time.

Source: All In by Joel Selwood

Although this seems logical when you think about it, I had not considered the fact that the conditions that foster success at one point in time may not foster the same success at another point in time. I guess this comes back to your point about identity and change over time. What was intriguing was the team that he had around him to support this change, whether it be trusted teammates, ex-captain Cameron Ling, club CEO Brian Cook and psychologist Anna Box. Throughout the book, I was continually reminded that it success in any field really does take a village, I just wonder if we always provide the resources to build such a village? Instead, it can be easier to provide the answer or automate a solution, rather than invest in autonomy and self-determination.

Bookmarked A Culture of Thinking for Teachers (learningshore.edublogs.org)

It turns out that that we can’t teach people to think after all, but we can enculturate the dispositions which enable thinking. Educators who succeed in developing a culture of thinking value the process of learning over the product of learning; they seek deeper learning rather than just the acquisition of knowledge. Leadership of this pedagogical approach requires patience, and valuing, respecting, and trusting people. Leadership matters immensely and models that this is not “flavour of the month”, it is who we are, and it is what we are about. It requires an invitational approach. An invitation is extraordinarily powerful. Invite people into change instead of telling them what they need to change.

Cameron Paterson shares reflections from his Churchill Trust exploring the leadership of difficult pedagogical change in schools. Some of his findings include listening to those hesitant into clarity, persist beyond the first failure, be curious and make people feel seen and heard.

Discussing the place of visible thinking, Paterson talks about the importance of culture.

Learning happens when students connect with ideas, when they ask questions, and create meaning with our guidance and support. A culture of thinking sends a message to students that thinking is valued and infused in the fabric of the classroom
…
Classroom culture sends messages about what learning is and how it happens. Understanding this process and how teachers might more directly influence it, as well as having the language to talk about classroom culture, helps to demystifying teaching.

Personally, I wonder what a culture of thinking might look like outside of the classroom? I think I appreciate what this looks like within the classroom and understand how we might foster a culture of thinking and inquiry outside of the classroom, but what does a ‘culture of thinking’ look like when it comes to mandated and mundane professional development? As someone who supports schools with things like timetables and reporting, what does a culture of thinking look like there?

Bookmarked Going Rogue: Teachers designing their own conferences as a transgressive act (Philippa Nicoll Antipas) by CI_Jamie (conferenceinference.wordpress.com)

In this post, Philippa Nicoll Antipas re-considers conferences as sites for teacher professional learning and development. She details her PhD research project Plan D, a game-like collective activity whereby teachers are supported to go rogue and design their own professional learning and development needs.

Philippa Nicoll Antipas explores how we might do a conference for teacher professional learning and development (PLD) differently. She argues that we need to breakaway from “somebody deciding to share what they’re interested in, in the hope that you’ll find it interesting too.” A review of the literature highlighted that too few decide for too many, in response she came up with a different model where teachers design their own conferences based on their own needs. This model came in the format of a board game-like collective activity.

There are four layers to the d.conference collective activity, known as Plan D. In the first layer, teachers consider what they already believe about effective PLD. In the second layer, teachers consider their professional learning needs, and the learning needs of their students in order to decide what the purpose of their d.conference is. The third layer gets more ‘nuts and bolts’: who will speak at the conference; what the schedule of the event will be; what the learning at the conference will look like. Finally, in the fourth layer, teachers reflect on the decisions they’ve made whilst playing, and commit to sustaining their professional learning beyond their d.conference.

The process is as important as product.

This reminds me of a piece from Sean Michael Morris reflecting on education conferences.

We need to critically examine all of our assumptions about conferences. How they are run. Who leads them. What kind of learning should happen there? Why are they convened? What is the gathering meant to accomplish? What is the pedagogy for conferences now, in a landscape where keynotes should be something more than talking heads, where organizers who are white and male need to cede not just the stage but the design of events to make way for new ways of knowing, teaching, and learning? Where expertise does not win the day, but a willingness to ask does?

people make conferences, as well as my wonderings about starting the learning prior to the conference.

Replied to Emily and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Professional Development Session (Mrs Fintelman Teaches)

I’ve tried to come up with answers to the question “What makes good professional learning?”. My answers are questions.

  • I believe I know how children learn. Do I know how adults learn? If I don’t, should I be in charge of running this session?
  • What is the point of the session? What do teachers REALLY need to leave with? Answers? Questions? Skills? Content? Attitudes? Enthusiasm?
  • Do I want to teach them what I know? If I do, what do I know that is so important that 30 adult professionals all need to hear it, in the same way, at the same time? Is me putting it on slides and talking about it the best way for them to learn it?
  • I believe people learn by meaningfully doing. Will people be learning by doing or will they be passive? How can I remove that tendency for the presenter to do all the doing?
  • Is my ego involved? How can I remove it if it is?
I really enjoyed your reflection Emily. I wonder if there are times when we learn as much from failed experiences as we do from those that truly succeed? It reminds me of riff I once made on something Douglas Rushkoff once said about solving riddles or posing new ones:

For me, what matters is not necessarily the content, but the conditions created that provide the possibility for personal problem solving. To reword Rushkoff’s question, is professional development meant to solve our riddles or pose new ones?

I was intrigued by your statement about being an ‘expert on learning’:

I really believe that people educating room full of experts on learning should be absolute masters of learning – otherwise they’re hardly qualified to be doing that job.

I wonder if all learning is the same and with that if all professional development is the same?

Bookmarked

Joel Speranza posits what makes good professional development:

Good PD is:
– Content-focused
– Involves Active learning for participants
– Coherent with school goals and teacher beliefs
– Long in both hours and span of time
– Collaborative

In many ways, this reminds me of my experience with Disciplined Collaboration:

One of the challenges associated with Disciplined Collaboration is creating the right conditions to support collective inquiry in order to determine success. A part of this is having a clear theory of action, providing staff with the appropriate skills to support collaborative learning, as well as fostering a culture of trust in which accountability for impact is shared.

RSVPed Attending Assessment of Critical and Creative Thinking

In this session a range of strategies for assessing Critical and Creative Thinking will be explored. Different assessment methods will be introduced within the context of planning for assessment. Examples of student work and associated tasks from Levels 5 and 6 will be used to illustrate the discussion, however this session is suitable for all teachers from F-10.

This VCAA webinar unpacks the Critical and Creative Thinking curriculum and how to go about assessment. The curriculum is broken into three strands:

  • Questions and Possibilities
  • Reasoning
  • Meta-cognition

Some examples of activities include:

Lotus Diagram

The Lotus Diagram is a structured concept mapping activity which provides a means of assessing questioning and reasoning. What was interesting about the example provided was that there may not be an explicit way of completing the task, this ambiguity is where the reasoning comes in.

Compass Points

The Visible Thinking routine, Compass Points, is a way of not only coming up with ideas, but also to step back and help make preconceptions more visible. In regards to assessment, what matters with such as task is how a students may use a particular tool to foster their learning.

Journaling

Showing your thinking in Mathematics provides a means of making your logic and reasoning visible. As a process, this could involve focusing on processes or digging into particular errors.

If students are not being challneged, then they are just practicing what they know

This reminds me of Back-to-Front Mathematics.

Tiered Success Criteria

Sometimes the biggest challenge is getting all students to push themselves further. One method for doing this is using the SOLO Taxonomy to create tiered success criterias to help students managing their own learning and thinking.

My take-away from this session is that from an assessment perspective, a stimulus can provide many different opportunities for assessment. What matters is the lens that you use. I was also reminded of the work of the ATC21s team and the work done to develop assessment methods for collaboration. So often it felt that the process was a subplot to the product of learning.

The VCAA have collected together a number of samples to demonstrate what is possible.

RSVPed Attending EAL program: What is Plurilingualism?

This presentation will explore plurilingualism and the ways it can be used to enhance the teaching of EAL students.

This webinar offered by VCAA walks through the concept of plurilingualism and its implications. Plurilingual is about the languages inherent within the individual. This is different to multilingual which is about the various languages spoken within a community. Plurilingualism sees efficincy as something that is a combination of all languages, not just the mother tongue. With this in mind, it needs to be noted that proficency in mother tongue may in fact vary, especially in regards to written forms that may not be fostered as much.

This was a useful presentation as I am not sure I had ever properly thought about plurilingualism. It really has me rethinking ways in which I support learners. The challenge is to be aware of this and make it an active process. Associated with this, there needs to be an effort to promote a more positive perception about achievement. Rather than students struggling, they are on a developmental pathway. In the end, this all highlights the ways in which literacy not static, but something that is ever evolving.

RSVPed Interested in Attending Digitally Literate Educator

This open, online course is designed to familiarize educators with the best ways to build the knowledge, skills, and processes educators need to embed technology in a meaningful way in their classrooms from Pre-K up through higher education.

Ian O’Byrne has put together a course for designing a technology infused unit of work.
Checked into Digital professionalism webinars
The Digital Professionalism webinar run by Matt Woodley discussed the challenges of staying professional in online environments, with a focus on the VIT Code of Ethics. This is something that has become even more pertinent with the move to online learning. What was useful was the opportunities to stop and reflect with others. Every context is different, but the questions about appropriate practice and safety online remain the same.

RSVPed Interested in Attending Better Conversations

The aim of the program is to present a framework for improving professional dialogue within education communities and beyond. In Dr Knight’s words:

“Effective communication is an essential skill for a fulfilled life, and we can’t teach it to students if we don’t know how to do it ourselves.”

Participants begin by taking stock of their current beliefs and communication habits by considering two simple questions: Where are you now? Where do you want to be? We will then consider the “10 Habits” required for better conversations.

I like the sound of this course. I assume that this is in part about a ‘coaching way of being‘
Bookmarked What Should Leadership Development Look Like? by Peter DeWitt (blogs.edweek.org)

With increasing demands comes increasing gaps in learning. It is too easy to ignore issues where we do not feel confident. In fact, Bandura found, “When faced with obstacles, setbacks, and failures, those who doubt their capabilities slacken their efforts, give up, or settle for mediocre solutions. Those who have a strong belief in the capabilities redouble their effort to master the challenge.” We need to find a different way to help prepare leaders, those with the degree and those without, for the changing face of education and help support their lack of confidence (self-efficacy) in a way that will turn it from a weakness to a strength.

In the transition from a focus on management to instructional leadership, Peter DeWitt discusses some of the gaps and challenges faced by modern leaders. These include the lack of preparation, challenge of equity and a pathway to leadership via discipline, rather than learning. DeWitt suggests the professional development associated with leadership needs to be a blend of research and practice.
Liked Something came up by Chris (chrisbetcher.com)

Please, if you say you’re going to do something, do it. Whether it’s a tech workshop, a family function, a kids party or a meeting with a friend. If you say you’re going to be somewhere, be there. And if something comes up, and you can’t be there, please have the courtesy to let someone know so that the organisers know who to expect, or even so your place can be offered to someone else.

It’s just common courtesy.

Liked Have Your Third Teacher Meet the First Teacher: Bringing the Inside Out (Technology Rich Inquiry Based Research)

When you visit the schools of Reggio Emilia, you are asked not to take photos of the indoor environment, not only to protect children but to prevent others from trying to duplicate in an inauthentic way. As Howard Gardner said in 1997:

I think that it’s a mistake to take any school approach and assume, like a flower, that you can take it from one soil and put it into another one. That never works. This doesn’t mean at all that [we] can’t learn a tremendous amount from it, but we have to reinvent it. … We have to figure out what are the aspects which are most important to us and what kind of soil we need here to make those aspects thrive.

Listened Networked Making – Podcast by David White from daveowhite.com

On the 10th July 2019 we ran the ‘Networked Making’ event at the University of the Arts London. This post introduces a podcast in which myself and Jon Martin reflect on the ‘Making Networks’ workshop activity we designed for the start of the day
(with input from Dr Sheena Calvert and the ‘Interpolate’ student group) .

The activity was described as: “A workshop session in which participants collaboratively make and reflect on a physical model/metaphor of their networks.”

David White and Dr Sheena Calvert explore the sense of risk, negotiated assessment and challenges associated with agency in delivering
an open-ended session. This is a useful reflection on professional development and learning.
Bookmarked 3 Steps to Improve Your Next Workshop – Issue 136 – Dialogic Learning Weekly (mailchi.mp)

Design the workshop with rich provocations, allow time to get ensconced, respond to the needs of those in front of you.

Tom Barrett provides another useful reflection on what constitutes effective professional development. Interestingly, it is about providing the conditions, rather than all the answers.
Replied to Killing Two Birds with One Stone (andreastringer.blogspot.com)

Taking into account individual contexts, schools and leaders must determine the purpose of professional learning plans. Blurring the lines only causes confusion and ambiguity. Problems arise when we try and kill two birds with one stone.

This is a great post Andrea. I always found it awkward to say the least to have a coaching conversation with the same person who I set my SMART goals with. Even worse when we were all encouraged to focus on the same goals to make the process easier.
Replied to Success indicators of a professional learning model (the édu flâneuse)

I have been reflecting lately on measures of success of this model. How might we know that our approach to internal professional learning is having a positive impact? As part of the model’s implementation, we generate ongoing honest feedback from staff in order to refine the model each year, including via focus groups and anonymous surveys. For instance, in the annual staff survey, the pathway options, especially the Professional Learning Groups, were rated highly by staff. Additionally, our staff satisfaction with professional learning is above the national benchmark.

Great to hear how you have distributed the leadership for the different groups. Look forward to reading the book Deb.
Replied to Balancing Professional Responsibility & Accountability (andreastringer.blogspot.com)

Being linked to a salary increase, teachers and their supervisors experience an amplified workload and additional pressure. Does the outcome justify the time and effort required? If the outcome or focus is on professional growth, coaching, especially in a teacher’s first five years of teaching, could be more effective than this documented accreditation process. Coaching may also support teacher wellbeing and ultimately influence teacher retention.

The question of professionalism and accountability is such an interesting topic Andrea. I remember writing about this a few years ago in response to the question of performance pay. It feels like it is a misreading of trust and coaching.