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Leading Professional Learning: Practical strategies for impact in schools

$59.05  Paperback
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Helen Timperley, Fiona Ell, Deidre Le Fevre, Kaye Twyford NZ author

About
  • Leading Professional Learning

136 pages
2020
ISBN: 9781742865393

Today’s school leaders are faced with the increasingly daunting task of leading their schools to improve, to innovate and to become ever more responsive to change. There are many resources to help schools to engage with improvement frameworks, but few that directly address the complexity of the challenges that inevitably arise along the way. Based on extensive research in the field, including the outcomes of a five-year project on school improvement and professional learning in Australia and New Zealand, Leading Professional Learning: Practical strategies for impact in schools identifies the challenges that school leaders face when leading professional learning and development in their schools as part of an improvement agenda.

Renowned professional development expert, Helen Timperley, has collaborated with a team of prominent authors, including Fiona Ell, Deidre Le Fevre and Kaye Twyford, to uncover the reasons underpinning these challenges and to provide practical strategies on how to address them. Case studies, excerpts from real teachers’ experiences and step-by-step examples of useful strategies, including the spiral of inquiry, give school leaders the tools they need to tackle complex challenges in teaching, learning, curriculum delivery and pedagogical practice in both primary and secondary settings.

Leading Professional Learning: Practical strategies for impact in schools is a hands-on resource for school leaders to identify specific professional learning and development issues that accompany the learning and change process and to overcome them in their schools.

Contents

Table of Contents

Front Matter

  • Preface ix
  • Introduction The complexity of professional learning in schooling improvement 1
  • The complexity of professional learning 2
  • Principles for professional learning that respects complexity 4
  • Responding to complexity using inquiry 7
  • This book: How does it help? 9
  • Coherence and sustained focus 9
  • Creating a learning culture 10
  • Emotion, uncertainty and vulnerability 10
  • Evidence and evaluative thinking 10
  • Equity, bias and beliefs 11
  • Case studies 11
  • Conclusion 12

Chapter 1 Coherence and sustained focus 13

  • The challenge 13
  • The reason why this is a challenge 14
  • Leadership actions to address the challenge 16
  • Don't comply, own it 16
  • Commit to an explicit plan with evaluative probes 17
  • Keep the main thing the main thing 20
  • Seek 'vertical' coherence 22
  • Interrogate new imperatives 24
  • See patterns and make links 25
  • Don't stop until you get there 26
  • Conclusion 27

Chapter 2 Creating a learning culture 29

  • The challenge 29
  • The reason why this is a challenge 30
  • Leadership actions to address the challenge 32
  • Make the school culture visible 33
  • Intentionally create a learning culture 34
  • Tackle the tough stuff 36
  • Keep the focus on students 37
  • Engage everyone in genuine inquiry 38
  • Use the spiral of inquiry to develop and sustain a learning culture 40
  • Conclusion 42

Chapter 3 Emotion, uncertainty and vulnerability 45

  • The challenge 45
  • The reason why this is a challenge 46
  • Leadership actions to address the challenge 49
  • Help others understand the role of emotion in professional learning 50
  • Understand, notice and reduce unnecessary uncertainty 51
  • Consider risk, not resistance 56
  • Support others to take risks 58
  • Understand how trust works 60
  • Expect and navigate emotion when using the spiral of inquiry 61
  • Conclusion 62

Chapter 4 Evidence and evaluative thinking 63

  • The challenge 63
  • The reason why this is a challenge 64
  • Leadership actions to address the challenge 65
  • Get the evidence in order 65
  • Use evaluative thinking in decision making 69
  • Interpret the evidence together 70
  • Seek new forms of evidence 72
  • Link evidence of student learning with changes in teaching, leadership and organisational practices 73
  • Give it time and keep coming back to it 75
  • Conclusion 77

Chapter 5 Equity, bias and beliefs 79

  • The challenge 79
  • The reason why this is a challenge 80
  • Leadership actions to address the challenge 82
  • Examine equity policies and systems 82
  • Develop knowledge of how unconscious bias works 84
  • Use inquiry and evidence to check for and challenge bias and inequity 86
  • Surface and process problematic biases and beliefs 88
  • Deprivatise practice 90
  • Take affirmative, strengths-based action 90
  • Conclusion 91

Chapter 6 Extended examples 93

Chapter 7 Bringing things together for impact 113

References 119


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