Reflective Practice: Implications for Leadership

Reflective Practice: Implications for Leadership Professionalism = Competence + Virtue A Commitment to practice in an exemplary way A Commitment to practice towards social ends A Commitment not only to one’s own practice but to practice itself A Commitment to the ethic of caring (Sergiovanni)

Emerging Consensus on School Improvement • Twin Pillars for Transformation “Quality of a schooling system cannot exceed Quality of its Teachers” (McKinsey)

School Leadership Matters (OECD) • Empirically validated • Indirect impact • Greatest where learning needs are greatest

The Challenge • Redesigning/repurposing Leadership - Instruction centred - Learner centred

The Case For School Effectiveness Research The Fatal Flaw They assume that the major determinants of the quality of pupils curriculum and pedagogical experiences are systems, rather than teachers’ (Elliott)

“The quality of education depends on the quality of teachers’ deliberations and judgement in classrooms” (Elliott) “To be effective, school improvement efforts must be directed towards what happens inside classrooms” (Hill)

Easier said than done “Substantial changes in pedagogy and in the way teachers work together on instructional matters is stubbornly elusive” (Fullan) “The hardest core to crack – is the learning core – changes in instructional practices and in the culture of teaching towards greater collaborative partnerships” (Fullan) “The priority for school improvement at the level of management is how to encourage a process of deliberative reflection on the part of teachers atthe classroom level” (Elliott)

Strategies for learning-centred leadership Modelling Dialogue Monitoring Southworth (2004)

Personalising Learning • Learning how to learn • Assessment for learning • Teaching and Learning Strategies • Curriculum Choice • Mentoring, Coaching and Support

Move Learning to top of the agenda - Governors’ Meetings - SMT - Staff Meetings - Middle Leaders Forums • Reframing INSET • Focus and Use of PRSD

Effective Use of DATA - Achievement Gap(s) - Internal Variability “Quantum improvements in student learning can be achieved if the performance of students in all classes is brought up to the level of students in those classes in which students make the greatest progress” (Hill) “When school leaders seriously address within school variation it can make a significant difference” (Munby)

“Systematic data collation, analysis and USE … can lead to the improvement of education as has no other educational innovation of the last century” (McLean)

Build a Culture of Collaboration rooted in reflective practice amongst teachers “The Capacity of the staff working collectively to learn, defines the limit to which the school can support ambitious reform. Therefore school leaders must adopt collective learning as a central role” (NCSL)

Handling education and change: • Coping Limited to managing the school and responding only to directions from higher sources • Diffusion ‘Christmas Tree Schools’ • Goal Focused Selecting a few key goals, establishing priorities and ignoring other pressures

Reflective Practice: The Leadership Challenge “…discover and provide the conditions under which peoples learning curves go off the chart” Barth (2001)

What does it look like? A group of people who take an active, reflective, collaborative learning oriented and growth promoting approach towards the mysteries, problems and perplexities of teaching and learning. It will not happen by accident!

Organizational Learning Frame • Are there regular opportunities to examine and reflect on classroom practice and student learning together? • Do we engage in dialogue about program and practice across departments and grades? • Is there a common understanding about what counts as progress across grades and subjects? • From the students perspective, is there some consistency in expectations about their learning experience across grades and departments? • Do we evaluate?

Do we gather and share data about the student’s learning experience? • Are there opportunities to read about, examine and share “best practices”? • Are there opportunities to network with others about classroom practice and procedures? • Do we try to learn from our students about how we are doing as a school? How can we learn this better? What methods and processes could we use? • Is our relationship with parents a learning relationship (where we learn from them, as well as them from us). How do we do this? How can we do it better? Hargreaves, Shaw and Fink (1997)

Reflective Practice: Implications for Leadership