The Role of Professional Learning in Determining the Profession S Future
Chapter 3.
The role of professional learning in determining the profession’s future
Philippa Cordingley, Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education (CUREE)
This chapter focuses on the nature and role of teacher professional learning in shaping the future of the profession. It offers insights from six systematic and technical reviews of the evidence about Continuing Professional Learning and Development and extensive research and evaluation focussed on the impact of such activity on teachers and pupils, and the effectiveness of school as learning environments for them both.
It starts with a proposition. Since schools are a microcosm of society, there are as many challenges facing the teaching profession as there are facing society more generally. Papers for a February, 2011 conference exploring The Future of the Teaching Profession organised by the OECD and Education International set out such challenges somewhat tellingly through social, political and economic lenses. But consideration of learning also has a place here. If the profession and its knowledge base lag woefully behind the demands placed on schools, teachers, pupils and society, surely teachers’ own learning is key to their capacity to respond to new demands? Since learning (albeit, the learning of pupils) sits at the core of professional identity and modelling is fundamental to the learning process, logically teachers’ own learning should contribute to progress at two levels; in increasing teachers’ confidence and efficacy and in making the benefits of effortful learning visible to pupils.
A quick scan of the education press, and of international evaluations such as those carried out by OECD (Schuller, 2005) and the EEC (Leney et al, 2007) shows us that it is teacher performance rather than teacher learning that has been and remains the focus of attention for support for continuing professional learning (CPD). Important as teacher performance is, focussing upon it can only help us raise the base level of professional practice; it is teacher learning, rather than performance, that has the potential to help the profession raise its own ceiling. Yet teachers themselves contribute to the relentless focus on behaviours and performance, emphasising as they do, what they see as “common sense” approaches. The problem here is that in reality, for effective teachers, common sense approaches are really complex and layered ways of responding to needs, based on accumulated and internalised professional expertise. But in the hands of less effective teachers “common sense” approaches often involve unthinking adherence to established routines and resources – and become a defence against questioning and risk taking. At its worst this can result in a “tyranny of common sense”, an intransigent resistance against learning from practices developed and tested elsewhere.
A more significant reason why teacher learning does not yet sit at the heart of professional identity is that support for professional learning and development has been rather limited in conception and execution. In effect we have made the same mistakes about teacher learning we were making 10-15 years ago about pupil learning. We have learned, albeit relatively recently, to focus on quality in the facilitation of CPD. But for many years we gave scant attention to the processes, and content of teachers’ learning post qualification – or to their agency in the process. Masters level study for teachers is one approach to professional development which is oriented towards something other than performance, focussing rather on acquisition and interrogation of a body of knowledge. But even the focus on developing understanding of teaching and learning is not quite the same as a focus on the process of learning about teaching and learning. For teachers, as for pupils, some of the way forward lies in learning how to learn, in teachers taking increasing responsibility for their own learning. This calls for two other strategic developments. First, it calls for teachers to develop their own skills and capacities in directing their own professional learning. Second it requires school leaders to develop an understanding of the pedagogy and curriculum of teacher development. Reading across systematic reviews of effective CPD, effective leadership and effective pedagogy (Cordingley et al, 2003, 2005ab, 2007, Timperley et al, 2006 , Robinson et al 2009 or, Stoll et al, 2006 ) this calls for
- a focus on formative and summative needs analysis
- collaboration as a learning strategy
- skilled recognition and use of specialist expertise
- the use of evidence from teaching and learning exchanges to structure the learning process
- active leadership of professional learning including explicit modelling or enquiry oriented approaches to development.
Of all of these key components, perhaps the role of in-depth specialist experience is the one that has most potential for expanding the profession’s sense of itself and for fuelling development into that space. Certainly the welcome (in many ways) increase in school based expertise has frequently been accompanied by a significant reduction in access to specialists for classroom teachers. But a focus on the role of in-depth specialist expertise in professional learning has the potential to establish a virtuous cycle of learning, in which teachers welcome and acknowledge the many forms of specialist expertise needed to prepare themselves and the young people they serve, thereby creating a buffer zone against the more tyrannical models of “professional common sense”. In short, enabling the profession to recognise more explicitly and to welcome the role of specialist expertise has the potential to raise expectations and deepen learning Cordingley (2012). Since the evidence also suggests the value of coupling the use of specialist expertise with sustained collaboration between peers who share the vulnerabilities that come with experimenting with new approaches, it seems likely that effective CPD has the capacity to increase ownership of and a desire for such expertise. So this chapter argues that a successful future for teachers individually and collectively depends on focusing anew on a combination of professional learning, specialist expertise and collaboration.
To this end the rest of this chapter sets out the evidence about content, process and effectiveness of professional learning as a springboard for exploring the ways in which moving professional learning centre stage would increase professional self efficacy whilst equipping the profession to rise to the challenges being posed.
The evidence base
The dramatic increase in access to an online, international, knowledge base has enabled many breakthroughs; one such beneficiary is the identification of a mature evidence base and emerging theory for teacher continuing professional development and, more recently, teacher learning. In the early 21st Century a series of systematic and technical reviews of the evidence about CPD that made a difference to both pupil and teacher learning revealed a surprisingly coherent and challenging picture of what is involved in effective professional development (EPPI 1-4). At the outset the members of the Academic community sitting on our advisory committee and anonymous peer reviewers of our proposed protocol were doubtful about the possibility of connecting teacher and pupil learning and indeed research studies of CPD by and large failed to make this connection. But the power of internet searching made it possible to review not only studies of CPD, but also studies of a wide range of interventions that included CPD and evaluated its contributions to a wide range of educational goals. This cumulative series of reviews first identified key characteristics linked to benefits for pupils, then examined features such as the nature of specialist and peer contributions in more depth, and tested the evidence for technical issues such as the effects of researcher involvement in CPD. Meanwhile, Best Evidence Syntheses from New Zealand (Timperley, 2007) used a different methodology to reach very similar conclusions. In unpacking what emerged as one strong and pervasive success factor, the contribution of peer support to professional development, the reviews also began to map, not simply what was being offered to teachers, but also their learning processes and dispositions.
Gradually, partly perhaps in response to systematic reviews, primary studies of interventions and CPD accumulated, creating an increasingly fine-grained picture of the connections between teacher and pupil learning. So that a 2010 review by Bell et al (PURR) of teacher engagement with the research of others and in their own research, which compared the evidence about teachers with evidence about the experiences of health and social care workers, was able to identify not only factors that inhibit teachers from engaging in and with research, but also approaches that help accelerate such learning; it began to explore the ways in which schools and school districts can increase and sustain such engagement.
Key characteristics of effective professional learning
At this point, it seems appropriate to clarify what effective professional learning looks like. Key components of professional learning that is linked with significant benefits to staff and pupils, evidenced in the various reviews listed above, range through:
- drawing down targeted, usually external, specialist expertise
- giving and receiving structured peer support
- professional dialogue rooted directly in evidence from trying out new things,
- focusing on why things do and don’t work as well as how they work i.e. defining professional reflection as building theory and practice together
- sustained enquiry-oriented learning over (usually) two terms or more;
- learning to learn from observing the practice of others
- ambitious goals set in the context of aspirations for pupils
- the use of tools and protocols to help create coherence, sustain learning, ensure depth and make evidence collection and analysis manageable and useful
Specialist expertise is ever present and serves a range of functions. Teachers who are effective professional learners use specialist sources of advice or information to identify high leverage strategies that address their concerns and aspirations for pupils. They look to specialists for help when they don’t know what they don’t know, for illustration of new approaches and phenomena in action and for help in unpacking what did and didn’t work well in their early experiments. They also use specialists to provide the kind of scaffolding that helps them take increasing control over their own learning about new approaches. Such specialist support is usually drawn from colleagues who sit outside day to day routines, the immediate school environment and accountability systems and are thus well placed to provide objective information, challenge orthodoxies and create a sense of planned purpose for experimentation and risk taking.
Peer support is also omnipresent. It is linked with embedding new practices introduced by others, in day to day contexts and providing emotional support through reciprocal vulnerability. The studies are replete with accounts of teachers tackling major challenges and persisting through difficulties ‘because they don’t want to let each other down’. Teachers who share the risk of looking silly as they abandon familiar routines to try something new find they trust each other more quickly and deeply than specialists, however skilful they may be. Interestingly such CPD works as well for conscripts as for natural enthusiasts. (Timperley, 2007; Cordingley et al, 2007 and Bell et al, 2010) The process of working out with a partner how to tackle new approaches on the ground and coming together regularly to offer each other a listening ear and moral support, is an effective catalyst for ownership of professional learning, however it is initiated. There are one or two studies of CPD with benefits for pupils and staff without extensive use of peer support. But here the specialist contributors are in fact so embedded in school life (for example, working in school for a full day every week for two years) and working in such close partnership with teachers as co-enquirers, that they have become, in effect, rather costly peer supporters.
Such professional learning and support for it is variously labelled, but at its best it tends to be configured as a combination of specialist and collaborative or peer coaching, collaborative enquiry and, more recently (Hargreaves, 2010), joint practice development. The English National Framework for Effective Mentoring and Coaching developed for the English national government in 2005 operationalises this evidence in a set of principles, skills and core concepts underpinning effectiveness. Importantly and unusually, this framework identifies the skills of the teachers being coached and mentored, as well as those of the people who support them. This emphasis on the skills of learners is rare. For example, although different national agencies started to use the framework to provide evidence informed CPD through, for example, the National College Guidance on leadership and coaching and on the work of the National Strategies, it was the skills of the coaches rather than the skills of those benefitting from coaching that took centre stage.
The development of this early example of an emphasis by government on the skills and processes of professional learning illustrates the need for such symbolic reinforcement from a teacher perspective too. In research interviews conducted as part of the development of the Framework and the later development of tools to support its use, teachers were asked about their contributions to coaching and mentoring based development as professional learners. Most were more conscious of their coach’s and mentor’s contributions than their own. Some did cite their own planning or the stresses involved in reviewing videos of their practice. Not one identified questions they had asked of their coaches or mentors as a professional learning strategy or activity. When the absence of teacher questioning as a learning strategy was probed, teachers tended to reply in a very similar vein. Asking questions of a coach or mentor would either make it “difficult to get a word in edgeways” or result in a focus on the coach’s or mentor’s agenda rather than on the teachers’ own aspirations or concerns. This finding illustrates clearly the extent to which teachers in the middle of the first decade if the 21stcentury in England were experiencing even the most effective forms of CPD as something done to them, rather than as a learning journey in which they had a proactive professional role and responsibility.
Focussing on building teachers’ skills in making good use of mentoring, coaching and enquiry opportunities is an important step in shifting the balance of attention away from what CPD providers do to and for teachers to the professional learning contributions of the teachers themselves and the way they draw down support in the process. In the right context this is an empowering focus. But it represents a considerable move away from traditional approaches to CPD. In-school approaches tend to focus on revealing deficits or on school priorities rather than on personal professional agendas. Beyond-school interventions from universities, consultants or Local Authorities/school districts tend to start from either a focus on a particular issue, or on an external body of knowledge. In both cases it is easy for the needs and agency of individuals to be overlooked. In this context, tools, protocols and resources can be particularly effective ways of helping teachers resist the pull of the status quo and a sense of “being done to”. Tools such as learning agreements or questioning frameworks can help teachers to structure their own learning; they also help differentiate sustained and significant professional learning from the unreflective exchange of practical tips and solutions that characterises too much CPD, whether facilitated by external providers or by schools. For example, formal learning agreements that set out aspirational goals and the respective learning contributions of both a specialist coach and teacher can even up the power disequilibrium that results from specialists having greater knowledge and expertise in new practices. Properly structured learning agreements also make clear the contribution that the teacher’s knowledge of the specific needs of their pupils makes to rendering external, specialist contributions meaningful and useful. Similarly, questioning frameworks that teachers can use to focus the attention of coaches and signal their readiness to take charge of their own learning help coaches recognise teachers’ increasing control over their learning and step back from a desire to intervene. They also prompt teachers to consider when they don’t know what they don’t know, and to ask both closed questions (to focus attention, for example on particular pupils) and open questions (to explore new possibilities and challenge orthodoxies) of specialists. Used in combination each of these tools can help teachers take charge of the process of inviting skilled others into their learning journey.
The role of effective professional learning at system level
What might the system look like if taking control of professional learning in the service of pupil learning were seen as the central priority for teachers and those who support and lead them?