Building and Sustaining Professional Learning Communities:
Following on as an extension to Sprint 19, some thoughts on Across School Professional Learning Communities:
I constantly feel blessed when I reflect on the quality and diversity we have amongst our staff. We have an exceptionally broad gamut of experience, ethnicity, interest and passions. As such, there is a teacher that is just right for each of our children - in all their own rich diversity of background, needs, interests, skills and talents.
To expand on that point, every child deserves a teacher who just "gets" them - whether it be their quirky humour, their Asperger's, their cultural or religious drivers, their gift for drama or their inability to sit still. Our diversity, and our focus on being the "parent in place" for every child in our care is key to achieving this goal of the right teacher for each child.
My second "blessing" is the quality of collaboration and support that exists between our staff here. "Anyone would do for anyone." This is how we function - as a family, and you do for family. It's a basic tenet of life and society - you do for family and we are all family here.
The quality of discussion is exceptional. Teachers are deeply reflective about their practice and wanting to constantly be better and do better for their children. In no small part because they all buy the why - which is we are the mum and dad to every child in our care. They are our own flesh and blood and we treat them accordingly.
Occasionally we have our differences, but these are addressed as separate from the person we have the differences with. It is the same as when we deal with a child who messed up. We address the mess and accept that was a bad choice. We would never label the child a bad child because of their choice. Differences can be a bit like failure - they enable us all to learn, and to grow.
These are the aspects of a school that have been highlighted by many teachers in surveys across the system that affect whether they wish to remain in the profession and/or in the school. When we reflect on Professional Learning Communities Across Schools, those same principles need to apply. Every child in our Learning Community is "our" child. We are working collaboratively to do the best for all our children. Individual success counts less than success of us all as a whole learning community.
Barber and Mourshed (2007) write that “You can mandate to get the system from awful to adequate, but not from adequate to great. To do that, you have to unleash potential and creativity. This cannot be centrally mandated but has to be locally enabled.”
Toby Greany, in his seminar series ‘Self-improving school systems: A review of evidence and reflection on progress in England’, affirms that it is his belief that simply freeing up schools and holding them accountable does not, in itself, ensure a self-improving system.
If we build on from this, David Hargreaves (2012), in ‘A Self-Improving School System: Towards Maturity’, argues that we must move beyond the existing architecture of single self-managing schools, by putting in place four ‘building blocks’:
Greany believed that “By working together in deep partnerships, these clusters – or families- of schools can realise benefits that individual self-managing schools cannot” (2015, p. 6).
Greany stated that this occurred because “they could meet a wider range of student and teacher needs; facilitate innovation and knowledge transfer; share capacity and manage change; and achieve efficiencies of scale and build leadership capacity and succession.” (2015, p. 6), but he adds that “most school partnerships are shallow and loose, meaning these benefits will not be realised.”
Hargreaves defined four core strategies that system leaders could prioritise in order to build successful deep partnerships:
I constantly feel blessed when I reflect on the quality and diversity we have amongst our staff. We have an exceptionally broad gamut of experience, ethnicity, interest and passions. As such, there is a teacher that is just right for each of our children - in all their own rich diversity of background, needs, interests, skills and talents.
To expand on that point, every child deserves a teacher who just "gets" them - whether it be their quirky humour, their Asperger's, their cultural or religious drivers, their gift for drama or their inability to sit still. Our diversity, and our focus on being the "parent in place" for every child in our care is key to achieving this goal of the right teacher for each child.
My second "blessing" is the quality of collaboration and support that exists between our staff here. "Anyone would do for anyone." This is how we function - as a family, and you do for family. It's a basic tenet of life and society - you do for family and we are all family here.
The quality of discussion is exceptional. Teachers are deeply reflective about their practice and wanting to constantly be better and do better for their children. In no small part because they all buy the why - which is we are the mum and dad to every child in our care. They are our own flesh and blood and we treat them accordingly.
Occasionally we have our differences, but these are addressed as separate from the person we have the differences with. It is the same as when we deal with a child who messed up. We address the mess and accept that was a bad choice. We would never label the child a bad child because of their choice. Differences can be a bit like failure - they enable us all to learn, and to grow.
These are the aspects of a school that have been highlighted by many teachers in surveys across the system that affect whether they wish to remain in the profession and/or in the school. When we reflect on Professional Learning Communities Across Schools, those same principles need to apply. Every child in our Learning Community is "our" child. We are working collaboratively to do the best for all our children. Individual success counts less than success of us all as a whole learning community.
Barber and Mourshed (2007) write that “You can mandate to get the system from awful to adequate, but not from adequate to great. To do that, you have to unleash potential and creativity. This cannot be centrally mandated but has to be locally enabled.”
Toby Greany, in his seminar series ‘Self-improving school systems: A review of evidence and reflection on progress in England’, affirms that it is his belief that simply freeing up schools and holding them accountable does not, in itself, ensure a self-improving system.
If we build on from this, David Hargreaves (2012), in ‘A Self-Improving School System: Towards Maturity’, argues that we must move beyond the existing architecture of single self-managing schools, by putting in place four ‘building blocks’:
- Clusters of schools - the structure
- The local solutions approach - the culture - part one
- Construction - the culture - part two
- System leaders - the key people
Greany believed that “By working together in deep partnerships, these clusters – or families- of schools can realise benefits that individual self-managing schools cannot” (2015, p. 6).
Greany stated that this occurred because “they could meet a wider range of student and teacher needs; facilitate innovation and knowledge transfer; share capacity and manage change; and achieve efficiencies of scale and build leadership capacity and succession.” (2015, p. 6), but he adds that “most school partnerships are shallow and loose, meaning these benefits will not be realised.”
Hargreaves defined four core strategies that system leaders could prioritise in order to build successful deep partnerships:
- To foster Joint Practice Development, which structures peer learning that is focused on improvement), as the key mechanism for professional staff learning within and between schools in the partnerships
- Through this process, consciously build social capital and trust within and between schools in the partnership
- For all stake holders, including students, to develop a sense of collective moral purpose - meaning that they care about the performance of other schools and children in the partnership as much as their own
- To practise peer evaluation and challenge at every level within and between schools.
“It is often wonderful how putting down on paper a clear statement of a case helps one to see, not perhaps the way out, but the way in.” —A. C. Benson
