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Welcome back. We hope you're enjoying this week.
We hope you're enjoying the whole course.
We're certainly enjoying thinking about what might be useful to you.
So, we'll look forward to the forums and seeing what
makes sense to you, and how you are making those connections,
how you are extending your own thinking,
and how you're challenging your own thinking -
and perhaps challenging our thinking, which would be great.
That would be fun to be in contact. We're looking forward to that part.
This week what we're going to-- well, this session what we're going
to have a look at is surprise planning for learning and teach.
But specifically, we're going to be continuing to look at teacher professional
learning, and how that teamwork can make us a lot stronger.
In this lecture, we're going to look at
two aspects of professional learning that are really important.
And as I said at the end of last session,
learner needs are the focus of professional learning plans -
that sounds self-evident,
but when people go into schools and see professional learning
practices, they often don't find evidence of this principle in practice.
And the other part, if you go to sometimes large conferences or sessions,
we now know that professional learning needs to be highly engaging,
just like learning for students.
And it isn't always,
it's sometimes one size fits all and that's not
good enough if we're going to develop adaptive expertise.
So, just revisiting the framework again,
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As I said, that sounds easy, but not all schools do it, so let's provide
an elementary case study, of a school that has taken the principle really seriously.
And this is a school from which we've learned a lot.
It's a small northern elementary school in the province of British Columbia.
They serve learners from five to age thirteen.
And there the staff really got along well. They worked well together on activities.
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But, they started exploring professional learning and the teachers were puzzled
by something they noticed about the reading skills of their students.
They figured out that their learners were really good,
no matter what age they were, at literal comprehension.
We often find this in B.C. schools,
and Yukon schools, that young people can read, kind of, on the line.
But, making inferences is a different set of skills and
the learners all seem to struggle with that quite consistently.
So, if this was your school, what would you do next?
That's the question you need to be thinking about
a little bit. Because sometimes schools faced with this
say, well, let's look around for a program or
you know, is there a solution out there now with the internet.
Let's Google and see what's happening with inferential comprehension.
What this school did was something quite different.
They realised that as adult learners, they didn't
fully understand the development of the inferencing process
for themselves, not just how to teach it,
but how it worked for them as adult readers.
So, they found a book, it was called "The Mosaic of Thought",
by a couple of American writers, that provided a model
of how adults make strong inferences about their own
reading, and they engaged in doing some shared reading themselves.
Not only of this book, but of novels and non-fiction pieces.
And began to learn how inferencing works for themselves as learners.
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So, in short, they formed a book
study group, which is a powerful strategy we find,
and enjoyed learning more about their own reading processes.
In that pleasure, what happened?
Well, they started then to work together to build inferencing strategies
into their literacy work in every classroom, for every age group.
And the thing that we really loved, we've studied the practices
at this school quite a lot, is that they developed
there older students as reading inference coaches for their younger ones.
So, that they build, really, a reading community,
but not only that, they built a teaching
and learning community for all ages and stages.
And it will be possible for you, we would really encourage you, to watch
the video that that they made of their work called Learners in the Lead.
Because you can see the social and
emotional connections but also the intellectual connections,
as these young, rural learners help each other with their reading processes.
And what was the result?
Well, after the end of two years,
adults knew a tremendous amount about inferencing
and so did the young people.
They learned so much about it, that they
actually became a bit of a center of excellence,
that drew in, from a word
of mouth perspective, educators within driving distance
of the school, to come and see their work, and learn more themselves.
So, one anecdote related to that that was interesting to us is
an experienced primary teacher came and watched what the learners were able to do,
and exclaimed at the end the sentence - instead
of saying, wow, this is really fascinating and how powerful -
her observation was, "Learners this age should not be doing this,
and shouldn't be thinking in this way."
And we thought that was really interesting because I think with
an adaptive expertise mindset, you might have taken a pause and said, "I
wonder how this works, and I wonder how some of this repertoire
could be brought to my setting", but it was just so foreign to
what she'd experienced so far in her teaching,
that she found it difficult to absorb.
Hopefully, she had more chances to come and visit and see what was being created.
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Depending on your setting, it might be one of these three things.
All three of these we find deeply engaging to ourselves as educators,
and to the teachers with whom we work, and principals. Book clubs,
you know, this is not a retro strategy.
This is something that's
powerful and it gives you access to thinking from all over the world.
And we have seen many, many, many schools and educators
really make a big leap forward in their thinking by studying
Mayan sets or by studying a book on professional learning
or a book on literacy or a book on mathematical understanding.
And just learning more together in a way that meets everybody's needs.
We also have seen lots
of people make gains now through video clubs, through
using video clubs that are readily available on the web.
You can see wonderful assessment practices, wonderful things about the growth mindset.
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It's almost endless,
which can be distracting.
But it can also, if it's well organized, a powerful way to learn,
because seeing other people's teaching practices that are strong,
it's highly motivating and also provides a physical
and active model of what we're looking for.
And the third thing that we really, really like to encourage is school visits
to talk with practitioners about what
they're doing and how they develop their strategies.
Because sometimes in expert workshops we hear about practices, and we
just can't imagine how they learned to do what they're describing.
And by going and sitting in a school and
watching the learning or wandering around in a school and talking to people.
There's that opportunity for informal dialogue where we actually
learn how people got better at what they were doing.
So, the last thing we'd say as a way
of summarizing this lecture is to think about this:
powerful professional learning pays attention to the needs of the learners,
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both young people and adult learners, both students and teachers.
And it also needs to be highly engaging learning for the adults.
And within that, one of the things that makes it engaging is
if you can think of three broad groups of adult learners.
Some people really need the concrete examples.
They have a concrete orientation, and they just want
to know if they're taking on some new practices,
how this will work, what it will look like, and they want to
kind of be able to see it in their mind before they explore it.
Some adult learners are highly social,
they're quite happy to go in a direction, in a team direction -
which is powerful for young people if adults work as a team -
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but they need to be embedded in a group.
And some adults are more self-reflecting,
and self-authoring,
and they may or may not like to work as part of a group.
But, when you're designing professional learning, and when you're a
part of it, and you may, at sometime-- I know I've been
concrete and sometimes I need to explore ideas as part of a
group, and sometimes I really like to be more self-authoring.
To sort of think about, okay, for me, how is this going to work in the future,
and where can I individually learn more from it.
And so, from a design perspective, we need to build these ideas in.
So, we'll look forward to exploring one or
two more of these principles in our upcoming sessions.
And we hope that you are working in a setting, or can
develop a setting where these ideas will work for you.
[MUSIC]
Dr Judy HalbertCo-director of the Centre for Innovative Educational Leadership
Dr Linda KaserCo-director of the Centre for Innovative Educational Leadership
Professor John MacBeathProfessor Emeritus
