Susan Lovett

Teachers’ Learning Journeys: The Quality Learning Circle as a Model of Professional Development

Worldwide, teachers struggle to keep pace with demands for learning. Educational reforms mandated at a national level require teachers to reconsider their teaching, curriculum and assessment philosophies and practices. This reliance on national policy initiatives increases teachers’ dependence on others knowing what their learning needs might be. Such dependence creates problems for sustained learning because teachers are not encouraged to help themselves. This article introduces an alternative approach to professional development, known as the Quality Learning Circle (QLC), to show how it can empower teachers to become agents of change able to meet both local needs alongside national agendas.

Schools as professional learning communities for early‐career teachers: how do early‐career teachers rate them?

For teachers, the early years in the profession are critical for developing the knowledge and skills of an expert teacher. The ‘Teachers of Promise’ study examines the experiences of 57 registered teachers who began their employment in New Zealand primary and secondary schools in 2003. The purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which schools employing these teachers are able to enhance the professional learning of their newest members. The article explores the relationship between new teachers and professional learning. Vignettes drawn from the everyday experiences of five teachers new to the profession point to conditions that appear to sustain and/or frustrate teachers in the early years of their teaching careers. The vignettes suggest that the dream of positioning schools as learning communities for students and teachers alike remains far from a reality.

Personal agency in leadership learning using an Australian heuristic

The starting point for this article is the lack of a robust research base regarding details of what works and why for school leaders’ professional development. The article extends work undertaken for a recent commissioned literature review of selected international reports on supporting school leaders’ development strategies. The authors reveal that the leadership learning landscape seems to be one where system provision over-shadows individuals taking personal responsibility for their leadership learning. In an endeavour to create a balance between system and individual agendas, the authors have created an augmented version of a leadership learning heuristic tool originally developed by Clarke and Wildy. The tool is designed as a starting point only, intended to help leaders identify the state of their current knowledge about leadership as well as their future professional development needs using the tool’s five focal points – pedagogy, people, place, system and self. An example of the tool completed by a practising principal is used to show his current leadership knowledge profile and the knowledge fields on which he will need to focus his learning in the future. The authors conclude with suggestions for further research on personal agency in school leadership learning.

Being a Secondary English Teacher in New Zealand: Complex Realities in the First 18 Months.

This paper focuses on the experiences of a group of beginning secondary school English teachers involved in ‘Making a Difference’, a national New Zealand study of the influence of initial teacher education and beginning teacher induction on teachers’ early development as professionals. Rich data drawn from three rounds of interviews with beginning teachers highlight the challenges faced by beginning subject‐specialist teachers in secondary school contexts. The focus is on how such teachers balance their need to be confident in their curriculum knowledge and at the same time devise strategies to engage diverse learners at all levels. Data from four case studies highlight the challenges and complex realities experienced by beginning teachers as they move from ‘surviving to thriving’ (or not) as specialist‐subject teachers, how these teachers continued to develop sound curriculum and pedagogical content knowledge in their specialism area beyond their initial training year, and the in‐school factors that contributed most to their developing self‐efficacy, identity and socialization into the profession.

Sustaining the commitment and realising the potential of highly promising teachers

The Teachers of Promise study has followed the work histories of 57 primary and secondary teachers who had been identified at the beginning of their third year of teaching as having the potential to make a significant contribution to the profession. Using data from surveys and interviews, this paper reports on what sustained or inhibited their initial commitment to and enthusiasm for ‘making a difference’, six years later, both in the classroom and in broader school leadership roles. Satisfaction with their day-to-day experiences in their schools was a particularly strong driver of teachers’ career decisions over time. Thirty-four teachers responded to survey items that were used to identify three different groups of teachers: a group of 10 primary school teachers with the highest levels of job satisfaction who were ‘fulfilling their promise’; a group of 21 primary and secondary teachers who were ‘persevering and coping’; and three teachers who were ‘detached and disengaged’. The group with the highest levels of job satisfaction taught in primary schools where they felt respected and valued, and supported to develop their teaching and leadership expertise. School leadership practices and school cultures in the other two groups diminished teachers’ overall job satisfaction and contribution to collective knowledge building in their schools. Almost all of the teachers had retained their commitment to students, to their current schools and to teaching as a career, including those with lower levels of satisfaction. Although these teachers reported ‘collegial’ relationships with their peers, individualistic school cultures, most often in secondary schools, impacted on their opportunities to learn with and from their colleagues. Few secondary school teachers felt appreciated, and included in school decision-making or had found it possible to combine high standards of classroom teaching with management responsibilities. The study indicates that while most promising teachers were still satisfied with teaching after nine years, relatively few were in schools where they were able to make the impact that had been predicted for them early in their careers.

Judging the quality of school leadership learning programmes: an international search

How to best address the professional learning needs of those aspiring to leadership roles in schools is a crucial issue. Robust evaluation practices are needed to determine the quality of current provisions and to identify where improvements can be made. This paper considers the quality of professional learning programmes using a set of 10 criteria distilled from a synthesis of compelling international leadership learning research. We show the potential of the 10 criteria for judging the quality of professional learning programmes by applying them to examples of programmes drawn from five countries around the world. These examples provide a launching pad from which questions can be posed about the potential use and applicability of such criteria in making design decisions about the quality and value of professional learning programmes in a range of national and international contexts.

Career pathways: does remaining close to the classroom matter for early career teachers? A study of practice in New Zealand and the USA

Retaining early career teachers and enticing promising teachers to become teacher leaders are issues of international interest not only because large numbers of teachers will retire from the profession over the next five to 10 years but also because the strongest teachers are the teachers most likely to leave the profession during their early years in the profession. This article explores the promise two formal teacher leadership roles – the consulting teacher role in Maryland, USA, and the specialist classroom teacher in New Zealand – have for extending and enhancing the work and career engagement of early career teachers. The article also focuses on one early career teacher, Ruby, who, having assumed the role of specialist classroom teacher, shaped it so she could connect teacher leadership and teacher professional learning in ways likely to enhance her own and her colleagues’ pedagogical practice and thereby raise student achievement.

Leadership for learning: what it means for teachers

In this chapter, we highlight the critical connection of teacher leadership with improved pedagogy and quality learning. Illustrations from Australian and New Zealand case studies are used to reveal a variety of ways in which teachers can create opportunities and structures to support professional talk centred on observation of one another’s teaching, shared reflections and planning of next steps. Traditional notions of leader and leadership are presented to show how they no longer serve schools well. Instead we emphasise the need to foster communities of teacher leaders who can inspire those around them to make a difference in the lives of their students. In attempting to clarify what we mean by teacher leadership, we argue that new forms of leadership are now needed which value professional learning not as the transmission of knowledge from experts but as a discovery and co-construction of knowledge which teachers develop alongside one another as learners and operate within a professional learning community. We argue that investing in teachers as learning leaders needs to be intentional so that promising teachers are supported in their professional learning and see leadership with and alongside their colleagues as attractive and satisfying options.

The potential of group coaching for leadership learning

Despite group coaching being used to facilitate goal-focused change in a range of organizational contexts, there is little research evidence of its use or efficacy in continuing professional development programs for educational leaders. In the first part of this article we define coaching and consider the benefits and challenges of several forms of coaching for leadership learning. In the second part, we introduce the Professional Learning through Feedback and Reflection group coaching model and report on an international pilot of its use in a continuing professional development program for school leaders. The stimulus for group coaching with this model came from the completion of a self-assessment instrument and subsequent feedback report which provoked individual reflection on personal competencies. A protocol used within the coaching process itself provided structure for school leaders to clarify problems and issues, share perspectives and experiences, reflect and plan for change. Analysis of data from the pilot indicates that group coaching, informed by heightened awareness of personal competencies, may have the potential to assist school leaders to identify their personal strengths and challenges, better understand the dynamic and complex nature of their own organization, and inform change processes to improve learning outcomes.

Leadership and Literacy

This book focuses on what school leaders need to know and understand about leadership for learning, and for learning to read in particular. It brings together theory, research and practice on leadership for literacy. The book reports on the findings from six studies that followed school principals from their involvement in a professional learning program consisting of five modules on leadership and the teaching of reading, to implementation action in their schools. It describes how they applied a range of strategies to create leadership partnerships with their teachers, pursuing eight related dimensions from a Leadership for Learning framework or blueprint. The early chapters of the book feature the use of practical tools as a focus for leadership activity. These chapters consider, for example, how principals and teachers can develop deeper understandings of their schools’ contexts; how professional discussions can be conducted with a process called ‘disciplined dialogue’; and how principals might encourage approaches to shared leadership with their teachers. The overall findings presented in this book emphasise five positive positions on leadership for learning to read: the importance of an agreed moral purpose; sharing leadership for improvement; understanding what learning to read involves; implementing and evaluating reading interventions; and recognising the need for support for leaders’ learning on-the-job.