BRITISH EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE

Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, 11th -13th September 2003

Teachers Leading Learning

Judy Durrant

Canterbury Christ Church University College

Abstract

This paper marks the beginning of research into how teachers learn from and with each other to contribute to school improvement. This is explored through the perspective of shared or distributed leadership, with a focus on teachers developing their own and each other’s professional knowledge, skills and understanding to support their involvement in school change. This can lead to improvements in pupils’ learning both directly and as a result of development and capacity building within the organization. Professional development might be seen as both a process and an outcome in this context.

The paper begins with an exploration of the relationships between research, policy and practice to examine the context within which professional learning takes place, setting out some challenges that this presents. A teacher leadership perspective is offered as a fresh way of analysing teachers’ learning in relation to school change. A tentative framework is offered for mapping and analyzing patterns of engagement in school change and related professional knowledge, activity, patterns of leadership and support. A case study of one professional network is used as a preliminary illustration of the framework. It is intended that the framework, further refined, will provide a basis from which to investigate a range of sites and scenarios. This research will focus on the role of teachers themselves in leading and shaping processes of professional learning and the implications for teachers’ professionalism.

Judy Durrant

Centre for Education Leadership and School Improvement (CELSI)

Canterbury Christ Church University College

North Holmes Road

Canterbury

Kent CT1 1QU

Introduction

This paper concerns the question of how teachers lead learning and contribute to school change and how they should best be supported in this. Teachers’ learning is usually considered within the domain of continuing professional development (CPD). The paper begins with a brief consideration of current CPD policy and offers a number of challenges that arise through the strategies currently employed, concerning the changing nature of external support, the challenges of complexity and the knowledge society, the question of impact and the balance of agency and synergy in school change. An alternative perspective is offered that focuses on teacher leadership. A framework built around different levels of teacher engagement in the change process is presented as a tool for analysis to aid the development of understanding about school change, and preliminary illustration is given through discussion of a case study already well documented through previous research. The ideas in this paper represent the first stage of research into relationships between teacher leadership, learning and school change.

Characteristics of current CPD policy

The Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Strategy (2001), has placed emphasis on developing teacher expertise and professionalism through a variety of flexible approaches that have changed the nature of the relationship between schools and providers of CPD. Strategies include the Best Practice Research Scholarships (BPRS) programme funding small-scale school-based research by teachers, opportunities for teachers’ sabbaticals and bursaries, and the appointment of Advanced Skills Teachers who have an allocation of time for ‘outreach work’ with colleagues in other schools. The Networked Learning Communities initiative supported by the National College of School Leadership (NCSL) with matched funding from schools in the cluster emphasises ‘learning together, from and on behalf of each other’, and there are other initiatives such as Excellence Clusters that operate through groups of schools working together. There is therefore a clear emphasis in current CPD policy on collaborative professional learning both within and between schools. Important features of the learning include the sharing of ‘good’ or ‘best’ practice and the development of ‘evidence-based practice’, placing varying emphasis on evidence gathered by teachers themselves in relation to wider educational research.

Collaborative CPD is the subject of a recently published research review for the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre (EPPI-Centre) (Cordingley et al., 2003) which concluded that collaborative CPD links with improvements in teaching and learning. The review identified core features of CPD with positive outcomes, including:

  • observation, feedback and peer support
  • use of external expertise linked to school activity
  • scope for teachers to identify their own CPD focus
  • processes to encourage, extend and structure professional dialogue
  • sustaining CPD over time to enable teachers to embed new practice

(summarised from Cordingley et al., 2003:60)

This shows an emphasis not only on interactions within schools and across their boundaries but also the importance of making use of teachers’ professional expertise, enabling them to make choices about their own learning and supporting direct engagement in improving practice.

The concept of the ‘learning community’ features strongly both in the context of individual schools and groups of schools. One of the aims of the current CPD strategy (DfEE, 2001) is to identify and describe characteristics and conditions of schools functioning as professional learning communities (Wood and Anderson, 2003). Teachers are clearly intended to be active in these initiatives, with an apparently increased level of trust in teachers’ professional expertise and the sharing of responsibility for their own learning, while schools have considerable scope to decide on the nature of CPD activity to meet their own needs. This is to be welcomed, but the rhetoric often appears to be in danger of masking the complexity of processes and situations within schools and many challenges arise, some of which are explored below.

The challenge of changing roles for external support

The fact that Universities and LEAs are increasingly taking their work out into schools and localities, which reduces travel time for teachers and makes collaborative activity more convenient, raises issues concerning the workload and conditions of work of academic and advisory staff. Provision has become increasingly flexible to respond to need. As recognized in discussion at a recent ESCALATE (Education Subject Centre Advancing Learning and Teaching in Education) conference, ‘Towards the Learning Profession’ (see ESCALATE website), academics are engaged increasingly in brokering CPD provision, developing partnerships and networks and designing bespoke projects and activities. Although off-the-shelf courses and training packages are not obsolete, flexible off-campus working is becoming the norm. All this is happening as changes in policy affect funding arrangements and CPD opportunities, for example the last cohort of Best Practice Research Scholarships is funded until summer 2004. Funding has instead been put into schools but with no specified allocation, so with greater choice for schools, the future of CPD is in many ways uncertain since it relies on schools prioritising sustained professional development over other demands on their budgets. Activities such as discussion, collaborative planning, reflection and peer observation and review, that teachers clearly find valuable, have to compete for time, energy and funding with a range of initiatives and are often not prioritised within schools. Working between schools is even more difficult, with time, energy and resource issues magnified and problems of recruitment, retention, staff illness and so on, making it difficult for teachers to leave their classes during school time so that they are often forced to use ‘twilight’ time, holidays and weekends for collaborative activity. Brokering and sustaining support for CPD on these shifting sands is fraught with difficulty and uncertainty. Nevertheless, there are schools and projects that have tackled these issues creatively, prioritising and funding time for teachers to collaborate and learn together and linking with the wider academic and policy discourse, for example some of the current Networked Learning Communities (see NCSL website).

The challenge of complexity

As schools and clusters of schools seek to become ‘learning communities’, the concept needs to be problematised. A school arguably comprises a number of communities within and beyond its formal boundaries and teachers are likely to belong to different ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger, 1998) from which they can learn and to which they can contribute. Individual teachers are necessarily involved in many different initiatives and work within various systems and structures simultaneously. They have a range of professional development opportunities and may have access to educational research and discourse beyond the school as well as internally, sustaining their practice with a complex web of contacts and interrelationships. They have different levels of commitment and involvement and different levels and types of support.

Many programmes and initiatives, whether externally directed or conceived within schools, fall short of planning exactly how professional knowledge and expertise might be grown, shared and transferred. Typically, the outcome of school-based development work and inquiry is a report for a website (the minimum requirement for BPRS), a published case study, a report at a conference, a dissertation or portfolio resulting in an academic or professional qualification, or simply that the change happens. The learning that comes from collaborative working and the engagement that is necessary for professional knowledge to be transferred into others’ practice are not always planned for or built upon. If collaborative approaches to school improvement are to lead to deep and sustained change, it is necessary to move beyond ‘sharing’ or simple dissemination of findings and case studies to genuine engagement with evidence and experience and to collaborative learning that is to do with translating the knowledge into new contexts. The very questions of identification of ‘good’ or ‘best’ practice and what constitutes ‘evidence’ require critical debate. David Hargreaves notes that policy documents “gush with this rhetoric” but that the knowledge about process is “frighteningly slight” (2003:44). Learmonth (2003) has examined the case for different kinds of evidence and has argued for the validity of practitioner experience alongside academic research and inspection evidence. If any of this evidence is to be properly understood and accurately interpreted, it requires users to approach it with rigour and criticality and to understand the context within which it has been produced. There is also a responsibility for presenters of evidence to provide enough information and discussion to enable a fully informed and critical approach to their interpretations.

The challenge of the ‘knowledge society’

The whole question of what is being learnt through sharing, use of evidence and collaborative activity needs to be addressed. We are living in the ‘knowledge society’, where knowledge, rather than capital or labour, is now the basic economic resource and where progress is made through speed, cleverness, creativity and innovation (Hargreaves, 2003). It follows that a knowledge society is a learning society. As Andy Hargreaves points out, schools for the knowledge society need to update their knowledge about learning (e.g. brain research and cognitive science), but within this focus on learning, a high degree of school self-knowledge and understanding about process is also essential as the basis for finding a sustainable way to move forwards. As suggested above, the current policy climate points to a need for deeper investigation of the processes of knowledge creation, transfer and transformation (Hargreaves, 1999) in which teachers are actively engaged. Clearly new knowledge needs to be tested and applied by teachers in different local and individual contexts. Teachers themselves need this process knowledge to build capacity between themselves and colleagues and to exercise leadership for change. Internal and external agents (e.g. headteachers, LEA staff, academics, researchers and education consultants) need a wide range of process knowledge, as well as subject and pedagogical expertise, in order to support them. If schools are to be improved, even transformed, by individuals taking action to support one another’s learning, then it is important to understand the dynamics of such activity, which involves exploring this theory through a wider range of contexts and in much greater depth. A critical and investigative approach to the processes themselves is needed so as to deepen our understanding about how professional learning is linked to school change and about how these ‘learning communities’ can be supported and sustained.

Andy Hargreaves gives a disturbing warning of the emergence of “school improvement apartheid”, offering this contrast between performance training that imparts relatively straightforward professional knowledge and learning communities that foster critical discourse:

“Sophisticated professional learning communities seem to work best with high capacity teachers in high capacity systems; where teachers are highly skilled and qualified, the schools are at least already reasonably effective, leaders are capable of motivating and engaging their teachers, and there are sufficient resources to provide teachers and schools with the time and flexibility they need to work together professionally.”

On the other hand,

“Improvement through performance training seems to yield results in low-capacity systems, where large numbers of teachers are uncertified and underskilled, where schools have a record of poor performance and many teachers have lost belief in their capacity to make a difference, where too many teachers see themselves as managers more than instructional leaders, and where resources have been scarce or spread too thinly across too many initiatives.”

(Hargreaves, 2003:189-190)

Hargreaves concludes that this kind of divisive improvement that reinforces advantage and disadvantage in contrasting communities is “…one of our most imminent and disturbing threats” and suggests that approaches are needed that combine elements of both performance training and professional community, so that all schools and teachers are equipped for the knowledge society. This enables a critical approach from the outset, so that training does not simply engender compliance, but this is easier said than done under the restrictions of “…the shadow of impending failure” (Hargreaves, 2003:191).

Tom Bentley, the Director of DEMOS, in his foreword to David Hargreaves’ paper ‘Education Epidemic: transforming secondary schools through innovative networks’ suggests that if we are to move from ‘informed prescription’ towards an ‘informed professionalism’ more trusting of teachers, “The challenge is to build professional identities and learning communities that are oriented towards adaptation and radical innovation”, rather than “self-protection in the face of disruptive change” (Bentley, in Hargreaves, 2003:132). Hargreaves asserts in this paper that educational systems need to work out how to learn for themselves. This, Bentley suggests, requires information and support from a system capable of rapidly transferring many different kinds of knowledge. Hargreaves (2003) believes that teachers need the motivation and opportunity to engage in innovation along with the critical skills to apply to new knowledge.

The challenge of the question of impact

Maximising the impact of CPD activity requires an understanding of the complex processes through which teachers learn and lead change. Cordingley et al. (2003) conclude that the exploration of the question of impact may have to be restricted to identifying associations rather than exploring causes and effects. As the EPPI-Centre review of collaborative CPD concludes,

“The link between teachers’ knowledge or skills, their actions in classrooms in relation to their pupils’ actions and pupil learning is complex, dynamic and often not directly observable.”

(Cordingley et al.,2003:59)

This echoes Frost and Durrant’s assertion that relationships between teachers’ activity and pupils’ learning are not linear; individual factors linked with particular outcomes are usually impossible to isolate (Frost and Durrant, 2002). One question posed in discussion during a recent OFSTED inspection of CPD at Canterbury Christ Church University College was whether impact resides with the teachers who participate in particular programmes and courses or with the school in which they put their ideas into practice; the tracking of impact as time moves on and teachers change roles and move schools would be fascinating but infinitely complicated. Interviews with teachers have suggested that teachers themselves are most cautious in this respect, voicing the complexity of their professional situations, classroom activity and interactions and links between leadership and learning (Frost and Durrant, 2002).

The challenge of agency and synergy

Bottery (2002) warns that the apparent shift to greater levels of trust as we are moved towards collaborative, sharing cultures may be a mechanical one rather than a philosophical one, a means of raising morale, improving retention and coercing teachers into implementing the latest initiatives. He notes that this is bound up with emphasis on performativity and accountability and results in ‘deprofessionalisation’ within ‘low trust cultures’. This may be the cause of unprecedented levels of stress and disillusionment (Galton and MacBeath, 2002; Johnson and Hallgarten, 2002; Price Waterhouse Cooper, 2001, all cited in Frost and Durrant, 2003). David Hargreaves, in considering the climate needed for transformation of schools, suggests that the teaching profession needs “…to establish innovation networks that capture the spirit and culture of internet hackers – the passion, the can-do, the collective sharing.” (Hargreaves, 2003:56) Yet Hargreaves also argues for a focus on a limited number of best practices that have been shown to ‘work’, are of high leverage (the amount of impact for given input) and can easily be transferred because they are not bound by context. Although he asserts that teachers must be creators of innovative practice in order to take ownership of reform, he warns against undisciplined knowledge creation and sharing. He recommends that teacher ‘champions’ be supported and rewarded as they share their knowledge through contacts and networks. How then is the balance achieved between identification of a selected group of ‘experts’ with a focus on priority areas for innovation and change, and the issues of ownership, involvement and passion needed to motivate all individual teachers within these ‘learning communities’ to adapt, change and learn? Frost and Durrant (2003) suggest that these issues can be addressed by focusing on enhancing teacher agency and, in strategic terms, working within the context of school, local and national development priorities to support teachers’ leadership of, and engagement in, school change.