Over the next 3 days, we will be sharing insights from this year’s Better Learning conference in Cambridge. Today, Senior Editor Jo Timerick from the teacher development team shares how the theme of leadership led the opening day of the conference.
On Monday, the second Better Learning Conference began at Churchill College, Cambridge. Churchill boasts one of the most diverse global alumni communities within the University and 32 Nobel Prize winners. With this heritage of diversity, innovation and leadership, the college proved to be the perfect setting to discuss this year’s key themes of innovation and leadership.
Leadership habits
Opening the conference was Andy Buck, founder of Leadership Matters and #honk, with his talk on leadership habits. Starting with some maths and audience participation (both firmly in my ‘zone of panic’!) Andy demonstrated how easily habits can be formed and how difficult they can be to break. 4090 +100 = 5000 … doesn’t it? Well, it does – if you’re in a room with many others and have been adding up sums involving patterns of thousands, chanting the answers in unison as instructed by the leader! The key lesson was ‘what you value is what you get’, so make sure that you communicate clearly what you value when giving direction or guidance to others.
Moving from maths to Shakespeare (my ‘zone of comfort’ – phew!) where an impressive recital of Mark Antony’s eulogy after the death of Caesar provided a masterclass in how to successfully influence others through establishing empathy, repeating key ideas supported by evidence and enabling your audience to reflect and ‘make up their own mind‘. But the most revelatory moments for me came in the discussions of typical approaches to leadership and how these should be challenged.
‘Pacesetting’ or ‘directive’ types of approach, traditionally associated with leadership, have been shown to have a negative impact while ‘visionary’ and ‘affiliative’ approaches have far more positive effects. In terms of directing professional development, focussing on fewer points for improvement which can then be more targeted, empowering others to reflect on their own needs, in-depth coaching and guided practice and offering more frequent intervals for progress reviews are all demonstrated to be more effective than typical practices; something which Vic Richardson revisited in his closing plenary.
Creating safe speaking environments
Next on my list was the talk by Dr Claire Dembry and Leslie Hendra on creating ‘safe’ speaking environments for learners. This informative research-based talk highlighted one of the great paradoxes of the ELT classroom; how highly learners value speaking as a measure of success, despite the fact that the large majority are reluctant to participate in speaking practice in class due to feelings of shyness and shame. For teachers, this reluctance can lead to difficulties in being able to give meaningful feedback. There might also be a ‘creeping-in’ of the learners L1 or the dominance of more confident students, as well as a negative impact on motivation. These are all conditions which can further fuel the ‘fear’ and make students feel unsafe.
Leslie Hendra, co-author of English Unlimited, presented 5 key and interconnected criteria which enable the nurturing of a ‘safe’ speaking classroom; a friendly, non-threatening environment; high-level of peer interaction, collaborative task types; relevant topic choices and feedback which is scaffolded, targeted and reinforces the positives as well as raising awareness of errors. Having this criteria presented along with some more practical examples prompted me to reflect more on my own time teaching and consider whether my speaking classes had been ‘safe’ for my students; room for improvement, I suspect!
Picking up on the leadership thread of the conference, Claire and Leslie closed by offering some suggestions which could help decision makers to foster a more effective approach to speaking, which in turn will benefit teachers and students. For me, seeing greater teacher support around speaking activities was really heartening. Equally important were the proposals to champion speaking in the curriculum, use a ‘flipped’ approach to allow more time in syllabuses for speaking opportunities and ask the students what they actually want or need, especially when they ‘go into the wild’ and use their English in the real world.
Developing teachers for stronger results
My day ended with the talk Developing Teachers for Stronger Results by Vic Richardson. This talk was particularly close to my heart, not only because of the focus on teacher development, but also because I worked for a number of years at Embassy English under Vic’s guidance. Immediately, Vic made plain the link between effective teacher development and improved student outcomes. Drawing on a wealth of research around the UK state system as well as global educational research, he reaffirmed something I have long believed – that effective teacher development is a long-term investment which relies on the collaboration and contribution of ideas of those being developed.
Despite these findings, teacher development often remains an act of compliance which is most easily fulfilled through one-off ‘one-size-fits-all’ INSET sessions which reflect the needs of the institution rather than those of the teachers. It seems a sad irony that when dealing with teacher education, we tend to adopt practices which we would never condone using with our students; the Gates Foundation (2014) stated that only one in three (30%) of teachers chose most or all of their professional development opportunities whilst nearly one in five (18%) reported that they never had a say in their development – truly shocking. Could this be part of the reason why so many teachers do not feel that teacher development is helpful to them?
Thankfully, researchers such as Hattie and Cordingley and organisations like the Gates Foundation and the Teacher Development Trust have identified characteristics of successful teacher development. Whilst the acronyms vary, the fundamental principles are the same: sustained, long-term investment; personalised and relevant to the teachers and the context; applied through learning by doing; allow opportunities for reflection and increased mindfulness; encourage collaboration and sharing learning between colleagues and finally demonstrate some form of impact not only upon the teachers, but also the learners. For us, at the Press, this is SPARCI, which we’re sure you’ll be hearing a lot more about soon!
Vic closed the day by giving everyone a lot of food for thought. The first day certainly set a high bar for the rest of the conference!