In ‘Unleashing great teaching’, a talk recorded at this year’s Better Learning Conference in Cambridge, Bridget Clay discusses frameworks around professional learning, as well as ways to overcome innate biases that can affect the way we take on information.
Bridget is a former teacher who works with schools on their leadership and development. She has advised a number of organisations, including the Department for Education and recently co-authored ‘Unleashing Great Teaching’, a book which outlines the culture and processes for great learning for teachers and students. She is Head of Programme for Leading Together at Teach First and was previously Director of School Programmes at the Teacher Development Trust.
What biases affect our professional learning?
“Learning something new is difficult,” says Bridget. “The things we invest time and energy in are often the things we value more and want to stick to.”
There are a number of biases that can affect our ability to learn. Some examples are confirmation bias, which suggests we hear what we want to hear, and the ‘halo effect’ whereby we are most likely to believe those that we like or favour rather than someone we do not.
Having a really clear purpose
Quite often professional development topics are grouped together, but it’s important to consider four key levels of impact that can affect learning. When planning your learning, you should assess these four areas and how you currently address them in your day-to-day practice.
1) Awareness – this is the starting point to building into deeper knowledge. The more aware of a topic we are, the easier it is to understand new information which relates to it.
2) Procedural expertise – this could be as simple as being confident in the method you take to teaching a topic, using an assessment system or how you first introduce and explain something to a group of learners.
3) Deliberative expertise – this looks at the complexity of planning a programme. Here, you have time to consider challenges and outlying factors that can affect your programme.
4) Adaptive expertise – a need to think on your feet and manage your approach to best suit what’s going on in the classroom at the time. This is one of the hardest areas to change when assessing professional development because there are many biases working against you.
Planning and structure
When planning professional learning, we should think of a programme as a whole before planning individual activities. This allows time to work out areas that might need more focus than others before getting fixated on creating a really good activity that may take up more time than it should.
Expertise
Collaborating with other teachers who have expertise in the area you want to focus on will undoubtedly help. We need expert input to disrupt more entrenched practices that can bring our innate biases into practice. This is because expertise can help to challenge preconceived opinions and open someone’s eyes to a new way of thinking.
However, it is important to consider the value of this expertise before investing in it for your programme.
Culture
Everyone has an opinion on what makes a good culture and context plays a big part in that. Research, conducted by Kraft & Papay in 2014, found that new teachers always improve quite quickly – no matter their environment. But this learning tends to plateau the longer someone is in their career if they are working in a low quality teaching environment.
Determining factors include: the amount of professional development someone is exposed to, principal leadership support and how quickly a raised concern is addressed and the school culture – whether it’s a culture of mutual respect/openness and whether there is a general commitment to student achievement.
To learn more on this topic and discover the building blocks of professional learning, watch Bridget’s full talk recording, found below.
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