Developing a Professional Learning model that works
School leaders, what is your professional learning plan this year? Having worked with many schools to support change in literacy practices, we wanted to share some of our learnings about how to make professional learning most effective to support you making changes in your school practice. We have some ideas that might just help 2024 be a winning professional learning year for you!
Dream big, act small
Baby steps! Not something that passionate leaders might want to hear (we get it!), but for real change to happen in schools we need a vision and then a step-by-step plan. You might have a vision of ‘Let’s change how we teach reading’. A worthy goal, nice work! But this is a huge undertaking that might be overwhelming for your team to implement.
Instead, we suggest you pick one thing…for example, you might start by introducing explicit phonics instruction. A core piece of the literacy puzzle. Get that going daily in your classrooms and allow a term or two of getting this practice right. Learning takes time and teachers need to be allowed to feel confident in their new approaches before we throw the next piece of learning at them. Every small positive change you make is going to impact student outcomes!
Walk the walk
The best models of professional learning we have seen are where the leaders lead from the front. We have worked with quite a few schools where the leaders take on the training first. This allows the leadership team to consider the learning in their own context, and foresee areas that might be challenging for staff, students and/or the community. Building leadership capacity is key so that the team can be united and empowered when supporting the teachers across the school. SPELD NSW offers consulting to leadership, leadership-only training, coaching, and lesson observations with leaders and support to develop programs and lesson plans.
Choose your champions
You have a vision; your leaders are trained and now you need to implement your planned changes. What next? In smaller settings, you might be able to have everybody implement the changes all at once. In other settings, an opt-in or pilot approach to your new program or pedagogy may be more successful in the long run. This is not only to see ‘if’ your new approach works but to test out ‘how’ it will work in your school.
A staged implementation allows leaders to hone their coaching and feedback skills, troubleshoot and give teachers a voice. This is key! You might select a stage or year group or individual teachers across different year groups to be your champions of change. Once they have tried and tested the new learning, they can be part of the team leading change across the school.
Let there be learning!
Now with a team in your school trained and empowered you can consider the learning plan for individual teachers and teams. When you send teachers on courses, or you book in-school professional learning, it should not be the driver of change. Teachers attending professional learning should have a clear understanding of why they are at the course and how that learning fits into what is happening in their school. At SPELD NSW our Professional Learning team’s role is to support knowledge development, provide models of practice, and ideas on how to best use resources and strategies to improve student outcomes. The leaders can then take that learning and help teachers contextualise it.
Partner-up for planning
Finding a partner to support you in implementing any change in your school can be critical for success. SPELD NSW can help you with this! We have great experience working with schools from all sectors and we would love to support you in developing your professional learning plan. If you would like this support, reach out to our professional learning team and we can support you to implement evidence-based change in your school!
Join us for our Leadership Professional Learning Courses – Teaching Reading in the Early Years and Making Spelling Stick!
