Leading Professional Learning Groups: a reflection

This year I have led a group of six fabulous colleagues who are all inquiring into their practice with a focus on building key competency skills with year 10 students in order to lift academic achievement.  We are a team looking at key competencies and achievement through the lens of Technology, Mathematics, Physical Education & Health, English, and Assisted Learning. 

We started with the model of the spiral of inquiry that Suzi Gould shared with us at a PLD session in January of this year.  Lots of teachers with leadership roles across our CoL came together for her session, and started to plumb the depths of what a rich picture you could build from looking at data from the school, from student voice and from whanau voice.

From Term Two onwards, each of our CoL leaders in our school took on leadership of a group focused on one of the school annual plan targets.  Interest in the year 10 target around key competencies and academic achievement was so high that Jayne and I took a year 10 group each.

As I write now, I look back on what I'm really pleased with and what I would like to do differently next year.  Some of this reflection is just for my own experience, and some of it will comprise feedback later this term on how we might all approach this process a little differently in 2019.

The biggest benefit in my view has been about breaking down the silos.  We built up a team as we met almost every Tuesday morning for two terms, and we had lots of learning conversations which were focused on what is working and what we could try next.  The feedback on the benefits of working as a team were positive and really validated this approach for me.

There is no doubt in my mind that teaching is a job for magicians.  We tweak and squeeze and find ways to fit more in a day than we would dare itemise into a list, and then we still find that there is more to be done.  So I absolutely expected that teachers would arrive some Tuesday mornings feeling that inquiry was not something they could fit in, and indeed that happened sometimes.  My job at that point is to help my colleague(s) see that they are further on than they thought, and to help them identify one specific next step they can take and make a time for it to be done and the results shared.  Often we made a time to meet 1:1 or 2:1 to help make this process work.  One of my goals was that more teachers would see that inquiry is something that they can do and have done this year.  Signs are promising on this, though we haven't finished our inquiry write ups that will give me concrete evidence - yet.

Three teachers in my PLG are working in the Assisted Learning Department and we learnt so much together.  I really valued the long conversations we had asking each other questions and building up knowledge of different systems, ways of tracking progress and needs in our school and how we can talk an increasingly common language.  Kia ora, Annette, Tara & Jason.

Helen, Ben & Shelley all shared their projects with me and continue to do so.  We share the same year 10 class group and I'm grateful for the opportunity to learn more about how my year 10 students respond to different learning opportunities outside of English. 

We used a very long document that had lots of options for tracking our inquiries, and I am definitely keen to simplify that for 2019.  The other key change I would like to make for next year is to include data points and discussions in our meetings programme.  I think we could have strengthened our process if we identified our own data points (whether pastoral data or academic data and I would suggest that using both is the best step) early on in our inquiries, and then tracked these and shared our progress as a team, that would have created more robust inquiries. 

Next week we meet to share our inquiry write ups as a group.  I've got some 1:1 meetings lined up this week to support teachers with their inquiry write ups which will help us all be ready for some deeper level sharing and reflection in week three.  After that we have the wine and cheese session where all the groups' inquiries are on display boards and we wander round reading them all.

As an English teacher married to a very talented dyslexic scientist, I'm conscious of the impact of written inquiry reports on teachers across the school.  I have seen many teachers in recent years experience frustration and anger about inquiry, not because they are not interested in inquiring into their practice, but because the write up aspect is so far away from how they best use their brains.  This year I have offered support 1:1 and 1:2 which has helped teachers, but there is also room to find/develop another tool for conducting inquiries.  Another project for another year...