Summer 2007

Teachers and Teaching

Teachers are learners too

Some of the patterns and insights that continue to emerge through the South Australian ‘Learning to Learn’ program are particularly about the power of teacher and leader identity in holding us to old ways of working. Margot Foster reports.

The South Australian Learning to Learn (L2L) program has worked with over 170 schools and preschools and thousands of teachers over the last eight years. It began with a view that transformation of schooling, rather than improvement, was needed.

We need a metamorphosis of education—from the cocoon a butterfly should emerge.
Improvement does not give us a butterfly, only a faster caterpillar.

BH Banathy, 1995

Thus the program design was informed by a belief in:

• constructivist learning principles
• teachers as learners first
• a spirit of positive intent—beyond deficit paradigms and assumptions
• learners having maximum autonomy through minimal prescription
• accountability reframed as an opportunity for learning.

One of the most significant learnings is that no amount of teacher training will achieve the change needed. Every one of us has to make our own sense of what knowledge and learning is. Placing this responsibility and autonomy back with teachers has reaped significant outcomes:

improved student engagement and wellbeing, enhanced student achievement, revitalised teacher professionalism and pedagogy and built system wide learning about change and professional growth.

Assessing the Impact of Phases I and II: Learning to Learn 1999–;2004

Core Learning Program

At the heart of L2L is an intensive Core Learning Program that has involved numerous educators from around the globe to learn about the process of learning. This is deliberately designed as a learning program, not a training program. It assumes that teachers and leaders have considerable experience and a ‘wisdom of practice’ that is as valuable as academic research. It does not intend to train teachers in methods or provide programs for them to implement—it provides insights, research, ideas from colleagues and gives space and time to consider how this informs (or not) their own values, beliefs and practices—their pedagogy.

This underpinning idea in L2L—that teachers and leaders need professional space to re-engage with the art and science of their work—forms the basis of our approach. Teachers are not viewed as technicians who simply require training and additional strategies to bolt onto their practice. It is a respectful stance and requires teachers and leaders to own the shifts they make through the decisions they take in their learning and change journeys. This distinction is fundamental to the change process and acknowledges the mutually informing relationship between practitioners and educational research.

One simple, but powerful, framework by Dr Yoram Harpaz shows the dominant patterns of schooling in the ‘Grand pictures’ and what we’re working towards for greater engagement of learners, in the ‘New conceptual picture’.

Adapted from Harpaz, 2002, pp. 1–26

I had no idea how dominant I was in the classroom—I could have sworn that kid’s voices were there at least 50 per cent of the time. It was a shock to see the reality of it.

Secondary teacher—metropolitan high school

This is a common story—many teachers and leaders realise that ‘teaching as telling’ is so deeply embedded in their routines and rituals of engagement with learners that it is impossible to see. The old picture of schooling becomes functionally invisible.

Leaders as learners

In the Core Learning Program, leaders focus on the question: ‘What does it take to lead for learning?’ Through regular Learning Circles convened by the University of South Australia over three-year periods, leaders also find it hard to let go of ‘being the expert’, feeling the need to give all the answers, rather than building the conditions for staff involvement in learning.

Suddenly instead of ‘knowing about’ being invitational, I felt what it would mean, look like, sound like…and knew that I had said the words only as a strategy to get others involved and not as an authentic invitation into learning. For me this deeper understanding of the idea of being invitational repositioned so much I thought I knew about leadership and leadership culture. Before, I would have said authentic behaviour is important, I now think authentic intent is imperative.

Primary years leader, metropolitan primary school

It’s interesting that the parallels between what we expect teachers to create with learners has become just as important for leaders to create with teachers. We talk about this idea as the ‘fractal’ nature of these shifts. Fractals are mathematical patterns, much like Russian dolls—where every time you look inside the pattern you find the same pattern within. For us it is resoundingly clear that this learning about what we need to do with our children is equally important for the adults in our school communities and the educational system as a whole.

To explore the routines, rituals and beliefs that hold us ‘stuck’, we need to go deeper into our professional identities. This, we have learned, is far more important to changing the way we conceive of and work with learners, than adding strategies to our teaching repertoire.

Teachers in L2L consistently report they will never think in the same ways again.

Prior to Learning to Learn, I now realise, my teaching would swing like a pendulum, depending on which conferences I’d been to. But now I have worked out what is important to me as a teacher, what I believe is important to teach, how [students] learn and why they’re learning it.

Primary school teacher, metropolitan primary school

Our fear of ‘not knowing’, our need to give answers and be ‘right’ as teachers and leaders greatly inhibits learning and change. We find this to be key in holding us to the simplistic transmission role of teacher or leader as teller. By engaging in a professional learning program that asks teachers to explore the learning process and themselves as learners, teachers become more comfortable and familiar with the discomfort and ‘uncertainty’ of learning.

L2L recognises that effective teaching is both learner- and learning-centred. What we mean by this is that rather than just cover the curriculum, we focus first on the learners and ask ourselves ‘who are you, what do you know and think now, what do you need, what would help you develop a clear understanding of this valued learning?’ It also recognises the centrality of teacher–student relationships to allow the risk-taking space for learning.

The great teachers are those who are best at helping students gain deep understanding through personal experience, and know the joy and wonder and power of learning itself.

Geoffrey Caine, 2004

L2L asks teachers to make visible and question fundamental beliefs like:

• Do I believe all children can learn?
• Do I see it as my role to ensure this?
• If I give up simplistic ‘telling’ instructional approaches—what do I do?

And for leaders:

• Do I believe that all teachers can learn?
• Do I see this as my prime role?
• What would invitational leadership look like for me?

How can we possibly ask teachers to do this for their learners unless they experience it themselves? We’ve learnt that teacher and leader learning is at the heart of transformational change of schools as learning communities.

References

Banathy, B H (1995). ‘A systems view and systems design in education’ in P Jenlink (ed.), Systemic Change, Touchstones for the Future School, IRI/Skylight Publishing and Training, Palatine, Illinois.

Caine, G (2004). Learning to Learn Inaugural Conference Phase III, Adelaide, South Australia, www.learningtolearn.sa.edu.au/

Department of Education and Children’s Services (2004). Assessing the Impact of Phases I and II: Learning to Learn 1999–2004, DECS Publishing, Hindmarsh, SA.

Harpaz, Y (2002). Teaching and Learning in Community of Thinking, The Branco Weiss Institute for the Development of Thinking, Jerusalem.

Margot Foster is the manager of Learning to Learn in the Department of Education and Children’s Services, South Australia.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au