Transformational Professional Learning

Making a Difference in Schools

Deborah M. Netolicky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000556544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Emerging from an education world that sees professional learning as a tool to positively shape teaching practice in order to improve student learning, Transformational Professional Learning elucidates professional learning that is transformational for teachers, school leaders, and schools.

Written from the unique 'pracademic' perspective of an author who is herself a practising teacher, school leader, and researcher, this book articulates the why and the what of professional learning. It acts as a bridge between research and practice by weaving scholarly literature together with the lived experience of the author and with the voices of those working in schools. It covers topics from conferences, coaching, and collaboration, to teacher standards and leadership of professional learning.

This book questions the ways in which professional learning is often wielded in educational settings and shows where teachers, school leaders, system leaders, and researchers can best invest their time and resources in order to support and develop the individuals, teams, and cultures in schools. It will be of great interest to teachers, leaders within schools, staff responsible for professional learning in school contexts, professional learning consultants, professional learning providers, and education researchers.

Chapter 1

Transformational professional learning

Around the world, teachers and school leaders are expected to professionally learn, and to be constantly committed to their professional development. Despite the acknowledged importance of professional learning, however, there are inequitable opportunities for professional learning, and approaches inconsistent with what is likely to have a positive impact on teachers and consequently students. In the USA many teachers do not have access to effective professional development (Darling-Hammond et al., 2009). The professional learning to which they do have access is often too short in duration to make a difference to knowledge or practice (Darling-Hammond et al., 2009). In Canada there are also uneven opportunities for professional learning across the education system (Campbell et al., 2017). In Australia, the report known colloquially as ‘Gonski 2.0,’ and more lengthily titled Through growth to achievement: Report of the review to achieve educational excellence in Australian schools (Gonski et al., 2018), outlines what research literature has been saying for some time: that teachers need to meaningfully collaborate, and that schools need to provide growth-focused professional learning environments in which teachers can interrogate and improve their practice, based on knowing research and knowing their students.

This chapter defines transformational professional learning and sets up the notions of transformation—via the shaping of professional beliefs and practices—as a useful frame for considering professional learning. It connects professional learning with identity and explores research literature around professional learning, including the trends, gaps, and cautions in this broad and contested field. In this way it provides a theoretical lens through which to view the professional learning approaches explored in Chapters 2 to 6.

Defining transformational professional learning

The focus on professional learning to improve teaching and learning points to crucial questions. How, why, and when do educators learn and grow? What learning leads educators to shift their teaching and leading beliefs and practices? As I noted in the Introduction, this book is concerned with effective professional learning, and more specifically transformational professional learning (not to be confused with Jack Mezirow’s transformative learning theory). So much in education promises to transform. Transformation implies change and that learning can be more than the acquisition of knowledge and skills (Illeris, 2014). Transformational is a seductive term that promises much, but is often used emptily. For the purpose of this book, an understanding of the word ‘transformational,’ in the context of professional learning, is key, providing the basis for a particular view of professional learning: one concerned with those experiences and processes that have an impact on what teachers and school leaders think, believe, feel, and do.

To tease out and clarify my meaning, here I draw on Ellie Drago-Severson’s (2009) description of adult learning as being informational, increasing knowledge and skills, or transformational, actively changing how a person knows through shifts in cognition, emotion, and capacity (Drago-Severson & Blum-DeStefano, 2018). While increasing knowledge and skills is important for the teaching profession, better knowledge and skills do not always change or improve practice. Someone might tell us an apparently better way of doing something, but unless we believe in a reason for a change, knowing a different way of doing something is unlikely to ensure that teachers or leaders change ingrained habits. Transformational learning shapes and re-forms the internal fabric of a person’s knowing, doing, being, and becoming. It creates shifts in knowledge, practice, or identity (Mockler, 2013). Transformational learning is about meaning making and is therefore tied to the notion of identity. It acknowledges that professional learning is connected to how individuals perceive, imagine, and enact their selves. Teachers learn in communities that enable them to develop: a vision for their practice; understandings about teaching, learning, and children; dispositions about how to use this knowledge; practices that allow them to enact their intentions and beliefs; and tools that support their efforts (Darling-Hammond et al., 2009). This kind of professional learning shifts educator professional learning from a focus on disseminating information to harnessing what is known about how people learn (Muijs et al., 2014), and what kind of learning actually influences beliefs and behaviour.

My definition of transformational professional learning is as follows.

Transformational professional learning shifts beliefs, and thereby behaviours, of professionals. It is tied to an individual’s personal and professional identity.

Unless their existing beliefs are engaged, teachers are likely to reject ideas that conflict with their current thinking, dismissing them as unrealistic or inappropriate to their own contexts (Timperley, 2008). Beliefs tend to change before practice, although sometimes being asked to do something practical (putting practice first) can change beliefs, if our experience of the outcomes of that practice shift our beliefs. A change in beliefs means a change in identity, in how we see and describe ourselves as professionals, as teachers, as leaders.

In the Preface to their edited collection on the transformational learning experiences of counsellors, Michelle Shuler, Elizabeth Keller-Dupree, and Katrina Cook (2017) explain that:

We can all likely identify that moment in life when real learning took place. Not just content learning, but real, applicable, feel-it-in-our-gut learning, that moved us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and others. These moments unearth our process, they profoundly impact us, and they shape who we are continually becoming. It is this type of learning that transforms our knowledge into deeply relevant experiences. It is in these moments that our personal self and our professional self intersect (p.vii).

Transformational learning involves moving the learner to a deeper understanding of self and other, and having a profound impact on the self (Shuler et al., 2017). The personal and professional self is inextricably connected.

So, transformational professional learning is learning that shifts cognition, emotion, and capacity. It is learning that changes teacher and school leader beliefs in order to change the macro and micro decisions that teachers make in their practice. It is personal as well as professional. It is human and complex.

The role of identity

Transformational learning is deeply connected with the notion of identity. As educators, our narratives of self-identity are essential for our professional growth. Nicole Mockler (2013) argues that, in discussions of professional learning for educators, using a lens of identity is more useful than one of teacher quality. It means looking at who people are rather than how they perform. However, the body of scholarship on teacher professional identity has been called an underdeveloped and confused field (Bridges et al., 2012) limited to primarily traditional routes to becoming a teacher and traditional classroom experiences, leaving out those involved in alternative routes such as fast-track teacher training (Thomas & Mockler, 2018). It is often focused on the teacher, sometimes on the principal, and rarely on the middle leader.

The term identity needs teasing out, as it is a slippery concept (Lawler, 2014) lacking a clear definition (Mockler, 2011). Those writing about and researching professional identity can embrace the complexity of identity’s many interconnected facets, but should aim for precision in their explanations of their approaches (Lawler, 2014). Some researchers support the notion that professional identities are fixed or formed early, but much research demonstrates that identities are flexible, multiple, and continually shaped by contexts and relationships. Not only do identities shift, but they are multifaceted and situation-specific. That is, each of us has a fluid and ever-changing set of identities (Netolicky, 2019). We call into action the identity appropriate to the situation in which we are currently functioning. This book aligns with theorists who conceptualise identities as pluralistic, multiple, overlapping, and intersecting constructions, operated by the individual and changing over time (Holland et al., 1998; Lawler, 2014). Within this frame, professional identities are fluid amalgams that are profoundly linked to practice.

For the purpose of this book, my definition of identity is as follows.

Identity is the situated, ongoing process through which we make sense of ourselves, to ourselves and to others.

That is, identity is continual and changing, not fixed. It is a process, not a product. It is embedded in social, organisational, and economic contexts. It is about making sense of ourselves in the worlds in which we live, and is operated by the individual. Here I draw on Dorothy Holland et al.’s (1998) description of identities as “imaginings of self in worlds of action” (p. 5), and Sue Lasky’s (2005) argument that identities are how teachers define themselves to themselves and to others. We are never finished, never foreclose on an identity, but fluidly negotiate our self-perceptions in a variety of contexts. We imagine and enact our identities by negotiating and reimaging our past, present, and potential future selves. Professional growth is ongoing and we are always becoming; becoming who we are, what we believe, and how we operate.

Identities are simultaneously individual and collaborative. We construct our versions of ourselves based on our relationships with others, with organisations, and with contexts. The connection between self and context is what Laura Desimone (2009) talks about when she outlines the concept of coherence in professional learning. That is, the extent to which teacher learning is consistent with the teacher’s knowledge and beliefs, and also the extent to which professional learning is consistent with education policies and reforms.

Teachers and school leaders need to feel a sense of ideological ‘fit’ with their schools and education systems. Individuals want to identify with the collective identity.

In my PhD study, the teacher and leader participants showed the desire to align with a team or organisation’s identity and were attracted to its purpose. While Peter Gronn (2003) suggests that individuals rework their perspectives in relation to their contexts, my PhD study (Netolicky, 2016a) found that, while context affects professional identity, individuals also choose their contexts to fit their individual identities. That is, contexts shape individuals, individuals shape contexts, and individuals can choose contexts with which they feel an identity fit, or leave contexts in which they feel they do not fit. A sense of belonging and self-authenticity was important. My PhD participants indicated that they stayed in schools that resonated with their senses of professional self, and left schools in which they did not feel aligned with organisational purpose and action. All of the participants in my study expressed the need for a sense of fit between individual professional identity and the school context. This suggests that school-based interventions, including professional learning, should carefully consider how to harness identities and internal purpose. Schools need to be clear, consistent, and communicative about their organisational identities, including values and purpose, thereby allowing staff to connect and ‘fit.’

Unfortunately, in today’s education world of hyper accountability, surveillance, and limiting standards, educators’ identities are often reduced down to a limited and limiting range of options. Those things at the core of learning that transform cognition and identity—critical reflection, dialogue with self and others, awareness of context, and authentic relationships (Illeris, 2014)—are often put in the ‘too hard’ or the ‘we’d love to but we don’t have the time’ basket by teachers, school leaders, and schools. This book acts as a reminder to systems, schools, and those working in schools, that transformational learning should be a priority, for the learning of our students, but also for the wellbeing, energy, motivation, and cohesive experience of our teachers and school leaders. Those designing and implementing professional learning reforms would benefit from engaging with teacher and school leader identities, with the whole person, and all the entwined personal and professional complexity that entails. Considering professional identity alongside professional learning allows for the exploration of what it is that shapes educators’ development of professional identity perceptions, what shifts those self-perceptions, and in what ways schools and systems might work with a greater understanding of educator identities when designing and implementing professional learning.

Pursuing transformational professional learning that engages with educators’ identities, beliefs, and emotions, as well as their cognition, leads to learning-enriched schools like those described by Susan Rosenholtz (1991) in which “an abundant spirit of continuous improvement” seems to “hover school-wide, because no one ever stopped learning to teach” (p. 208). She describes educators in effective schools as “clumped together in a critical mass, like uranium fuel rods in a reactor” (p. 208), illustrating school communities as hubs of continuous collaborative learning in which individuals work alongside one another for a common purpose. It is worth considering, from the perspectives of teachers and school leaders themselves, what changes their beliefs in order for them to embrace education reform or reshape their professional practices.

What research says about professional learning

Professional learning is a heavily-researched area in the field of education. There is so much written about professional learning for teachers that it can seem like there is a confusing overload of information. Among all this research, trends have emerged on what constitutes meaningful learning for teac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: About this book
• 1. Transformational professional learning
• 2. Speakers, courses, and conferences
• 3. Key life moments as professional learning
• 4. Collaborative professional learning
• 5. Mentoring and coaching
• 6. Self-directed professional learning
• 7. The role of professional standards in professional learning
• 8. Leadership for professional learning
• Conclusion: What next in professional learning
• Appendices
• Index