Teacher Learning and Leadership

Of, By, and For Teachers

Ann Lieberman, Carol Campbell, Anna Yashkina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138941885
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317376118
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teacher Learning and Leadership asserts that teachers should be put at the center of creating, developing, organizing, implementing, and sharing their own ideas for school change rather than being passive recipients of knowledge from the outside. It argues that there is tremendous potential for the good of students and the professionalization of teaching, when teachers work collaboratively to develop their own and their colleagues' professional knowledge and practices and are supported by school and system leaders, unions and government.

The book draws on the groundbreaking work of the Teacher Learning and Leadership Program in Ontario and uses an in-depth case study to illustrate its points. It demonstrates how professional development built around collaboration, teacher leadership, curriculum development, technology and pedagogy can be organized in a way that redistributes control and responsibility to teachers, thereby instilling a genuine sense of pride and accomplishment in their work.

This book is a sincere outreach from the authors who advocate for the professional development of, by and for teachers as individuals and, importantly, as a collective profession. The authors argue that projects like the TLLP (a joint initiative between the Ontario Ministry of Education and the Ontario Teachers' Federation) can radically, and positively, transform teachers' knowledge, skills and practices. The book provides an important model for school change led by teachers, rather than experts, in partnership with school and system leaders and is a fascinating read for all those concerned with teaching, teacher development and educational change.

1 POLICIES AND PRACTICES FOR TEACHERS' LEARNING AND LEADERSHIP

DOI: 10.4324/9781315673424-2

We begin our discussion of teachers’ professional learning and leadership of, by, and for teachers by considering changes in policy approaches intended to improve educational systems and the rising interest in teachers’ practices and leadership. Throughout this book, we bring together evidence, debates, and the latest thinking from research, practice, and policy. As a writing team, we are currently or have previously been students, teachers, leaders, researchers, academics, government officials, and political advisors working in schools, districts, and entire education systems at provincial/state and national levels, as well as engaging in international collaborations and contributions. Genuinely enabling teachers to lead their own learning and practice requires the integration of changes in policies and practice drawing on professional knowledge and research evidence.

We begin by tracing developments in policy makers’ interest in improving educational practices and approaches to the substance and style of policy-making over time. Approaches to policies for teacher quality have evolved over time and in different contexts. We are now at a time when a new potential for teacher-led educational improvement in collaboration with partners throughout the education system is emerging and gaining momentum. We propose that teachers’ learning and leadership requires enabling teachers to be agents at the center of educational changes rather than the subjects or recipients of externally mandated reforms only. Government, district, and school leaders become partners in supporting, co-learning, and enabling professional practices. This is as much about a new way of developing and implementing policy, as it is about the substance of policy. It requires consideration of the changing nature of teachers’ practices and their opportunities to become and be leaders of educational improvements. It is about educational change and improvement led by and for teachers in partnership with educators throughout the education system—school, district, state/province, nation—and indeed in an increasingly interconnected international network of teachers seeking to be the advocates, experts, and leaders of educational practices and improvements locally and globally.

Policies for Educational Change: Governing Teachers' Practices, School, and System Improvement

Since the origins of formal schooling, there has been interest in what policies are required to enable access to, and quality of, educational experiences and outcomes for students. The existence and persistence of inequalities in educational experiences within schooling and in outcomes for students is a long-standing concern. Low levels of educational achievement, not graduating from high school, and/or large gaps in the performance of different student groups have serious consequences for an individual’s life chances and for wider economic, social, and community development. There are compelling arguments about the importance of educational change for moral (Fullan, 2010), social justice (Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009), and economic (OECD, 2010) imperatives. Teachers are, and have always been, key to supporting students’ learning and success and also to wider school and system improvement.

However, the governance of education and the content of educational change have evolved over time, including changing attitudes and approaches to developing teachers’ practices. Hargreaves and Shirley (2009, 2012) have proposed that there have been Four Ways of educational change. In brief:

• a First Way of state support and professional freedom, of innovation but also inconsistency;
• a Second Way of market competition and educational standardization in which professional autonomy is lost; and
• a Third Way that tries to navigate between and beyond the market and the state and balance professional autonomy with accountability (Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009, p. xi).

As we will discuss later, Hargreaves and Shirley (2009, 2012) propose an alternative—a Fourth Way—grounded in professionalism, democratic engagement, and partnerships connected to an inspiring and coherent purpose for public education. Each of the Ways, along with related developments in research, policy, and practice, have signalled changing attitudes, approaches, controversies, and possibilities for teachers’ learning and leadership that is of, by, and for teachers.

According to Hargreaves and Shirley (2009), the First Way emerged at the end of World War II and lasted until the mid-1970s. It was a time of investment in the welfare state, human rights movements, trust in public services, and professional autonomy for teachers. The government’s role was to provide overarching legislation and resources to establish or develop the public education systems. Educators had significant freedom and autonomy over the content of education, their professional practices, and day-to-day work. It was a time of both “innovation and inconsistency” (Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009, p. 3), but with a lack of attention to building capacity and leadership development, there were “huge variations in focus and quality” and “unevenness in implementation” (Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009, p. 5), resulting in parents, politicians, and the public becoming concerned and frustrated.

By the 1970s, significant developments in educational research concerning school effectiveness were emerging also. While the origins of studies of school “effects” indicated the larger influence of students’ background characteristics (Coleman et al., 1966) and the limited impact of schools on students’ achievement gains and, in particular, persisting inequalities for students from different racial, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds ( Jencks et al., 1972), methodological developments and empirical studies since the mid-1970s have drawn more attention to those factors within schools that appear to make a difference in improving student success, regardless of background. As Reynolds and Creemers (1990, p. 1) proposed, School Effectiveness Research (SER) has become: “based around the central idea that schools matter, that schools do have a major effect upon children’s development and that, to put it simply, schools make a difference.”

Although this focus on how schools make a difference has been contested (e.g. Thrupp, 1999), there is a considerable body of evidence examining what factors appear to contribute to the effectiveness of schools, particularly high achieving schools as compared with low achieving schools with similar student intakes. Although there are many variations in the “characteristics” and/or “processes” of effective schools, the importance of features associated with teachers and teaching are common. For example, Edmonds’s (1979) seminal study of effective schools included a focus on teaching and learning as one of five key characteristics. Later work has built on, expanded, and refined the characteristics of effective schools. For example, Levine and Lezotte (1990) and Lezotte’s (1991) model includes “instructional leadership.” Sammons, Hillman, and Mortimore’s (1995) factors include concentration on teaching and learning and purposeful teaching. In considering not only “What makes a ‘good’ school?,” but also “How do we make more schools ‘good’?” (Reynolds, Sammons, De Fraine, Townsend, and Van Damme, 2011, p. 1), the processes of effective teaching and of developing professional learning and skills have been identified (Teddlie and Reynolds, 2000). Alongside these research developments in school effectiveness, school improvement research has emerged also to emphasize the importance of both committing to and managing the processes towards better schooling so that improvement can be sustained in the long run (Reynolds and Stoll, 1996).

Beginning with the Second Way of the 1980s, evidence concerning school effectiveness and the belief that reforming education would make a difference to educational outcomes began to take hold among policy makers. According to Hargreaves and Shirley (2009), the Second Way increased government centralization of educational content and operation. Professional autonomy was replaced by prescription of curriculum, assessments and intended outcomes and accountability to parents and the public as consumers of schools. Hargreaves and Shirley (2009) propose that the introduction of a National Curriculum in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland through the 1988 Education Reform Act was a hallmark of the Second Way. While the work of teachers was considered central, teachers were not the owners and developers of these policies; rather, they were the implementers of government-established curriculums, testing, and linked teaching approaches.

The limitation of the First Way was that professional autonomy resulted in positive innovation, but also inconsistencies and ineffectiveness. The Second Way solution was for the government to become more centralist and prescriptive; the downside was top-down mandates without attention to engaging and supporting education professionals. Enter the Third Way with policies intended to “combine the security of a reformed welfare state, along with renewed respect for professionals and professionalism, with the entrepreneurial energy of innovative spirits of markets” (Hargreaves and Shirley, 2012, p. 6). Within the Third Way, emerging in the 1990s and continuing to the present, two major developments have informed policy direction concerning educational improvement and teachers’ practices: first, the scale of educational change has expanded to entire systems (states/provinces/countries); and second, the primary foci of change have become teachers and teaching.

Hence, the purpose, goals, and scale of educational change have become “bigger” (Hargreaves et al., 2009, p. xii) with the rise of Whole System Reform and large-scale educational change (Fullan, 2000, 2009, 2010). In the inaugural issue of the Journal of Educational Change, Fullan (2000) heralded “The Return of Large-Scale Reform” involving: whole school reform, whole district reform, and state/national reform. Almost a decade later, Fullan (2009, p.101) suggested that 2003–09 was the period when “large-scale reform comes of age” with the focus expanding from one of scale to include attention to the system involving the interactions and inter-relationships at all levels of the education system. Indeed, Fullan (2009, p.112) concludes that on entering the second decade of the twenty-first century, “system reform is indeed beginning to come of age.” Fullan’s (2010, p. 4) “Big Ideas for Whole System Reform” are:

1. All children can learn.
2. Only a small number of key priorities.
3. Resolute leadership/stay on message.
4. Collective capacity.
5. Strategies with precision.
6. Intelligent accountability.
7. All means all.

While all seven ideas are important, the key feature of Whole System Reform is “all means all”: all students and schools plus all people employed and/or engaged with the education system.

In large part due to rising interest in international testing and benchmarking (Schleicher, 2009) and research on the educational strategies, practices, and outcomes in different national contexts (e.g. Barber and Mourshed, 2007; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Fullan, 2010; Jensen et al., 2012; Mourshed, Chijioke, and Barber, 2010), there is increasing policy interest in the content and processes of “Whole System” educational change at national and/or state/province levels. Both educational quality (high standards of achievement) and equity (low differences in achievement for different students and schools) are the priority goals.

Discussions of Whole System Reform generally combine an overarching theory of action with attention to change processes (Fullan, 2009, 2010). There is no one-size-fits-all approach to educational improvement and there are considerable variations among and within countries. While authors vary in the details (e.g. Barber and Mourshed, 2007; Fullan, 2009, 2010; Jensen et al., 2012; Mourshed, Chijioke, and Barber, 2010), we identify “Whole System” educational improvement as including:

• a central focus on improving teaching and learning including supporting conditions such as leadership development, attention to equity, curriculum and assessments;
• a small number of ambitious but relevant and realistic goals, widely communicated, understood, and acted on;
• effective allocation of resources aligned to the priority goals and strategies;
• a sustained focus on key goals and linked priority strategies while managing potential distractions from the main reform agenda;
• capable senior leaders committed to sustained prioritization of educational improvement plus engagement and development of leaders and leadership throughout the education system;
• high standards and expectations for all students and schools to achieve combined with use of data to identify current performance, monitor improvements and target where further improvement is required;
• a combination of valuing and being transparent about existing professional practice while also holding high expectations for further improvements in professional practice and student learning;
• an emphasis on, and support for, respecting, valuing and developing professional capacity (individual and collective) through a system of recruitment, training, development, recognition, improved working conditions, and career progression for educators;
• a commitment to continuous improvement and use of evidence to identify and spread effective practices and innovate succeeding ones;
• strong attention to procedures for delivering strategies and improvements in practices and outcomes (Campbell, 2015a, pp. 73–74).

Central to these international movements has been the phrase “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers” (OECD, 2010, p. 3), promoted by reports from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and from international research on educational systems that have improved over time (Barber and Mourshed, 2007; Mourshed, Chijioke, and Barber, 2010). In light of evidence that teachers and teaching are central to school effectiveness and improvement—indeed some evidence suggests that teacher effectiveness is the most important element within a school (National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 1996; Sanders and Rivers, 1996)—there has been growing attention to teacher quality and to effective instruction internationally. Darling-Hammond and Rothman (2011, p. 1) explain:

The focus on teacher effectiveness makes sense. While there might be disagreement about the most effective ways to measure and develop effectiveness, educators and policymakers generally agree that ensuring that teachers are capable of improving student learning—and that school leaders are able to help them to do so—is perhaps the most significant step they can take to raise student achievement. This ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Policies and Practices for Teachers’ Learning and Leadership
• 2 Moving from Chaos to Collaboration: A System Enabling Teachers’ Learning and Leadership
• 3 Teacher Learning in the TLLP
• 4 Teacher Leadership in the TLLP
• 5 Teachers’ Knowledge Exchange and Sharing of Practices through the TLLP
• 6 What We Have Learned So Far
• References
• Index