Learning for You
Activity 1 Thinking strategically: journal activity
Today our leaders must know their students and teachers so well that they can anticipate their future learning needs and plan to ensure that teachers are able to provide an education that equips students with real choice and chance in their future lives. In the past we often tried to be everything to every student and often found that we failed to achieve the improvements we sought. Today we ask what is it that we can do that will have the greatest impact. This strategic thinking involves not only deciding what to change but how and when to change
Research strategic change
- Start with this article about Finland (click here). (There are some additional key articles in the references)
- How is Finland responding to the need for innovation?
- What can you learn from their experiences?
Ask yourself these questions:
- Where are your students now?
- What 21st century learning skills will have the greatest impact on their current and future learning?
- What will you do to ensure that they learn these essential skills?
- How will you ensure that you and your teachers have the skills and knowledge to facilitate this improved student learning?
Make notes in your journal
Activity 2: Building teacher and leader capacity
There are some powerful trends in change literature. One is a history of failure that has a range of causes including:
- disillusionment with initiatives that have required enormous amounts of work but failed to improve student learning outcomes
- innovations dying due to change in policy or loss of interest over time
- leaders saying that they value an innovation but failing to personally commit their time and necessary resources
- one off solutions often recommended by outside experts
- leaders who fail to ensure that the teachers have the skills and knowledge needed to improve their performance
There is a strong view that you have to improve the intellectual capital and learning capacity of a school before you can improve student outcomes. This has led to the popularity of work based strategies like coaching, mentoring, action research, action learning and instructional rounds. These strategies improve teacher capacity to identify issues, develop shared strategies, collaborate for the same outcomes, hold each other accountable for outcomes and to build the leadership and learning capacity of every team member.
You can begin to research these strategies here:
Deciding on a whole school strategy
- How will you involve the school team in selecting the most effective strategy?
Research learning strategies
- What is the history of change? Is there a resistance to specific strategies caused by past initiatives? Are there successes on which you can build?
- What skills exist in your school now? Do you have skilled action learners or coaches who could develop others?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of available strategies? ( peer coaching / action learning)
- What programs are available to support alternative strategies eg There are a number of people who can train and accredit peer coaches. Click here to find a list of those accredited to train coaches.
- What is the cost and availability of ongoing training?
Meet with your active learning partners. (Our course Maang Group (click here) may be an additional source of discussion) Describe your chosen strategy and discuss further