Some reflections

It is only now that I have some time to sit and think that I can reflect on my visits to schools in Adelaide and my meetings with various educators and academics.  I chose to travel to South Australia to see if the Learning to Learn (L2L) initiative had paid off ten years down the line.  I wanted to find out how the Department of Education and Children’s Services (DECS) had managed to provide sustained and meaningful professional development opportunities for teachers and how they had built capacity over time.  I wanted to see if there were things we could do in Scotland to support teachers with the implementation of Curriculum for Excellence.

I managed to gain some more clarity on the reasons for the success of Learning to Learn (L2L) when I met two of the academics involved in facilitating the learning circles which were a key part of building the learning communities in schools that opted in.   Some of the things we discussed included the targeting of leaders in schools, the allocation of funding to the schools that joined up and the Core Learning Program which provided readings and presentations from educational theorists from Australia and overseas and was open to anyone.  What struck me most though was that noone expected any change within the first eighteen months so that in some ways the pressure was off.  There was space to take time to build an effective learning community and to decide on what the focus of the inquiry for your school might be.  Targeting principals (the principal’s participation was mandatory) and encouraging them to bring a small team to every meeting also meant that the program had credibility within the school when people started talking about pedagogy and the need for critical reflection.  A quote from one of the papers written about the initiative talks about not being able to expect any whole school reform without the leader being intimately involved in the learning.

The working relationship with the University of SA was also key.  Senior lecturers on the teacher training programs facilitated the learning circles responding to assumptions about learning, about teaching and about the structures where these take place.  They were also able to collect a lot of qualitative data and to write about the process which means that there is now a rich source of evidence tracking the last decade.  A DVD called, ‘The Thingy’ also has lots of video clips, readings, presentations and stories from sites which I am still enjoying dipping into.

Advertisement