Having spent a long career on both the receiving and delivery sides of professional learning, for the past few years I have been researching how teachers experience it and why this is often less than satisfactory.
In short, to get results - contrary to Bananarama’s suggestion - it is not just the way, time and place you do it, but also what you do and who you do it with.
The national professional learning policy environment in Scotland is generally good. Teachers’ terms and conditions provide for in-service days, collegiate time and 35 hours of personal professional learning time per year, even if the picture with class-contact time leaves Scottish teachers time-poor overall.
Employers, meanwhile, have the responsibility to “ensure a wide range of career-long professional learning development opportunities”, and teachers have the responsibility to “undertake a programme of agreed career-long professional learning”.
And the General Teaching Council for Scotland’s professional standards and national model of professional learning emphasise collaborative professional enquiry and critical engagement with research and policy.
However, data I have gathered from secondary science teachers across the north of Scotland, as part of my PhD research, shows that collaborative professional enquiry approaches are often absent.
Subject-specific CPD preferred
Teachers most value subject-specific professional learning focused on improving teaching in their classrooms, and when this takes place with teachers in similar contexts this is most likely to transfer into positive impacts in their classrooms.
However, teachers report that the provision of subject-specific professional learning by local authorities is patchy at best, and usually poor or non-existent - something confirmed by many leaders with responsibility for professional learning across the education system.
As a result, teachers seek sources of subject-specific professional learning from outwith the “system”, resulting in much ad hoc provision often reliant on third-sector organisations and volunteers.
Rather than being focused on improving teaching and being enquiry-based, school-based professional learning tends to very top-down, transmissive and generic. This appears to be driven by external accountability and scrutiny pressures, which may often be more perceived than real. But this, ironically, takes time and effort away from improving the classroom practices that are the very things that will improve pupil outcomes and system performance.
With budgets tight, it may be tempting for school leaders to arrange an external speaker for all staff together, but there are rarely adequate follow-up activities to then enable any learning to be embedded in practice. Nor is this type of activity likely to be making the most of the expertise already in the room.
Many teachers I interviewed had participated in extensive whole-school professional learning programmes with external inputs. Teachers’ views of these were very varied, even for the same programmes.
What teachers see as important
Those who had been more involved in the decision-making and delivery of such programmes - often having received significant additional professional learning and also opportunities to visit other schools - were more positive than those who had these programmes “cascaded”.
The common theme, regardless of the method of delivery of a programme, was that teachers were much more positive when the content was focused on improving pedagogy and addressing classroom-based issues that the teacher saw as important.
School senior leaders also commented on how such programmes can be imposed by local authorities without adequately considering the needs of the school and its teachers. The “what” is important - the “way”, within reason, perhaps not so much.
That much professional learning is not fit for purpose is in part due to the lack of support for many of those responsible for organising and facilitating it.
An effective teacher educator requires knowledge and skills more than just being a good teacher. For good-quality, subject-specific, collaborative, enquiry-based professional learning, teachers need to draw upon people with expertise in pedagogy, subject matter and the facilitation of professional learning.
Confident school leaders are key
School senior and middle leaders also need to be confident leading coaching conversations during the Scottish professional review and development process, to ensure that school improvement planning and individual teacher professional learning are well aligned. Initiative overload can often pull people in too many directions.
If the teacher-empowerment rhetoric is to be realised, teachers must be given time and be trusted to engage in professional learning that is focused on improving their priorities. Any future education and curriculum reform will only be successful if teachers have a voice in decision making - and good-quality professional learning is focused on things that matter in the classroom.
Dr Stuart Farmer is learning and skills manager at the Institute of Physics Scotland. He gained his doctorate from the University of Strathclyde researching the misalignment between policy and practice for the professional learning of teachers in Scotland. He tweets @stuartphysics
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