Part 5 How can school leaders support a whole-school approach to professional learning?

"We don’t learn from our experiences, we learn from reflecting on our experiences.”

J. Dewey

Implementation of professional learning will be nuanced to each school’s context. We invite you to consider the following suggestions as whole-school approaches to supporting professional learning and how they might be adapted to your context:

• Professional Development Days: An Interleaved PD process; PD Day Options; Getting Started

• Professional Learning Communities: A PLC process with external, asynchronous learning support

• Collaborative Practitioner Inquiry: A practitioner inquiry process over two terms or more

It is also worth building a timely review cycle to identify what may not be currently effective or working, and consider what may need adjustment, partial reduction or full de-implementation.

Questions to guide implementation planning:

• What opportunities currently exist for job-embedded professional learning?

• Where does collaborative time already exist in the school’s current structures?

• Could we more effectively leverage weekly staff/department meetings?

• How could existing collaborative time support professional growth?

• What expectations currently exist around collaboration and professional growth?

• What additional expectations/agreements would be needed to support collaboration and professional growth?

Suggested yearly programme

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Professional Learning Communities

“Professional Learning Communities operate under the assumption that the key to improved learning for students is continuous job-embedded learning for educators, and that educators are part of a group of people working independently to achieve a common goal for which members are mutually accountable.”

(Steve Barkley, 2010)

Collaborative Practitioner Inquiry