3. Our challenge:
Michael Fullan notes in his recent paper "Learning is the Work":
"It may seem strange to say that professional development - educators going to
workshops and conferences, and taking courses - bears little relationship to classroom
and school improvement. Similarly teachers toiling away as individuals do not add up
to school or system success. What really counts is what happens 'in between
workshops' or what I call learning is the work”
Learning on the job, day after day, is the work. My colleague Richard Elmore(2004)
nailed the problem of superficial school reform when he notes that "improvement is
more a function of learning to do the right thing in the setting in which you work"
(p73). He elaborates "The problem (is that) there is almost no opportunity for teachers
to engage in continuous and substantial learning about their practice...observing and
being observed by their colleagues in their own classrooms and classrooms of other
teachers in schools confronting similar problems of practice" (p127).”
6. Organisational learning opportunities
Teaching
95%
Experiencing
80%
Discussing with
others •Being a coach or mentor
70% •Sharing best practice
Seeing & hearing •Communities of Practice
•Peer Mentoring
•Iterative mentoring
50%
•Self Review
Reading •Observing Best Practice
10%
Lectures We
5%
Enact
7. What interactions are effective?
Contextualised, Personalised, Iterative
• Modelling
• Observation Lesson Observation
Within a community of practice
• Dialogue
8. Lesson Observation Challenges:
• Obtrusiveness (disturbing the dynamic)
• Subjective
• Expensive / hard to scale
• Debrief issues
• Dual purposed
9. The key…
• Moving the practice of observation from QA
monitoring, through to mentoring, coaching and
collaboration.
QA Mentoring Coaching
10. What we find..
• Video is a very powerful (but emotive) tool.
– Staff confidence is the most important factor
– We need to make it technically easy to capture practice
– We need to make it easy to add context (edit)
– We need to make it easy to manage
• What tools do I need to add rich layers of context?
• How can we share and collaborate?
11. What else is important?
Empowerment:
in high performing education systems ... teachers
embrace and lead reform, taking responsibility as
professionals…
OECD, March,2011
12. What else is important?
Developing Social Capital:
If a teacher’s social capital is just one standard
deviation higher than the average students’ maths
scores increase by 5.7%
OECD, March,2011
13. What it is..
• IRIS Connect can be an effective vehicle for change if
you have a clear direction.
• The culture will not change by itself in most cases…
14. Developing a high quality teaching profession
A systems model
•Staff collaborating within and across schools
Professionalism at •Staff establishing a cycle of self review and reflection
•Action research
Empowerment the front line •Developing and sharing best practice
•High skill staff coaching and mentoring others
•Coaching – both internal and external
Schools developing •Mentoring
high quality staff •Modelling best practice
•Schools collaborating
Development
Schools identifying •School self review identifying areas for growth
•Identifying and celebrating best practice
areas for •Performance management
development •Quality assurance
External review for monitoring standards, identifying and
Control disseminating national best practice and quality assurance
16. IRIS Connect
IRIS Connect is a CPD system that enables
colleges to harness their collective capacity.
It allows all teachers to access brilliant
teaching, reflect purposefully on their own
practice and share practice with peers,
embedding a peer-led mentoring and
coaching culture with ease.
Some of the innovative uses of IRIS Connect
at FE colleges include:
• supported experimentation
• promoting a self reflective culture
www.irisconnect.co.uk • action research
• linking ITT and longer term CPD
