This year one of my roles is the leadership of a professional learning group across the Uru Mānuka cluster. The purpose is to generate enough evidence following a theme for each group, for teachers to meet the PTC's.
One of our challenges is to interweave the guiding pedagogy of the cluster throughout the process, even though each school will have its own documentation methods for TAI - that of Learn Create Share.
I do believe that many staff are still not willing to spend enough time unpacking what LCS means. It's too easy to go on the Oxford dictionary definitions of those words without actually buying into the work and research behind it. While that is a separate frustrating issue, little steps will lead to more meaningful evolution of ideas eventually. I found this particular article which clarified Learn as to know, create as to act, and share as to value, and specifically identified these as 21st-century educational skills. My argument is that staff should value the pedagogy not the words. Maybe we just need to see it in different words, with research behind it from other sources such as this.
Learn
Focusing Inquiry
“What is important (and therefore worth spending time on) given where my students are at?”
In identifying two elements of leadership dimension 4 (I haven't questioned deeply why this is the one we are focussing on yet), I have struggled which I focus on. I'm erring towards three and four. In this TAI, the 'students' are my colleagues, the outcomes are their own learnings from this process. The most gain for them is going to be making sure I have the knowledge of effective professional development from a researched basis and ensuring collective responsibility and accountability and how to foster it. Acting as an instructional leader is a focus, but with two of us as leaders for this group, 'we got this'. Use of data is actually just a pain when you are working across schools and there is no time allowance for this 'job'. It's a good way of making my own TAI unachievable. Good individual processes should mean data collection happens naturally anyway, and if it's causing the TAI's to fail, then I guess I revisit this hypothesis. There are 8 participants in the group from 3 different schools and only one meeting per term. In focussing my inquiry, effective professional development and collective responsibility/accountability are probably of the most significance for our learners (colleagues). This is my activation of the process, my Learn, and what I know.
