RAMP

The first day of Term 2 saw the entire staff attend the first RAMP Professional Learning* at the Australian Technology Park, Redfern.

RAMP will start with Stage 3 teachers (presumably in Reading) and Stage 4 Mathematics teachers. It will focus on the development of Professional Learning Communities, with the aim of improving student performance especially the NAPLAN tests.

A significant part will be "Professional Rounds". Yes, groups of teachers will be visiting your class to watch you teach. While there are some very idealistic rules surrounding this, I will reserve my comments and decision on it till I have seen it in action.

As usual with any of these days, there were workshops that might have been worthwhile attending, but you can't be everywhere - you could get to 1 out of 8.

*Professional Development looks like it will now be called Professional Learning in CEO Sydney schools and offices.

Professional Learning Communities - 3

What difference does it make if staff are communally organized? What results, if any, might be gained from this kind of arrangement? An abbreviated report of staff and student outcomes in schools where staff are engaged together in professional learning communities follows. This report comes from the summary of results included in the literature review noted above (Hord, 1997, p. 27).
For staff, the following results have been observed:

• reduction of isolation of teachers
• increased commitment to the mission and goals of the school and increased vigor in working to strengthen the mission
• shared responsibility for the total development of students and collective responsibility for students' success
• powerful learning that defines good teaching and classroom practice and that creates new knowledge and beliefs about teaching and learners
• increased meaning and understanding of the content that teachers teach and the roles they play in helping all students achieve expectations
• higher likelihood that teachers will be well informed, professionally renewed, and inspired to inspire students
• more satisfaction, higher morale, and lower rates of absenteeism
• significant advances in adapting teaching to the students, accomplished more quickly than in traditional schools
• commitment to making significant and lasting changes and
• higher likelihood of undertaking fundamental systemic change (p. 27).

For students, the results include:

• decreased dropout rate and fewer classes "skipped"
• lower rates of absenteeism
• increased learning that is distributed more equitably in the smaller high schools
• greater academic gains in math, science, history, and reading than in traditional schools and
• smaller achievement gaps between students from different backgrounds (p. 28).

Professional Learning Communities - 2

Reports in the literature are quite clear about what successful professional learning communities look like and act like. The requirements necessary for such organizational arrangements include:

• the collegial and facilitative participation of the principal, who shares leadership - and thus, power and authority - through inviting staff input in decision making
• a shared vision that is developed from staff's unswerving commitment to students' learning and that is consistently articulated and referenced for the staff's work
• collective learning among staff and application of that learning to solutions that address students' needs
• the visitation and review of each teacher's classroom behavior by peers as a feedback and assistance activity to support individual and community improvement and
• physical conditions and human capacities that support such an operation

2012 - Australian Year of the Farmer

Professional Learning Communities

Simon Crook recently posted this on Twitter:

Cannot have a Professional Learning Community without a 'Trusting and Collaborative Climate' (Turkington, 2004)

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Lucianne Carmichael, the first resident principal of the Harvard University Principal Center, proposes that the notion of principals' omnicompetence be "ditched" in favor of their participation in their own professional development. Kleine-Kracht (1993) concurs and suggests that administrators, along with teachers, must be learners too, "questioning, investigating, and seeking solutions" (p. 393) for school improvement. The traditional pattern that "teachers teach, students learn, and administrators manage is completely altered . . . [There is] no longer a hierarchy of who knows more than someone else, but rather the need for everyone to contribute" (p. 393).