Edutech 2017 - Leading Professional Learning Communities: Where next? Professor Louise Stoll

Professional Learning Communities

Past model - getting a little help from friends = cheating. Now we know there are benefits from working together

• Collaborative cultures
• Collective responsibility
• deprivatise practice - please come in, please observe me. please give me feedback.
• Purposeful - to make a difference for all students' learning experiences and outcomes. Wellbeing

Three key Ingredients of responsive 21st century schools

1. Confident teachers
2. Willingness to innovate
3. School leaders who establish the conditions that enable 1 and 2 to flourish                   (Schleicher, OECD 2015)  

Teacher Professionalism

1. knowledge base
2. autonomy - being able to be a change agent and make decision - but in context of working with peers within and across schools. If want our children to be adaptive and creative - teacher needs to be too
3. peer networks

So where next?

1. Generating and exchanging knowledge within and between schools - where there is great teaching, enrich further with language. Sharing and deepening for mutual benefit.
2.  
3. Growing / being change catalysts - stimulate learning conversations, bring in articles, how can move ideas around schools, networks
   
4. Promoting and nurturing colleagues' creativity - create conditions for colleagues to feel more creative: model it - risk taking; expose them to new thinking and experiences; self-consciously letting go; provide time and space to think, design and have a go; keep referring back to core values. We will fail - it is OK to fail. (example of secondary school having to let go to design a learning policy / learning wheel - pictures around wheel, students carried out research, young people observed in teachers' classes - invited in to give feedback (Geraldine's example fits this). When did you last learn something that really took you out of your comfort zone? If I did this, maybe I can do other things? Challenge myself.
                                                            Schools have to be learning organisations. With a little help from their friends - teacher will go into areas of risk

http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.co.nz/2016/07/how-to-transform-schools-into-learning.html