Education CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by CUREE

This paper sets out the international evidence about continuing professional development (CPD) and learning (PL) for teachers in order to highlight three key roles that a new Royal College for teachers could play in enhancing the profession’s identity:

the creation of a strong focus on teachers’ professional learning as well as their development;

supporting teachers in establishing and engaging with the professional knowledge base; and

challenging teachers to end the tyranny of common sense and to focus on developing in-depth subject knowledge, pedagogic content knowledge, practice and theory side by side.

1. Systematic reviews of research about effective CPD, effective leadership and effective pedagogy1 ^, 2 ^, 3 ^, 4 show excellence in professional learning that benefits pupils means:

using aspirations for specific pupils and evidence about as a starting point for development;

seeking out both formative and summative analysis of current strengths and areas for development as tools for enhancing practice;

using collaboration, especially reciprocal risk taking, as a core learning strategy, working with colleagues, for example, to overcome the most intransigent learning obstacles for pupils;

expecting to make use of a specialist expertise especially when they don’t know what they we don’t know;

learning to learn from looking; putting evidence, about pupil outcomes and from observing teaching and learning exchanges, especially those involving experiments with new approaches, at the heart of PL process;

active leadership of one’s own and of colleagues’ PL, including its explicit modelling, peer coaching and engaging in enquiry-oriented approaches to development; and

focusing on why things do and don’t work in different contexts to develop an underpinning rationale or practical theory.

2. Attending to high quality PL and support for it is self evidently a responsibility and entitlement for professionals but not one widely recognised for teachers. Whilst some national professional standards for teachers recognise this explicitly,5 many focus more on what teachers do than on what they bring to their professional lives.

3. One reason the role of teacher learning doesn’t yet sit at the heart of professional identity, or international deliberations about the future of the profession, is that support for PL has been limited in conception and execution. This makes the same mistake about teacher learning we were making 10–15 years ago about pupil learning. It focuses on the teaching (of teachers) at the expense of their learning. Whilst Masters programmes focus on acquiring and investigating a body of knowledge about teaching and learning, they rarely attend directly to the teacher learning process, although the best do help teachers develop awareness of the process of professional learning as a by product of collaborative enquiry. What is needed is explicit development of teachers’ “learning how to learn skills”.6

4. Positioning PL as core to professional practice and identity and modelling it confers status on high quality learning strategies (pupils pay more attention to what their teachers do than what they say). The effective learning processes highlighted for teachers in the international evidence3 ^, 7 mirror those highlighted for pupils by Hattie. For example, effective work-based PL involves teachers openly making their learning visible to their pupils through active, and increasingly self-directing learning activities that are structured and scaffolded by evidence from, collaborative enquiry, co-coaching or lesson study and by manifesting curiosity about the practices, experiences and understandings of others. Sustained, visible, collaborative PL helps establish a virtuous cycle of development for both pupils and their teachers and helps them reap the rewards of taking responsibility for PL. For example:

their confidence grows, their teaching becomes more meaningful and responsive, their planning and scaffolding of pupils’ learning helps them support growing independence amongst learners and increase personalised challenge to them; and

they build professional relationships and a belief in their collective ability to make a difference which reduces isolation and stress and increases their commitment to continuing to develop their practice and experiment with evidence based approaches.8

5. Standards, especially inspiring ones, do help to raise the bar and there is no doubt that establishing ambitious professional standards will be a key role for the College. But the fulfilment of their potential depends upon teachers individually, collectively and as a profession pushing beyond what standards can encompass towards the development and mastery of a body of both professional evidence and theory as a guide to action. A quick scan of the education press and of international evaluations9 ^, 10 shows that teacher performance remains the focus of attention for support for improvement in many countries. But the role of a Royal College for teachers is to propel the profession beyond performance management and its role in raising the floor towards raising the ceiling. Key here is the role of the College in expecting and enabling teachers to make connections between their day to day practice and the professional knowledge base and theory.11 ^, 12 It is the development of practice and underpinning theory hand in hand13 ^, 14 that enables teachers to gain control of complex pedagogies and genuinely adapt and refine these in ways that meet individual pupil needs.

6. In this context the College will have an important role in challenging an over-focus on “common sense” approaches to teaching and learning and an underestimation of the importance of in-depth subject and practice knowledge and of underpinning theory. For effective teachers, who focus on what more could be achieved than on their established, tacit knowledge and expertise, common sense approaches are really internalised, complex and layered ways of responding to needs, based on accumulated professional expertise, analysis and critique. But less effective teachers also assert the importance of “common sense” approaches, often involving unthinking adherence to established routines and resources—and defences against questioning and risk taking. At its worst this results in a “tyranny of common sense”, an intransigent resistance to learning from practices developed and tested elsewhere. The existence of a “Royal” college would be an important defence against such confusion.15