After our last staff meeting I had set some milestones for teachers to have their TAI question framed up and for teachers to have completed the 'Focusing Inquiry' stage of their inquiries. Some teachers took to this and did an excellent job, incorporating reflections on their practice, learning from other schools, assessment data from their current class and wider reading. However, some teachers were slower at getting their inquiries framed up and we needed everyone to have their inquiries identified.
As a school we were making a significant shift from a senior leader writing up a generic professional learning plan and handing it to teachers, to teachers having to reflect on their own practice and their current CHILDREN to select what their learning focus within e-learning was going to be. It was scary stuff for me, different people would have different foci and that meant that the professional learning couldn't be preset and delivered to the group as a whole. Some teachers would be better at reflecting and knowing what their inquiry was going to be. Some teachers wanted to be handed something that required very little thought.
To reinforce what was expected and re-visit the TAI cycle we had another staff meeting. It was kinda like this ground work needed to be done before we could all go off in different directions (personalised directions!) and get stuck into our inquiries. If teachers didn't have a clear understanding of what TAI was then we would never get the shifts in learning and practice that we wanted.
This staff meeting started with re-visiting the cycle (again!!), a reflection on what we used to do (PPDPs) and what we are attempting to do - TAI. This showed really positive buy-in from all teachers, which gave me confidence when making some significant changes. We watched a clip about developing an inquiry disposition with Sharon Freisen. I wanted the teachers to be asking questions in their practice and if they were already doing this, to have it confirmed that it was a good thing. Once we had discussed this, I wanted to move the teachers to thinking about their inquiries that they were meant to have framed up. We reflected as a group on 'Why bother having an e-learning focus?' and did this through the Chalk Talk thinking routine. This again showed a lot of buy-in from our teachers and cohesion in their thinking. I showed the teachers a short clip from Michael Fullan about e-learning in schools and 'How we need to move toward the danger' and 'Get it on our terms'. I then shared the idea of Professional Learning Communities (PLC's) and shared some tentative PLC's with the staff from who had similar learning areas for their inquiries. Teachers got into these groups and shared informally where their thinking was at with their inquiries.
Here are the slides from this meeting
Once ERO had departed in Week 4 of Term 1 I started to think about how I was going to develop an understanding of Teaching as Inquiry with our teachers. I had initially talked about it very briefly at our staff retreat before the school year started. Our whole school focuses this year are e-learning and Science/Thinking (PRT 1s Reading and Writing and PRT 2s Maths). I thought we would start our TIA with a focus on e-learning, teachers were already starting to take risks in this area and there was a much stronger focus than ever before at CSNS. I thought that once teachers had their e-learning inquiry gaining traction they could then develop a Science/Thinking one.
I shared my thinking for the staff meeting with our SLT prior to the meeting and got a fairly positive response (Quite a bit of this nutting out I have done on my own and then shared it with the leadership team before rolling it out). The staff meeting was two pronged 1. Trying to develop an understanding of TAI and 2. Getting teachers to start framing their own inquiries. The staff meeting started with re-visiting the Inquiry focuses for CSNS in 2015 and the Teaching as Inquiry model. We only really looked at the 'Focusing Inquiry' stage in depth during this meeting. We watched some clips from the enabling e-learning TKI website from Karen Melhuish-Spencer, mainly for the teachers to understand the importance of the 'Learning' as the focus for their inquiry and the e-learning is the 'how'.
I shared some possible examples, but was hesitant to do this as I wanted the teachers to go away and think about the children in their class this year, to look at the assessment data and identify what learning they wanted to enhance through e-learning. At the end of the meeting I shared some milestones that I wanted the teachers to work towards.
Here are the Slides I used during this first staff meeting.
My own inquiry this year is around developing teacher's understanding and ability in Teaching as Inquiry. This is the first year that our teachers have followed this process, previously they have followed a more prescribed, one size fits all model.
