Moving into the Teaching and Learning

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