Quality and School-Based Continuous Professional Development: School Leaders’ Responsibilities

Anne Gold

Institute of Education, University of London, England

Most writing about quality in education argues persuasively that it is important for school leaders to pay attention to school culture – to make sure that they lead a learning organization. It is generally agreed that learning schools and learning organizations (Dalin, 1993, Senge, 1990) are dependant on educative leadership (Duignan and Macpherson, 1992). Without doubt, continuous professional development is the key to a learning school, and the educative school leader will make sure that everyone in the school is constantly engaged in teaching and learning.

This paper explores ways of improving quality in schools by addressing the school leader’s responsibility for school-based continuous professional development. Two very focussed questions will be asked about that responsibility.

• Why is it necessary for school leaders to have an understanding of (and a theoretical framework for) how professionals learn?
• Is it fair or ethical to attempt to balance needs when planning for professional development?

Why is it Necessary for School Leaders to Have an Understanding of (and a theoretical framework for) How Professionals Learn?

I want to argue that in order to make sure that everyone who works in a school is involved in continuous learning, the school leader must have a clear understanding about how professionals learn (hopefully the rest of the school knows how young people learn). Successful continuous professional development requires both careful planning and the development of an ethos which encourages life-long learning – on-going and connected learning for both staff and young people. When it is embedded in the life of a school, it enriches the ambience of the school and makes it into a place of excitement, energy and direction.

I often work in the UK with groups of educational managers who are attending courses with me in order to develop their management skills further. When we talk together about middle and senior managers’ responsibility for professional development, it usually becomes clear that for most course members, ‘professional development’ implies going out of school to attend courses. This may be to courses in the evenings, but most often it means daytime or residential courses, which in the UK involve expensive cover (or substitution) for absent teachers. It doesn’t seem significant to course members that as a result of the Education Reform Act (1988) there are now several school-based professional development days in UK schools. These are days which all staff are expected to attend and when there are no young people present – a great possibility for formal and informal professional development. Unfortunately however, these days are usually taken over by workshops in which teachers often feel manipulated through highly managed sessions, or bored by endless and non-productive meetings. For many teachers and many reasons, these professional development days do not offer real opportunities for development.

Most of the managers with whom I work are clear that successful professional development does not happen very often within their schools. On the whole, development is either a marginal activity or an unplanned one in their professional lives, so they are nearly always surprised to find it on our course programme as a central part of a management course. I am persuaded (and want to persuade them) that schools in which the managers are committed to continuous professional development (CPD) will have professional development policies which are accessible and transparent and which will have an influence on all activities in the school. Everyone in the school is learning and extending themselves all the time, and everywhere there is an air of progress and energy.

There are many signs of this energy and progress. Some of the signs are obvious, and some less expected. Even the way people greet each other in a school community will be affected by the school’s energetic embrace of CPD – at some stage the school leader will have transmitted a sense of worth and value and excitement about learning to the teachers which will permeate to everybody in the school and can be read in all interactions.

In order to explore further theories underpinning effective CPD, I would like to begin by thinking about how professionals learn most productively. There are many diagrammatic explanations of adult learning, and each of us has our favourite. I am going to use Kolb’s (1984) cycle of learning experience here because it is probably the best known, and although I would suggest additions and adaptations to it, I think it still offers us an important basis for discussion. Some people see it as too simple and others would like it to be more multi-dimensional, but Kolb’s learning cycle is a useful way of reminding us that we have to plan for different stages and styles of learning and to make sure that there are connections between them. I described this cycle of learning experience in greater detail elsewhere.

He works outward from the learner rather than from the teacher. His emphasis is on learning rather than teaching. His cycle need not be followed slavishly and in the order presented below, but this is the basic shape it takes:

1. concrete experience: planning for learning must include the opportunity for concrete experience,
2. reflective observation: reflection on that experience,
3. abstract conceptualization: an introduction to relevant reading and research findings,
4. active experimentation, the possibility to plan changes to the concrete, or real, experience, next time,
5. time to think and talk about that concrete experience,
6. and so on (Gold 1998, p.50).

Eric Verbiest has a diagram based on Kolb’s cycle of learning experience in his chapter in this book.

Those who have responsibility for CPD in a school might add activities under each of the above headings which fit the school and its community most closely. For example, within our management programmes, we plan group learning activities which are linked with work or use participants’ work as bases for activities (concrete experience); we suggest that participants keep course diaries and we plan for small group work and individual reflection (reflective observation); we suggest readings and give formal inputs during which we refer to recent research findings (abstract conceptualization); and we make sure that we have a space in every programme in which participants can make realistic and real plans for new strategies (active experimentation) when they return to their schools.

In many learning relationships, especially for adults, too often it is taken for granted that people learn best by listening to lectures – the transmissional mode characterised by Kolb as the abstract conceptualization stage. The lectures that our teachers go out of school to attend are to be found here. Too much continuous professional development is dependent on the transmission of knowledge from someone who ‘knows’ to people who, it is thought, ‘need to learn’. We encourage exaggerated and dysfunctional power relations in this equation, and it is unclear whether learning in this way is effective.

I have been involved in education as a professional for 35 years, and I have had the privilege of being in the presence of and listening to several world-famous educators. I could tell you whether they were good speakers (whether they provoked and entertained me); I could tell you whether they had great charisma; I could tell you when I thought they had sprinkled me with magic dust and made me feel wonderful; but unless I combined listening to them with reading their work and talking about it to other people and thinking about the impact of their thinking on my own work (the other three stages in Kolb’s cycle), I could not tell you what they actually said in their lectures or about the thinking for which they were venerated.

This cycle of active learning is not a new idea. All educators know it, but the courses and lectures that most people still go out of school to attend are to be placed at the abstract conceptualization stage. I would like to link this knowledge more closely and actively with the school leader’s specific responsibility: it seems to me that the two parts of Kolb’s cycle that are most important for school-based continuous professional development, but which are least often planned for in the busy lives of schools, are reflective observation and active experimentation.

During my school teaching career I taught in some difficult secondary schools in inner London. Most of the teachers I worked with were young and new to the teaching profession, and many of the young people we taught were challenging and could be very difficult to teach. The most important professional development we older teachers could engage in (for both experienced and inexperienced teachers) was to work with those beginning teachers to help them to work constructively with the young people. But we were not very successful: at the end of nearly every day, I would go into the staffroom and see the newer teachers sitting around exhausted, smoking, drinking coffee and talking, some of them in tears. When I listened carefully to the talk, I found that it had a repetitious, almost mesmeric tone to it: one person would tell another or a group how awful such and such a young person had been in their lesson. Usually the story was told and retold, and sometimes advice was given, but rarely were careful questions asked by the listeners which would eventually move the teacher on to think differently about what had happened. This repetition cannot have been an extending, learning activity: it often didn’t even help make the story teller feel better. Misplaced sympathy often silences real learning opportunities.

Stephen Brookfield (1987) writes about learning conversations in such as way as to show how skilled an activity it is to ask the right questions at the right time in order to encourage reflection and learning. He writes about encouraging critical thinking, and describes a learning conversation as an activity to do just that:

1. Good conversations are reciprocal and involving: In a good conversation, the participants are continually involved in the process; they are either talking or listening. Developing critical thinking is a process in which listening and contributing are of equal importance.
2. The course of good conversations cannot be anticipated: When we begin to ask people to identify assumptions underlying their habitual ways of thinking and learning, we do not know exactly how they are going to respond.
3. Good conversations entail diversity and agreement: A measure of diversity, disagreement, and challenge is central to helping people to think critically. Unless we accept that people have views very different from ours, and that a multiplicity of interpretations of practically every idea or action is possible, we will be unable to contemplate alternatives in our own thoughts and actions (pp. 238-241).

Brookfield’s learning conversation fits perfectly into Kolb’s reflective observation section. Senior teachers in a school need to develop the skills of critical thinking through learning conversations in order to model it to other members of staff. It is a difficult skill to learn. Careful examination of this excerpt from Brookfield’s writing shows that nobody can know the answer at the beginning of the conversation. But so often, beginning teachers or struggling teachers ask for advice (or don’t!) and more experienced teachers just give it, based on their own experience. The beginning teachers then try out strategies which fit more experienced teachers’ ways of working but not their own. And indeed, they are not given the opportunity to analyse their problem or to try to make sense of it for themselves. The teachers most of us admire are those who have learnt to analyse a difficult or challenging classroom situation and who develop strategies to deal with them that are underpinned by a set of principles they have articulated clearly (to themselves at least). This is an important set of skills that can be learnt and which are encouraged by reflective questioning.

The introduction of reflective questioning into schools is not unproblematic: school leaders who wish to develop critical and reflective thinking within their schools must be aware of the difference this will make to traditional power relations in the hierarchy of school staffrooms. As Brookfield says “a measure of diversity, disagreement and challenge is central to helping people to think critically”. It is difficult for ‘young’ staff to challenge well-established staff without permission and encouragement. But ultimately the ensuing learning brings with it such rewards as mutual respect, understanding and closer working relationships.

There are many other ways of encouraging reflective observation in schools, but it seems to me that constructive talk is to be developed and promoted because it will become a pervasive habit. It evolves into a way of thinking more widely, it helps to create the ethos of a school, teachers find themselves talking in the same way to the young people, and it does not cost any money.

Returning to Kolb’s cycle, the active experimentation stage is most often omitted because it must be planned for, otherwise it does not take place. Teachers know that it takes time to devise strategies for change, and the demands of the busy life of a school ensure that many other activities are prioritised. It is clear however, that without time set aside to prepare strategies for change meticulously, new knowledge cannot be put into practice, and the school will not have a sense of purpose and development. This section of the learning cycle can tale place individually, in small groups, as a curriculum group or as a whole school. It can be in the form of a highly complicated and sophisticated development plan, or it can be done on the back of an envelope with help from dates in a diary. But, if it is not completed, good intentions to change evaporate or fall off the bottom of the list of important tasks to be accomplished. I suggest that the school leader’s responsibility here is both to help make sure that there is time for the planning to take place, and then to check gently that it actually has taken place.

Thus, a familiarity with a conceptual framework for successful adult learning is necessary for a school leader, both to encourage the learning to take place and to be able to explain to others why these particular aspects of learning are so important. But the traditional hierarchical structure of most schools and the workload demanded of teachers in the late twentieth century can mitigate against such development.

There follows a summary the school leader’s responsibility for ensuring that Kolb’s learning cycle can be effective in the form of a list of some suggestions for change:

• plan enough time for everybody to talk and discuss critical incidents,
• welcome constructive questioning; encourage an ethos where everyone asks ‘why?’
• continue to ask ‘why?’ as many as five times until values and principles are formulated,
• allow for shifts in power balances,
• set up many different working parties,
• make sufficient time for staff to work across and between their usual planning groups,
• promote team teaching and planning.

Another argument in favour of Kolb, the notion of continuity – continuous professional development – is rarely addressed. Educationalists talk about life-long learning, but they are often vague about it. We agree that teachers need to be involved in life-long learning, but we need to understand and plan for it. Successful learning has a cyclical dimension and the very nature of any cycle means that you go round and round it, and in and out of different parts of it, but that it always rolls along with you. Good learning continues cyclically and continues throughout our adult lives.

School leaders whose plans for and expectations about adult learning are underpinned by a theoretical framework are more likely to make sure that the learning continues. The schools they lead will be learning organizations which are full of learning conversations.

Is it Fair or Ethical to Attempt to Balance Needs When Planning for Professional Development?

John Adair (1986) introduced a diagram consisting of a set of three interlinking circles (a Venn diagram). These circles can be used to think about fairness when attempting to distribute professional development. In the diagram each of the circles represents in turn the curriculum team or department, the whole school and the individual teacher. It helps to remind a school leader that three main sets of needs are to be kept in a sort of equilibrium.

Orthodox management literature says that school leaders need to become aware of different sets of needs and then to find ways of making sure that there is a balance between them. There may be times when one of the circles grows larger than the other two – one set of needs is greater and must be met before the others. An example of this is when the National Curriculum was introduced in the UK, and curriculum/group/department development needs had to be met through courses and development days so that teachers were ready to teach the new material. This meant that individual teachers had to forego some individual professional development that was not seen as so immediately valid, and some whole. School work was not addressed until after teaching plans were drawn up by the curriculum teams.

There are also times when a curriculum team has a new member, maybe a beginning teacher, and for a while more attention must be paid to that teacher than to the rest of the group, so that eventually the team will be able to work well together. It may be that a teacher is unwell or going through difficult personal circumstances, and thus is unable for a time to carry out full professional duties: the other team members may have to work harder to compensate for this temporary lack of attention to work. In these cases the imbalance is for a short time, and ultimately balance is restored.

By understanding the importance of balancing needs in this way, it is argued that it is possible to have a framework which allows for a reasoned, ethical and logical response to outside demands while at the same time making sure that all professional development needs are met fairly. Well-balanced schools which have their development needs in equilibrium will be able to allow imbalance for a short time, because, it is said, everyone understands that their needs will be met eventually.

I bring this to your attention because I am not sure now whether this really is an ethical framework. It is easy to forget that choices and needs are socially constructed: who frames the need? Who decides what is a need and how important it is? Some UK schools have introduced appraisal procedures in which teachers talk about their development needs with another member of staff. Although within this process care is taken to recognise and reduce unequal power balances, the negotiations can still be complex. It is not always possible to take account of the power relations which make it more difficult for teachers being appraised by more senior members of staff to think objectively about their needs and then to argue for them.

Blase and Anderson (1995) in The Micropolitics of Educational Leadership, write about these sorts of mixed management messages. They explain that teachers are often made to feel that they have a say in decision-making and in discussions in their schools, but then they are manipulated very subtly into saying what their school leader wanted them to say in the first place:
“Ideological control, most often referred to in the educational administration literature as ‘the management of culture’, is increasingly being used to tighten loose coupling in hierarchical organizations. It remains unclear whether the current rhetoric of managing the organizational culture, ‘empowering’ teachers and sharing decision-making means anything more than new management techniques for greater control and efficiency. Teachers are right to examine critically empowerment movements promoted from above; they need to be aware of the subtle forms that ideological control can take” (pp. 127-128).

Earlier I described an organizational culture which makes for an exciting, energetic and directed school, and most literature describes this vitality and vigour as ideally coming from the teachers, encouraged by the school leader. The question is whether the school leader is to encourage, to develop, to implant or to enforce that culture? There are subtle nuances here which position the school leader differently in relation to those they manage, depending on where the culture comes from and whether or how it is developed or transmitted. Complicated notions of empowerment, power-sharing, manipulation, and transmission are encountered here, all of which link with ethics when they are connected to the source of the school culture: whose school is it, and who decides on the school culture?

Another problem with Adair’s diagram is that individual members of staff cannot always argue for their own perception of their needs if they are regularly being told to think about the needs of the group and the school. To what extent can we demand or expect that teachers give up their own needs for others? Who can decide which set of needs is more worthy of attention?

I am not suggesting that we do not pay attention to this diagram, or that we do not use this idea. I am, however, suggesting that we treat it with caution, as we should all management strategies: a school leader will make decisions based on this balance of professional development needs within a framework of a clear vision of educational management. If the vision is really about empowerment, then the balance will be interpreted differently than if the vision is about leading or directing. And this balance will effect the school culture and the learning and teaching in the school.

Conclusion

A commitment to quality means that school leaders have full responsibility for continuous professional development in school. Continuous professional development works best when it is understood theoretically as well as planned for. The challenge is to encourage a culture which ensures that the school is a vibrant and learning school. The resulting ethos will be one which encourages talking, questioning, and discussing, where teachers and teachers, teachers and learners, and learners and learners will draw ideas and thinking out from each other in a constant learning conversation. Having encouraged and taken part in this continuing development, the school leader will be acutely aware of the need to be vigilant about the power balances and the definition and articulation of development needs within the school. The challenge for school leaders is to ensure that this highly principled rhetoric is translated into real practice.

References

Adair, J (1986), Effective Teambuilding, Reading: Pan.
Blase, J and G Anderson (1995), The Micropolitics of Educational Leadership. London: Cassell.
Brookfield, S (1987), Developing Critical Thinkers. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Dalin, P and H-G Rolff (1993), Changing the School Culture. London: Cassell.
Duignan, P A and R J S Macpherson (eds) (1992), Educative Leadership. London: Falmer Press.
Gold, A (1998), Head of Department. London: Cassell.
Kolb, D (1984), Experiential Learning New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Senge, P (1990), The Fifth Discipline. London: Century Press.

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