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If professional learning is to remain a
critical part of the ongoing development
of teachers, more meaningful, ongoing
and evidence-based projects between
universities and schools are required.
Campus Review spoke to Ryan about
the need for purposeful and measurable
professional learning in education and ways
this could be realised.
CR: Little evidence seems to exist to support
the professional learning that teachers
engage in. Even though we might know it’s
beneficial, there’s a lack of hard evidence to
back it up. How did this situation develop?
Improving professional
learning for teachers
Leveraging university knowledge
to strengthen professional
learning in schools.
Mary Ryan interviewed by Wade Zaglas
T
eachers could be forgiven for
approaching professional learning
with a degree of ambivalence. With
unrelenting administrative tasks, classroom
teaching, preparation and marking,
there is always the risk that such learning
becomes an encumbrance, a ‘tick the box’
registration requirement rather than the
critical development tool it is.
While many one-off sessions can be
useful – learning a new digital tool, for
example – engaging teachers in more
targeted, continuous and evidence-based
projects is likely to yield great results in
terms of teaching practice and student
achievement.
One of the best ways of achieving this
is to foster more collaboration between
16
universities and school communities.
According to Macquarie University professor
Mary Ryan, much professional learning in
the past has lacked “a holistic, evidence-
based practice approach”.
Through analysing “small data” like
school assessment and “big data” such as
standardised tests, teachers can often see
improvement, but pinpointing the specific
practices that have caused it requires more
rigorous observation and analysis.
Take, for instance, this simple professional
learning scenario. A Year 6 teacher attends a
session on improving students’ spelling skills.
Without a system to collect and analyse the
effects of the session on teaching practice
and student achievement, the teacher will
have little idea of what specific practices
have made a difference. Simply put, too
many “puzzles of practice” exist.
Enter the university sector. With their
wealth of research knowledge, practical
experience and passion for project design,
academics are well-placed to assist
classroom teachers in understanding
their learners’ needs and developing a
suitable professional learning project. In
doing so, they will draw on not only the
assessment data above, but the wider body
of academic research that teachers have
little time to access and divulge. In Ryan’s
words, academics will be able “to curate
the research evidence for teachers” and
help them design project models that suit
their learning contexts.
MR: Firstly, I’d like to differentiate between
data, research evidence, and practice-based
evidence. Teachers use data all the time
in their teaching. That’s what assessment
is. And sometimes teachers don’t think
about it as data, but classroom assessment
is what I would call ‘small data’. Then we
have ‘big data’, which includes those large
standardised data sets.
Teachers do use data in their teaching,
and they also use it to look at their student
outcomes and achievements.
Research shows that teachers tend to get
their information from other teachers. They
don’t always go to research, they go to other
teachers for information about improving
practice and so on. This is fantastic,
because we want teachers to be having
these professional conversations with each
other and forming a professional learning
community. But while professional judgment
is important, it’s only one form of evidence.
What we need to think about is a
holistic, evidence-based practice approach.
Evidence-based practice includes some
different kinds of evidence. There’s the
big and small data I talked about – that’s
important for us to fold in, to have a look at
student learning outcomes and how they’re
performing at a local level, but also how
they might compare to look at trends across
the country and across nations.
There’s also teacher practice evidence,
where we look at our own practice. We
might go to a professional learning session
for example, and we might learn about new
things that we could do in the classroom.
This comes back to the professional
learning community, which is powerful
in schools. When schools have that
collaborative, collective approach, they
actually observe each other’s teaching, they
have conversations about their teaching,
they talk about the improvement. You know