Notes and reflections from Part 5. Effective professional learning

Develop your leadership

The aim of this activity is to engage as many team members as you can in short ‘appreciative interviews’ or conversations about the positives they see in their colleagues. Another option, of course, is to develop a system for collecting everyone’s views via an online forum or even post-it notes!

Decide how best to organise this activity, which may depend on the size of your team. You might decide to ask each team member about every other team member, or instead (if teams are large) ask an individual about two or three other team members. You might ask:

• What do you value the most in [team member] and what they bring to the team? OR What strengths do you see in [team member], and in what ways are these strengths valuable to team practices? NB. Before you conduct these ‘interviews’, it might be a good idea to let team members know about the upcoming conversation, so they have had time to reflect on and notice strengths in their colleagues.

You might like to upload your notes here:

Uploaded File: Remove

Upload a FilePermitted file formats: pdf, doc, docx, xls, xlsx, csv, txt, ppt, pptx, mp3, mp4, zip.

Next, try to synthesise and organise your data from the interviews into a data summary, to present in your learning bubble. In order to create your data summary, you need to look across the individual data to try to draw out themes. Try to answer the following questions:

What areas of strength are shared across multiple team members? (If it is helpful to mention individual team members in your data summary, be careful to do so in a way that enables team members to remain anonymous). What is missing from the list of strengths? Are there any areas not mentioned as strengths that you would have expected, or that you would like to see? What sort of themes come up in the lists of strengths that are mentioned? What does this indicate about your interviewees, and their priorities and lenses on practice?

The leader’s role in professional development

What is your perspective on the utility and relevance of external professional development activities (those that occur outside of your early childhood setting)? How easy is it for teachers to bring back the knowledge they gain in external professional development and put it to use in your early childhood setting?

Managing external Professional Learning opportunities

Which of the solutions suggested above might work in your centre?

Engaging in effective professional learning

Can you summarise, in a set of key words, what the key aspects to effective professional learning are, as demonstrated by research?

Look back at your answer for the previous question. What would you add to the list you created there in order to include the ideas from the Exceptional Professional Learning Approach?

How many features of effective professional learning do your current strategies for supporting teachers’ professional learning in your early childhood setting embody? Thinking about what you have just read, what kinds of professional learning do you think would meet some of the criteria for effective professional development, and help teachers not only to develop knowledge but also to transform their practices in the light of new knowledge and understanding? You can include strategies that you already use in your setting as well as imagining new possibilities.

What form can teacher professional learning take?

How do the ideas in the video match up with your ideas about professional development?

Teachers’ supporting each other’s professional learning

How might your own team support each other’s professional learning? In what ways do you think this kind of collegial support approach to professional learning might support and enhance other key aspects to developing excellence in teams that you have explored so far in this course, such as a positive team culture and individual wellbeing?

Choosing a focus for professional development

How does what you learned about the perceived strengths of individual team members in the developing leadership activity for this part help you think about extending professional learning? What type of professional learning might you be interested in?

Notes and reflections from Part 6. Courageous conversations

Develop your leadership

For this activity, then, we’d like you to reflect and gather some data on one team member and the aspect of practice that you are concerned about or that could be improved. Spend a minute or two now thinking about a team member with whom you would like to have a courageous conversation about their practice, but have not approached yet. Perhaps you have been worried about seeming overly autocratic and so have avoided approaching the issue. Alternatively, perhaps you have already had conversations with this team member about this aspect of practice but the improvement that you desire has not taken place yet.

Write down the name of the person and the aspect of practice you would like them to improve.

Next, make a list of all the data you have about the aspect of practice you want to see improved. This data will be information that you already have – after all, something is fuelling your concerns or suggesting to you that some improvement could be made. You may have anecdotal evidence, things you have heard or seen in passing, or you may have had comments from parents and whānau, or other team members. There may be some documentation that evidences the problem. You may be aware that this data is not convincing – for example, comments from others do not form reliable data, and ideally you would want to substantiate this with some direct observation. However, the initial stages of a courageous conversation are about sharing concerns and trying to reach agreement about whether there is an issue to improve, and to offer the team member an opportunity to put forward their understanding of the issue. While more formal data collection may form part of the solution, this will need to be agreed with the team member.

Data:

Courageous conversations

Think about the team(s) you work with.

Are there team members to whom you tend to lack confidence to give really honest feedback, in case you damage your relationship with them or their self-esteem? With which team members are you perhaps too autocratic? Which kind of relationship issue characterises the relationship you have with the team member you focused on in your Developing Leadership activity? Why does the third option above work so well? What difference do you think it would make to relationships when leaders are open-to-learning about the other person’s perspectives? What difference would it make to solution-finding, and the effectiveness of those solutions?

Think again of the team member and the courageous conversation you’d like to have, that you began to make notes about in the developing leadership activity. Look at those notes again.

Can you identify any assumptions in your thinking there? What information leads you to those assumptions? Are other interpretations possible? What would you like to ask the team member in order to help you determine the validity of those assumptions? Your list:

Learning conversations

How does this example show principles of open-to-learning conversations?

Returning to the courageous conversation you would like to have with the team member about which you wrote in the Developing Leadership activity, write a list of questions that you might use to uncover this team member’s theory-of-action. First, think about what you want to know. For example, in relation to the story-time problem that we worked through, the leader might decide to find out what the teacher believes constitutes an effective story-time, how she perceives the children experience the story, and what impact different kinds of story-time might have on the subsequent nap-time. With a strong sense of what you want to know and discuss, see if you can construct open-ended, invitational, specific, evocative, challenging, and positive or neutrally-framed questions.

Questions:

Assumptions and defensiveness

Think back to a difficult conversation or feedback conversation that you have had recently.

Can you remember some of the claims that were made (by you or others involved in the conversation)? What were some of the assumptions behind these claims?

Alternatively, if you cannot recall a recent conversation, see if you can detect the assumptions present in the leader’s thinking in the scenario we explored before.

Click here for a reminder of the leader’s initial thoughts.

These children are not engaged in the story at all…look at them, up and down like that! I’m sure it is because the story is totally inappropriate for this age group and that teacher is doing nothing to engage them in the story. This happens every afternoon and the children are not getting sufficient rest. I have to do something about this.

AND

Hmm I thought we agreed in our meeting that we would make these story-times nice and calm to help the toddlers transition to nap-time. Why has this teacher not got that message? I will need to remind them of the point of these story-times again.

Think again about the different team members that you work with.

Can you see this approach to difficult feedback conversations (courageous conversations) could be helpful, for both those team members that you are not confident to give honest feedback to, and those that you feel you can’t get the message through to? Are there team members with whom you think this technique would be tricky to use? Why is that? How to have a courageous conversation:

Notes and reflections from Part 7. Mentoring and coaching for excellence

Develop your leadership

Using what you have observed about Sara’s and Marin’s practice and reflection, decide at which stage of the scale you would place each teacher in their teaching journey. Make some notes about specifically what you have observed in their practice and reflection that you identify as evidence for your judgement. Keep these notes to share in your Leaders’ PLC meeting or critical friend conversation.

Sara: Marin:

Mentoring and coaching

What is and is not effective support in a mentoring or coaching relationship? When would you use each mentoring mode? Can you think of an example for which you would employ an instructive mode? Collaborative mode? Facilitative mode? Mentoring modes shown: What do you think are the benefits of formal mentoring arrangements? What are the disadvantages? What are the benefits of informal, in-the-moment, professional conversations? Similarly, what are the disadvantages? Things I already do: Things I could do:

The leader’s role

Think about your own experience of being mentored.

What supported you to learn from that experience? What helped you to develop a strong and positive identity as a teacher? Were there any aspects of mentoring that you did not find supportive or helpful?

Think about the kind of mentoring relationship that you would really thrive in.

What would you like your mentor to be like? What kind of qualities would you like your mentor to have? Draw a picture (this could be a caricature) of what this person would be like, and write key words around your image. You might like to upload your drawing here:

Uploaded File: Remove

Upload a FilePermitted file formats: pdf, doc, docx, xls, xlsx, csv, txt, ppt, pptx, mp3, mp4, zip.

Bearing in mind the information above about ensuring mentees have control over their mentoring experience, what important elements or questions would you include in a mentoring meeting?

Reflective practice and questioning

What would your next response be, if you were the mentor in the above discussion? How would you help this teacher to reflect more deeply on this situation (a child who shouts a lot), and the teaching strategies he might use? Think about questions that might encourage the teacher to unpack his values and beliefs about the shouting behaviour, and the theories of teaching that are underpinning his current strategy to resolve this problem.

Questioning

Reflect again on your own experiences, either of being mentored or of being assessed in some way.

When did you take on feedback and use it to help yourself improve? Have there been occasions when you have rejected or failed to act on feedback given? What was the difference between the way that the feedback was given that led you either to use it, or reject or ignore it? Was it due to the relationship you had with the person giving feedback, or the way the feedback was given, for example?

As we come to the end of this part, think again about Sara and Marin, the teachers you met in our Developing Leadership activity. What support and challenge do you think they would benefit from in a mentoring process? What kinds of skills you would want them to develop and what kind of mentoring would be useful? Your answers will depend on where you assessed Sara and Marin on the teaching development scale, and it may be helpful to look to the next stage on the scale for ideas.

Sara: Marin:

Mapping your vision

As a leader, what would you like mentoring to look like in your setting? Spend some time to think about and articulate a vision for mentoring in your place (you can write, create a spider-gram, or use the visual arts). Think about who in your team(s) would benefit from regular mentoring, and who might benefit from being a mentor. Think too about the skills and competencies that mentees and mentors will need in order to benefit from a mentoring relationship, and what kinds of structures and processes would need to be in place (time, space, and equipment). Write down or draw your vision for mentoring practice in your early childhood setting, imagining the best mentoring processes and relationships that you can. What would you see taking place? How often? What qualities of relationship would emerge? How would people feel as a result of taking part in mentoring?

You might like to take notes about your vision here: Or upload notes or an artwork:

Uploaded File: Remove

Upload a FilePermitted file formats: pdf, doc, docx, xls, xlsx, csv, txt, ppt, pptx, mp3, mp4, zip.

Notes and reflections Part. 8 Making positive change

Wellbeing

Write a list of all the people you can and do draw on for support as a leader, and in what ways (social support as well as perhaps mentoring and coaching). Are there people you haven’t considered, or relationships you can develop further? Have you managed to establish any consistent routines for self-care? Have you managed to carve out short segments of time for self-care, or have these periods become squeezed out of your day by other demands? Have you found some self-care activities more helpful than others? Or is it time to experiment and try something new?

Mapping your vision

Goals: