Changes in Practice

As Judy Halbert states “Inquiry is a stance. It’s a way of professional being, it’s not a thing. We don’t ‘do’ inquiry. We’re just always asking ourselves and seeking for the evidence that we are making enough of a difference.” (Whole Education, Youtube).

Changes in practice in any industry is critical for success, this is especially true for teachers as the digital revolution growth exponentially.

It is teachers who make the difference and it is often assumed that it is educational management's job is to help teachers to change their practice. But this approach creates the ‘everyone but me’ reliance where everyone thinks someone else needs to change.

This mindset needs to become ‘everyone including me, the collective efforts of everyone are essential to making a real difference to outcomes for students.
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This brings me back to one of the very first Mindlab sessions on Spiral of Inquiry, a framework for evaluation and collaboration.

Inquiry is a collaborative process involving more than just one or two people. To learn deeply you have to learn from one another. The inquiry spiral is a team sport, not an individual endeavour.

Such a method should be used by every school and institute not only for educational policy compliance (ERO for schools, EER for tertiary institutes) but to truly develop a culture of value for the student and professionalism within staff, whether this be at primary, secondary or tertiary level. In assessing the value of our teaching critically we can make required adjustments without feeling singled-out, rather it shows strength of self-engagement and a focus on quality over ego or narrow sighted self-belief.

By continually challenging ourselves, our leadership and our schools to add more value, compliance tasks such as ERO/EER become trivial ticking the box type activities as staff are truly committed to continual improvement, with the value of such clearly seen within every student engagement.

We should remember that although school performance is based on metrics of Qualification Completion, Course Completion, Retention and Progression, it is always the qualitative data seen through the ERO/EER model which really tells the story of performance.

Leadership can try to “drive the numbers” as can teachers, by manipulating statistics or holding disengaged students from withdrawing. However it is much harder to“create” a culture of change, in practice and leadership and even harder to manipulate the results of such a process.

Change of practice is indeed good and something we should all try to embrace within ourselves and our teams.

Timperley, H., Kaser, L., and Halbert, J. (2014, April). A framework for transforming learning in schools: Innovation and the spiral of inquiry. Centre for Strategic Education, Seminar Series Paper No. 234.

Dumont, H. et al (2010). The Nature of Learning: Using research to inspire practice. OECD Publishing.