Professional Learning Application of Effective

Professional Learning

Application of Effective Leadership Practices in Leading Professional Learning

Description of professional learning context and issue

and many others -- is convincing teachers of the need to adopt standardized methods of evaluation to enhance accountability. Since assuming my position in 2011, I have been responsible for creating a professional monitoring system for individual teachers, which is designed to improve the quality of teaching and overall student outcomes. After several months of researching different models of appraisal and professional development systems in place in other school, a new assessment system was launched in 2012 which was based upon the standards for professional learning needs and teacher appraisal of the New Zealand Registered Teacher Criteria.

At present, teachers are asked to rate their teaching effectiveness using a general rubric and to set professional learning goals to work on over the year. However, it is not clear that the goals teachers have established for themselves have improved student outcomes and in many cases it appears that the goals were met because they were written retrospectively. This paper will use the applied critical leadership formula of Santamaria & Santamaria (2012) to suggest ways to improve teacher-administration dialogue and to foster greater investment by teachers in the assessment process. Applied critical leadership stresses the need to recognize and exploit "the existing needs of a follower" to achieve its objectives (Santamaria & Santamaria 2012: 3-4)

Identifying a challenge

The challenge is to improve the quality of education and to get teachers 'on board' with the self-evaluation process. Ultimately, improvement must be integrated into the process of teaching and professional development must be an important component of the philosophy of the school. At present, teachers have varying ideas of what constitutes acceptable methods of disseminating content. While many of these ideas are good and the teachers at the school are certainly accomplished, the ideal is to have a cohesive, continuously-improving model for teacher growth. "When energies are directed towards multiple, sometimes conflicting initiatives, that are not part of an overall coherent plan," they are unlikely to be successful (Le Fevre 2010: 75).

To realize the ideal of synchronization of teacher goals, the evaluation program must become more structured. There must be a general beginning-of-the-school-year meeting for all teachers, so they understand the goals of the overall assessment program. The director of the assessment program must sit down with each teacher one-on-one as the teacher establishes goals for the year. These goals should be formal and written out, rather than merely established privately by the teacher. Then, at the end of the year, there can be a debriefing of the teacher participants, as well as an assessment of the growth of the class. This method of investing in teachers and allowing teacher more input into the structure of the assessment program on an ongoing basis is a transformational model in the manner in which it fosters change as a collective process. Teachers will also feel a greater sense of investment in a school which contributes to their growth as professional educators through mentoring.

Despite the resistance shown by the teachers to goal-setting, the school feels that this approach is fair, given its focus upon improving teacher quality and its lack of emphasis on students meeting predetermined benchmarks. Ultimately, what is controllable about teaching is the process of what the teacher does, and which must be of a high quality, while the factors influencing student outcomes outside the learning environment is more challenging to assess appropriately (Fenstermacher & Richardson 2008: 187).