Episode 207: Professional learning communities

Professional learning communities. That's what we're talking about today. This comes into so many different episodes that we've talked about and just more generally. But we talked in one episode about some of the factors that can influence the establishment of professional learning communities. But just want to expand them a little bit more. Your thoughts, Andy, Robin, just how do we go about it? How do we get them functioning?

Yeah. So like look professional learning communities. First off, I think we need to kind of define what we're talking about professional learning communities. And I think it's one of those you know, those buzzwords that flies around in education all the time and different people have different interpretations.

But when I talk about professional learning communities, what I'm really talking about is just like teachers getting together and learning together, right? Like that's the simplest way I can describe it. And I think there's lots of different approaches to that.

But I think...in particular for teachers is critical that you involve them in professional learning community. It should be mandatory that every teacher is involved in some form of professional learning community. And that's not to like belittle or kind of say like, need the extra help or like, that's not, it's not, there's no professional judgment here taking place, right? The point is, that teaching is a very, very, very isolating profession.

Especially in primary schools, elementary schools, more so than maybe anywhere, than any other profession I can think of, because you spend all day on your own with a bunch of kids, right? In elementary school, that's what you do, or primary school. So, you know...

Who are you learning from? How do you improve your practice? Right? If you're all you ever do is you're with the kids, like obviously you're going to do things and you're going to see the results of them and whatever, but it's so easy for you to go down rabbit holes. So there has to be, there has to be a community of teachers getting together, discussing the issues that they're having and, ways to ways to solve problems and ways to improve, anything from the performance of the, of the, of the learning right down to their mental health, right?

And they're coping with the extremely stressful job of having to manage 30 little people, right? So I think it's super important. what, you know, Adam, what kind of professional learning communities have you been involved with and which ones have you found effective?

I think the one that opened my eyes up most was...

I was involved at the very, very, very beginning of Math Hubs, so the pilot. And I remember that we were sat around a table and it was in the Northwest and there were a lot of people that were sat around that table that were professor this and doctor this and so on, like everyone, everyone had amazing things. And it was easy to feel, and certainly I did when I first started, you know, almost intimidated, you know. But what I realized really quickly was,

There was a lot of, don't know how to do this. I don't know how to do that. There were times where we might start a session with a problem. know, just as something just to remind ourselves we're here to teach mathematics and be comfortable saying, I haven't got a clue how to do this. I don't even know where to start. So I think that that was something for me that reminded me that it doesn't matter how, you know, moving away from that idea of, it's only people that...

at early stages of their career or whatever it was. And I think that made it an incredibly powerful space because you knew where everyone was at. Because if someone didn't know how to do this or they've not had experience of this, it was evident immediately.

And I think that that was, you know, it didn't make everything work perfectly, but I'll tell you what, I think we all learned huge amounts from each other because we knew, we knew where we were or weren't, you know?

And I think that that's the thing. that, like I said, it reminds me that this isn't just a support for those people new in it or anything like that, that the whole idea behind them is it's just an absolute continuum of learning. And I think it's about having the sort of, know, one, it's setting up the culture, but also having the courage to be able to do it and realize nothing terrible happens when you say, don't know how to do this.

And so I think that was a real eye-opener for me.

Yeah, and so, you know, it's that leveling, right? It's like, hey, you know what, actually, we're all kind of like, we're all, you know, we're all capable of being humbled, right? All of us, even the professors, right? Like, I can, you know, we can all be stumped. Right. So, so, so don't feel bad about being stumped.

Right. And I think there's, there's like this. Yeah. I think performance anxiety is something that teachers worry about a lot in those kinds of scenarios. Right. So you see it, you see it in our professional development, you know, when you're doing the training and you, and you realize like, Hey, those teachers here are really kind of like afraid of the fact that they don't know how to answer because they feel like they should. And I think that that's really, an important thing is to, to make them realize, hey, like you don't know.

Now let's bring that back. Let's bring that back to the students. Okay. To the pupils. Okay. Now you're getting a sense of what they feel like. Okay. And like, okay, we're all like, let's, we all feel this way. Okay. It's a human trait, right? Like, and that's, in, in, in jargon speak, you know, I always refer to it as, the teacher as a student, right?

And it's a really important thing. It's like, let's build that empathy right off the bat of what it feels like not to know something. Because you know what? That's where the learning is happening. Right? Because if we're all doing things that we already know, nobody's learning anything. Right? So let's all do something that's not that easy. So that's a great, is that like, I would call that teacher as a learner. Right?

And when I say learner, not necessarily that they're, not necessarily that they're learning something. The most critical thing is that they recognize that they don't know everything. And neither does anybody else. Let's start there.

Yeah. And you could apply that even to a new teacher versus a more senior teacher where there's no question that even though the more senior teacher has knowledge, has been doing it a long time, does not mean that they don't have a lot to learn from a new teacher. Obviously the new teacher can learn some things, but I mean it goes both ways.

Well, you know, I mean, Adam, don't know if you've had this experience, but I certainly have. I've had several people that have been really intimidating sitting in my training sessions in the past. I remember two very clearly. One was the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences from Dalhousie University sitting in one of my seminars, right?

And the other one was Tony Gardner several times sitting in my seminars. Right. It's like Tony Gardner. Like, can you imagine a more intimidating figure to have sitting in your seminar? But what you recognized is that they didn't know the answer any better than anybody else. They just were more tenacious and finding ways to solve it. And they weren't necessarily, you know, like that, was an interesting thing.

In both instances, my biggest problem with both those guys was I'd have to stop them so that we could get onto the next thing. Because once they found, you know, they just wouldn't stop, right? There was just like going deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper.

And that's the only difference. you know, as far as like how many ways are there to do this, they didn't know the answer better than anybody else, right? They just were more tenacious and they didn't figure it out any quicker. They just didn't want to stop.

It's tenacity, its resilience is what they have, right? It's that they know it's hard. They're supposed to be hard. Yeah.

Yeah, I think I agree. And I think having the opportunities to like be comfortable with that. I think that's the other thing, like you said earlier, Andy, about that idea around teaching that we spend a lot of time in the classroom by ourselves. And so, you know, that we might only get snippets of dealing with some people. And so if we don't establish that being comfortable with, don't know, then.

then yeah, that can be problematic. One thing that I don't think happened as much now, but it certainly happened when I was training in New Zealand, which I thought was fantastic, smaller populations, a whole host of things, the reason why it could happen, and it's not a transferable model necessarily for here. But when we trained, any government initiatives in draft form would be first shared with the trainees that were doing their teaching degree, which was three years in the uni.

with the intention that when you left uni, when you were qualified, you were the ones that were most up to date with the changes for the curriculum and you could support the colleagues that were already in situ because you'd been trained in the new ways or the new whatever it was. And it didn't mean that you like ran the professional development because there was support for the schools as well.

But what made it really nice, it comes back to your point, Robin, and something you said as well, is that idea around someone coming in and saying, right, well, I know this about this. And so again, it's that leveler. So it's not all that one way traffic of, you're a new teacher, you're the one that's got to do all the learning, it's that one direction. It was really a case of, so what's the latest and greatest, or what direction are we moving in? And it just allowed for that,

coming in at a bit more of a perceived level. And I thought that was a really good thing. I thought it was a really good thing. But I think ultimately, and we're all fortunate that we get to visit a lot of schools, you know when you walk into a school, you know that it's a school where everyone would feel comfortable talking about the profession. And that's ultimately what it comes down to, right? It's professionally responsible. Why wouldn't you talk about...

how to do what you do better to the people you do it with. That just makes total sense. But I think that's the thing is that the culture in schools that we, and we've been in some, we just know, you know that anyone could talk to anyone and it would be absolutely celebrated. How can we do this? And allowing for those conversations to flourish. But I have been in schools where it's been the opposite and it does feel like I don't want to say this.

because it will come across as if I don't know how to do my job very well, which always falls apart somewhere, somewhere along the line. There's always something at some point, but yeah, it's interesting.