Professor Geoff Southworth, NCSL Director of Research, suggests that by focusing on five levels of learning, school leaders can put instruction, not administrative pressures in the priority seat.

At a glance

• School leaders must make instruction and learning their priority not administration.
• Schools should help pupils learn how to learn
• Teachers learn best by reflecting on classroom practice and by collaborating in groups
• 'Learning Schools' have a climate of trust, openness and security
• Creating learning schools depends on the quality and depth of the leadership

Learning vs Teaching

Learning lies at the heart of school leadership, improvement and transformation. Much of the 20th century was preoccupied with teaching. Educational debate revolved around (and around!) what to teach. Much time and effort was devoted to the curriculum as content, to questions of what pupils needed to know and how we should assess whether they had acquired this knowledge.We now recognise that more attention should be paid to pupils' learning. Contemporary thinking show that learning is not merely absorbing knowledge, but is an active process of mind.

Conversation and group discussions have a vital part to play in the learning process. Another way of describing these ideas is to say that not only should we pay attention to how pupils learn, but we must help them learn how to learn.

However much we agree with this conceptually, old habits are hard to unlearn. Changing the balance between teaching as transmission and teaching which enables pupils to construct new knowledge and become powerful learners is a process which needs to be led.

FIVE LEVELS OF LEARNING

1. Teacher Learning
2. Collaborative group learning
3. Organisational learning
4. Leadership learning
5. Learning Networks

1. Teacher Learning

Involves encouraging colleagues to look closely at the learners' experiences and to use these insights to reflect on their teaching. This involves using outcome data and monitoring what is happening in the classrooms in a spirit of peer development. It also requires professional dialogue; colleagues must recognise excellence challenge assumptions and create new professional knowledge. It is a constructive process of professional learning. The major purpose of professional dialogue is to enable participants to make their teaching and the pupils' learning more powerful. Whilst there are other benefits - such as peer support, collaborative teacher cultures and wider frames of reference - we need to ensure that all who use this approach understands that the goal is to improve classroom practices

2. Collaborative group learning

The second level is that of groups of teachers learning collaboratively. These groups might be structural units such as key stage teams, departments of teachers or year groups. In some schools, teachers get together in alternative groupings and form their own learning teams. These informal teams can be valuable in that they supplement established structural arrangements and transcend subject or other boundaries.

3. Organisational learning

At the third level, the school becomes a learning organisation. Such schools are characterised by climates of trust, openness and security. Trust is essential if people are to work together learn from one another and apply their learning in the classrooms. Without trust colleagues lack the confidence to talk to one another because they are fearful or negative or even hostile reactions. An absence of trust undermines an openness. Leaders need to think about creating the conditions in their schools which enable the workplace to be a positive, professional learning environment for the adults as well as the students.

4. Leadership learning

Creating learning schools rests, in large measure, on the quality of leadership. As professional development and improvement grows in a school, more leaders are needed to exercise learning-centred leadership.This leadership needs to be distributed to ensure it influences teaching and learning. Heads, deputies and assistant heads may well need to become leadership mentors and coaches to their colleagues.

5. Learning networks

The fifth level is learning networks of schools. Without this level, professional learning could be too strongly internally focused. Without external input, we may never re-think existing practices which we take for granted. Being able to engage with each other outside the school helps up see anew. We all need to look outside the confines of our contexts in order to see more clearly the strengths and limitations within them. These five levels may appear to be in sequential order; they are not. For example individuals and groups can be involved in networks without the school becoming a learning organisation. Likewise leadership learning is needed to support each and every level. The intention must be that over time all five levels of learning are achieved and operate simultaneously. Then we will have learning teachers, leaders, schools and systems. To reach the point where we all work in a learning education system, which also learns from best practice worldwide, is an ambition for all leaders and for NCSL.

<TAKEN FROM NCSL MAGAZINE - VOLUME 6>

The first annual Conference of Networked Learning Communities was set in the very plush surroundings of the Hilton Hotel, just outside Birmingham. The venue certainly did not disappoint. Excellent rooms and top quality food set the tone. Professor David Hargreaves provided the keynote speech. He was clearly very impressed by what he had heard and seen and was hugely optimistic about the impact network learning could have, both for teachers professional development and, in-deed, for pupils learning. Heather Du Quesnay was the main speaker for the second day and set out clearly and concisely the work that the National College for School Leadership was doing and how this married with Network Learning. Nationally there are over 70 networks in operation. At the conference each network had a display stand where they exhibited information about their current initiatives. It was interesting to see the ideas presented by other networks and it gave us the opportunity to build links with other learning communities. There was a great deal of interest in our work as a network. The shared staff development activities and assessment focus were issues that other networked were keen to learn from. What will be really interesting is to see how the larger scale projects have fared, what has been developed and how this has impacted on professional development and pupil's learning in twelve months time!

<SALLY PEMBERTON - SWEYNE PARK SCHOOL & PETER GRAINGER - WOODLANDS SCHOOL>