Learner - learning: New approach

School and cluster-based teacher-development programs:

G H Asoka

Ensuring quality of learner-learning as it is defined within a particular education system is the most fundamental feature of high-quality education. First part of this article was published on last Satuday

The other significant facet is in the philosophy of education: constructivist approach (considering that knowledge and learning as dynamic because individually learners understand matters in their unique ways and create their own and new knowledge without ignoring importance of knowing facts and information) in preference to positivist approach (thinking that knowledge as stable and relatively fixed by knowing particular canons of fixed knowledge as the basis for learning while paying less attention on constructive criticism and creating new knowledge as each learner wishes using commonalities in the target input).

Parallel to these shifts in learner-learning and teacher-learning, the changes identified behind SCBTD can be found in two other fields: l governance and organization of schools and classrooms and l the same of teacher development programs. Replacing centralized nature and centralized decision-making, decentralized or local decision making at school level is usually expected in SCBTD.

Democratic environment

Use of participatory approaches enhancing democratic environment by facilitating schools with desirable autonomy, accountability with community involvement and communities or learning among teachers and school leaders is desired instead of authoritarian background using a cascade. When previous approaches to teachers’ professional development relied on pre-service, modern approaches emphasize continuum of professional development through in-service level. Thus it is vivid quality ensuring aspects of teacher education that have been modified a lot of SCBTD mechanism.

Three out of Harvey’s (1995) five alternative concepts of education directly reflect the importance of the link between education and quality in line with quality of teachers and their instructional design reflecting a distinct rationale for a plausible justification in educational change: education quality as consistency (with equality as the vision for ensuring equitable experiences, schools and classrooms for providing consistent experiences across the system), education quality as fitness-for-purpose (with the vision of refinement and perfection in specific subject areas through which preparing students for specific roles and instructional specialization are emphasized) and education quality as transformative potential (with the vision for socially and personally important positive changes expected through its catalyst/s role).

The teacher is expected to function as part of a social network with his or her students, within a school community and the macro society through extended professionalism. The literature indicates that appositive policy environment and adequate support for growth are essential for creating sustaining teacher-quality. Recent discussions on educational quality have paid attention emphasizing the role of schools, teachers, school leadership, community members and students. Among them, teachers are paramount:

‘The literature suggests that schools and teachers, supported by a strong system of supervision, flexible policies, efficient administration and community involvement, should be emphasized in policies and programs intended to help improve education quality’ (The Role of Teachers, Schools, and Communities in Quality Education, P. 10).

Today empowerment of teachers to enhance and ensure quality in education is a school based task in its developmental agenda allowing teachers to make greater control of their practice and responsibility for their professional development in a cooperative and collaborative context: ‘Teachers and classroom process are now in front and centre and they generally agreed to be key to education-quality’.

Quality factors

The 2004 UNESCO report repeatedly emphasizes that teachers have the strongest influence on learning and on a wide variety of other quality factors within schools. (UNESCO 2004, P.18, 161-168). This trend focuses more on complex interactions and processes in the school than the other factors which highlight importance of concentration on teaching and learning, purposeful teaching, school-based staff development demonstrating school as a learning organization which focus mainly on teacher and teacher development through SCBTD.

The newly accepted prominent pedagogy based on constructivism, active-learning principles problem solving, critical dialogue, inquiry and higher order thinking skills through self-directed learning invites teachers to deviate from traditional teacher-centred support. Currently teachers themselves are expected to play a responsible role for their professional development frequently among groups of teachers at school level itself by deviating from the traditional acceptance that teachers as the semi-skilled workers who are unable to make responsible decisions about their practice. SCBTD has been identified as a rich source for this complex task.

School and cluster-based teacher-development (SCBTD) programs for continuous teacher-development

It has generally been found out that continuous teacher-development support has been a neglected area in developing countries, with budgets and programs heavily front-loaded in favour of pre-service teacher education.

Teacher education

Consequently continuous professional teacher-development support becomes frequently scanty or non-existent after initial teacher education available as pre-service or in-service. In Sri Lanka, too, the situation is the same. This is an undesirable situation for teachers due to professional isolation experienced in different terms. The small number of continuous teacher-development programs annually available in Sri Lanka is occasionally conducted on a large scale, centralized cascade or multiplier training workshops or courses, which provide a large audience of participants with information of relevance to their practice. Yet this mechanism possesses weaknesses in several aspects.

They reach only a small percentage of teachers. Educational authorities rely on those who attend these workshops to pass new information to their colleagues through a cascade. There is rarely a mechanism for them in place for the cascade or multiplier to work. Such workshops or courses are typically expert-driven and a desk-bound specialist transmits abstract information to teachers in a series of presentations or lectures and therefore teachers are provided with negative models of passive learning. They tend to be ad-hoc in content and rarely provide a comprehensive learning program for teachers.

Degree courses

The consequence is that necessary information does frequently not flow down across the cascade to lower levels at all and/or the quality of information becomes low when moving down through the cascade. Thus such multiplier workshops lead to little change in teacher’s classroom approaches as they depend on the exhortation rather than modelling, process and structured practice in which teaches play an active role.

Continuous professional development of teachers is associated with various models such as seminars, short courses or higher-level degree courses. However, these models may not address teachers of all the schools in a country in an equal manner to address their learners in return unlike in school and cluster-based teacher-development programs. Robinson introduces two types of paradigms for teachers’ professional development: the management paradigm and empowerment paradigm. The SCBTD approach is usually and mostly related to the latter.

Another significant observation in research is that the school has today become the focus of teacher-development for optimizing teacher-learning through restructuring time and meeting structures to create additional opportunities for collegial work within a school day and to address emerging teacher-learning trends by implementation of quality teacher-learning strategies. This needs creating time, teams and role of leadership for highlighting power of collegiality and collective thought in effective school based teacher-learning.

Actual teacher-learning needs an experiential and experimental approaches to explore new ideas, links previous knowledge with new understanding within broader education reforms, reflects on their classroom practice and collectively shares and discusses educational practices. By linking these processes with student-learning, curriculum reforms can be deeply embedded in daily school life with new classroom structures and as a result, self-managing teacher-learning teams emerge.

The topics on improving students’ learning outcomes, improving how teachers facilitate their learners and expanding the ways they think about their learning-teaching are necessary to be discussed as apprentices and experienced teachers. It has been found out that this is best done in a collaborative situation through common knowledge, common understanding and exploring issues together and so with highly professional insiders and outsiders. This process creates power: collaborative visioning, collective debating and collective sharing of ideas.

Confidence and self-realization in the power of collegiality and collective thought strengthens the spirit of working as a self-managing team without nuts and bolts of administrative issues. This can be done through learning by doing and vice versa with reflective practice on what teachers do, how they do it, how they know about something and the steps taken for desirable changes and so on.

Collegial learning supports teachers to develop new skills of supporting all students, student-problem solving skills and prepares them to be adaptable workers and life-long learners. It is a major challenge today for the teacher to be a specialist through self-directedness and self-directed learning while guiding students to be independent learners through the same. Such an environment becomes a feasible place for teacher-learning as well.

This aspect needs restructuring schools as learning communities allowing teachers to learn together. Senge’s learning organization model shows that when restructuring schools as learning communities, they should deviate from the industrial age-concept of knowledge as fragmented categories and specific subject areas: under learning organization model, within associated learning communities and communities of practice. The SCBTD program encourages teachers to learn together to understand pragmatic reality with reflective practice which leads to new assumptions and generalizations to create new directions of teacher-development and learner-development. This sort of specific social situation, in return, leads to restructure and acculturate the school in such a way fostering benefits for both teachers and learners.

To be continued