Inspiring Professional Practice
Ensuring everyone in the school has a constant and consistent focus on learning is key to the role of school leadership. In between workshop there will be opportunities for engagement and action learning.
Action learning promotes a culture of collective efficacy and impacts positively on student outcomes. Throughout the Challenging Learning Process, you will create action plans for staff development, ensuring that there are opportunities for engagement in action learning.
On this page, we will provide access to relevant articles, videos and podcasts that stimulate professional dialogue and reflection, and support action learning, planning and monitoring.
Resources to Inspire Professional Dialogue and PLCs!
PLC 1
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Downloadable Inspiration
On here we will place relevant podcasts, videos, and articles that will prompt discussion in staff meetings and PLCs.
PLC 2
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Downloadable Inspiration
On here we will place relevant podcasts, videos, and articles that will prompt discussion in staff meetings and PLCs.
So, what is the Action Learning Cycle?
The Action Learning Cycle is a step-by-step structure that gives staff, champions and leaders a protocol to develop their professional thinking and practice.
At the heart of the Action Learning Cycle is a professional enquiry; which creates deliberate opportunity to explore real educational issues that relate to your school and context. By discussing ideas, theories and making plans, educators are more likely to take actions that significantly improve education.
Implementing an action learning approach to school improvement gives staff a voice in the core issues that the school wants to improve, and ultimately builds a culture of collective efficacy.
Our Action Learning Cycle is based around 6 key steps that encourage learning together:
- Identify a theme: this can be broad, and is usually an issue, an aspect of the vision, or any area of meaningful professional interest to the group or individual.
- Seek Inspiration: read, watch, listen or discuss inspirational material and resources that give the group a better understanding of the theme. Sometimes these are articles, podcasts, workshops or even, data.
- Make a Plan: based on what they have been inspired by, the group will make a plan to take action and trial an approach. This could be something small – a single action in a classroom; or something much larger, like implementing a project.
- Action and Observation: put the plan into practice. Take a risk and try something with the students in the classroom. It might not be comfortable at first, but it might change your practice, and impact positively on your students!
- Reflect: this is key to professional dialogue, taking the time to talk through what worked and what didn’t work, so that the plan can be refined and improved, and most importantly, tried again!
- Evaluation and Next Steps: review all the steps of the action learning cycle so far and share the group’s experiences and reflections. In this step, the professional dialogue centres around the impact of the actions taken and what it means for the school.
This dialogue should generate recommendations for the school, share the learning with the wider staff and highlight a new theme for the next cycle of action learning!