Greg’s Blog – principal (le?) learning

An article worth reading from Charles Handy:

Unexamined learning can turn out to be wasted learning, while those who fail to learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them. Which is why wise organizations build in regular review sessions for their work groups, to help them spell out the lessons, good and bad, that they have learned from their recent experiences. The most fruitful appraisals, too, are those that focus on what has been learned during the year, rather than on grading performance. Leaders, in particular, I now believe, need to devote time and intellectual energy to reflecting on their experiences in order to crystallize what they have learned and can now add to their stack of knowledge.

I have been having interesting conversations recently with a number of people at school, in our cluster and online about appraisal and performance management. I see the two as VERY different!

Performance Management = people making changes to their practice and reflecting on what they have done so they have lessons they can imbed in their practice/s. Making practice better.

Appraisal = summative judgements about how good that practice actually is.

We all (should) learn from our practice in an ongoing way.  Few teachers simply bang their head against the brick wall of poor practice.  I don’t know any teachers, parents, principals who get out of bed each day thinking “whose life can I ruin today?”  We all do our best …

But do we learn from what we do?  The answer to that is very different for different teachers!  Some reflect deeply on their practice and endeavour to improve it step-by-step.  Others simply treat teaching as a technocratic activity where if they do the ‘right’ things kids will learn through some mystical and mysterious processes.  I want the deeply reflective ones in our school thanks.

The challenge for appraisal and pefomance management processes is capturing the learning.  What is different inside the teachers head and for their practice as a result of the professional learning that has taken place this year?  This is Teaching as Inquiry as described in the NZC …. ongoing action research about pedagogy for real.  We have developed a framework for this that is one page for any given objective/focus.

It is a cool time of the year for me having the discussions with each teacher about the things they have LEARNED.  A time to celebrate the successes and offer new challenges.  Acknowledge the challenges overcome and the learning steps taken.  What has been left behind, what has been reinforced, what has been adopted.

What professional learning is all about.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Learning and Teaching, Pedagogy, professional learning, school leadership.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.