The Power of Collective Action
A number of readings from Creating Learning Without Limits, by Maddock, Peacock, Hart & Drummond, Open University Press, Maidenhead.
Reading 1: Power and leadership: partnership and collaboration (p. 109)
This different view of professional learning has important consequences for teachers’ sense of their own power and agency and for the distinctive nature of relationships between school leaders and their teaching teams. The training-delivery model assumes a hierarchy of power; ideas and diktats emanating from centralized agencies are passed down to school managers, frequently via local authorities, and from there disseminated to staff groups in schools by teachers with leadership responsibilities. This hierarchical approach reduces teachers’ role to that of operative of other people’s ideas. It is demeaning of teachers’ expertise and also disempowering. The assumption is that ‘what works’ will work. But what if it does not? If teachers have been encouraged simply to apply ideas drawn from elsewhere, they do not have full control and ownership of the ideas needed to review and revise their practices and find new ways forward. Even more worryingly, if children do not learn when exposed to ‘quality first teaching’, then it seems logical to assume that the problem must lie with the child; there is no impetus or obligation for teachers to examine and develop their own practice. Hence the proliferation of booster groups and individualized support packages that have been introduced in recent years (e.g. DfES 2003b). At Wroxham, as we have shown, the approach to development ensures that teachers stay in control of their own learning. Their awareness of their own power, through the focus on children’s learning and the cultivation of the seven dispositions, leads teachers to respond to difficulties by seeking to deepen their understanding of what is going on, working out for themselves what scope there is within current practices to lift limits and enhance learning opportunities.
Teachers’ sense of their own agency and power to change things for the better implies the need for a different kind of relationship between head and staff.
Reading 2 (p. 110)
Her approach from the outset was to communicate with people that they were invited to work with her in a genuine collaborative partnership, where ideas and insights would flow both ways. In working together, everyone had both power and responsibility.
[At Wroxham,] accountability is not primarily about attainment or external measures for monitoring school performance… Accountability is intrinsically bound up with teachers’ own intentions as they write their own plans, devise their own resources, introduce their own topics and projects and then monitor rigorously how the children are responding. When the teaching teams decide to make changes in their classroom practices, with a view to enhancing learning capacity, they do not just ‘hope for the best’ and assume that these changes will help the children to become more powerful, committed, enthusiastic learners. On the contrary, they follow up their decisions carefully and consistently, looking for signs that they are being successful, reflecting on what to do next to refine or improve their practice.
The first Learning without Limits study drew attention to the potential for using questions based on teachers’ purposes in teaching for transformability as a framework for wider accountability. The list of questions shown in Figure 6.4 could provide criteria for monitoring and evaluation intrinsic to teachers’ own review and reflection process.
Reading 3: Using questions as a starting point for monitoring and accountability (p. 111, Figure 6.4)
| Building confidence and emotional security | Do all the children feel emotionally safe, comfortable and positive about their participation in learning activities? |
| Strengthening feelings of competence and control | Do their classroom experiences strengthen or restore all children’s feelings of competence and control? |
| Increasing enjoyment and purposefulness | Are classroom activities experienced by all children as interesting, enjoyable and purposeful? |
| Enhancing children’s identities as learners | Do all the children experience sustained success and achievement in their learning, and recognition of that achievement? |
| Increasing hope and confidence in the future | Do all the children recognize their own power to make a difference to their own future development? Do they develop constantly expanding conceptions of what is possible? Are they hopeful and confident for the future? |
| Increasing children’s sense of acceptance and belonging | Do all the children feel that they are looked upon by others as an equal member of the classroom community? Do they feel that their contributions are recognized and valued by their peers, as well as by their teacher? |
| Increasing children’s capacity to work as a learning community | Have all the children developed the skills they needed to work together constructively as a team? Do they accept responsibility for working effectively as a learning community? |
| Providing successful access by all children to whatever knowledge, understanding and skills are intended to be the focus of a lesson | Have all the children understood and engaged with the content and learning intentions of the lesson? Have they engaged in worthwhile learning in relation to these intentions? |
| Increasing relevance, enhancing meaning | Have all the children found the content and tasks of the lesson relevant to their lives and concerns? Has it created intellectual connections for them? Has it opened up new horizons and led to recognition of new meanings and relevances? |
| Enhancing thinking, reasoning, explaining | Have all the children been helped to think, to talk about their thinking, to reflect on their learning and what helps them to learn? |
Reading 4: Four distinctive features of school development [at Wroxham] (p. 112, Table 6.3)
| Feature | Standards agendaPerfectibility approach | Alternative approachTransformability approach |
| Impetus for improvement | ExtrinsicExternally exposed pressure | IntrinsicPassion, striving for something you believe in |
| Professional development | Training modelDisseminate known ‘best practice’, downloaded teaching plans, ‘what works’ | Create conditions for professional learning to flourishStrengthen dispositions of autonomous professional learners |
| Power and leadership | Top-down initiativesInvested in senior leadership teamValue placed on teacher compliance | PartnershipHead as a lead learnerCollaborationValue placed on teacher power, autonomy and creative, collective endeavour |
| Monitoring and accountability | Extrinsic criteria based on attainmentsComparison with local and national norms, targetsPerformance managementObservation and grading | Intrinsic criteria based on teachers’ purposesEmbedded in structures and processes to support professional learningShared responsibilityCollaborative learning |
Reading 5: Parallels with the Cambridge Primary Review (p. 113)
These distinctive features find many parallels with the independent findings of the Cambridge Primary Review (Alexander, 2010), the most comprehensive study of English primary education [in the last 40 years].
What is needed instead, the Review argues, is an alternative view of professionalism [in which] ‘in relation to anything he or she does, a teacher is able to give a coherent justification citing (i) evidence, (ii) pedagogical principle, and (iii) educational aim’ (p. 308). The Review also notes the importance of re-empowering leaders and teachers who have been subject to centralist control and a regime of high-stakes testing and accountability:
The focus needs to be one which enables school leaders to develop a culture in which internal school accountability for the quality of teaching and learning precedes and shapes external accountability. This rests on the development of trust and openness to collegial support and challenge.
