Using data within a professional learning approach

The collection and analysis of data prompts a reluctant participant to engage in professional learning and provides the information that is needed to identify and address the challenges and needs within the professional learning context.

I’m working as a facilitator supporting in-school literacy leaders. I have been working with a secondary school that wants to investigate and improve the situation of students achieving at lower levels than their peers in similar schools.

Our assessments and observations suggested that students seemed to have too few opportunities to engage in the high-level literacy activities that would lead to an increase in achievement. We also found that although teachers had participated in many professional development activities, few changes in classroom practice had occurred as a result. Given these findings, we agreed that although an increase in student achievement was the ultimate goal, in the short term, we needed to focus on the development of an effective professional learning approach that would change teacher practice and understanding.

Working with a group of lead teachers, we developed an approach that focused initially on building the literacy knowledge and expertise of the lead teachers. They would then lead and support changes in teacher practice across the school, which would result in more successful student outcomes. Our plan acknowledged the importance for leaders of professional learning to have or develop expertise in specific content areas – in this case, both literacy and the particular curriculum area of each lead teacher.

The lead teachers and I identified data collection tools for gathering important baseline information. The tools included:

• surveys for teachers on their previous professional learning experiences, their literacy teaching knowledge, and their perceptions of literacy challenges in their content areas;
• individual teacher interviews to identify their concerns and questions about literacy teaching and learning in their specific content areas;
• an observation guide to determine what literacy practices were currently used in classrooms and how they were being used.

After gathering the information, we sat down to analyse the findings. One member of the group, the lead teacher for science, was very reticent about being involved. He said that he had “little understanding” of how to look at literacy in the context of science; as a physics teacher, this was especially the case within the specialist senior subjects of biology and chemistry. He also admitted to feeling like he knew “too little about literacy” and was terrified at the prospect of working with teachers who had considerable expertise outside his curriculum area.

This lead teacher wasn’t on his own in feeling that he knew too little to assist others. Given this situation, the group and I agreed on a range of strategies for the first stage of our work. Firstly we reviewed the research and literature on adolescent literacy and, using this “lens”, took a close look at materials and external assessments in specific content areas to determine the literacy challenges in those areas. While this helped, the lead science teacher continued to feel very tentative about his work. So he and the school’s literacy leader worked together to identify a range of strategies that could be used in teaching physics to support the development of students’ literacy skills. While the lead teacher trialled these new strategies, the literacy leader sat in class and observed student responses. Data from these observations helped them as together they then evaluated and modified the strategies.

This lead teacher now feels much more confident about his role. He believes he has a stronger basis on which to identify students’ learning needs and challenges in relation to literacy within science. He has reviewed the department scheme to ensure that appropriate literacy tasks are embedded in science learning as students move through the curriculum. And he intends to adopt the professional learning approach he has benefited from across his department: building knowledge of literacy learning within a specific curriculum area, gathering and analysing data to identify challenges and needs in this context, and developing and supporting strategies to meet these challenges and needs.

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