Inquiry question
What were Jo’s learning needs? What was her inquiry question?
“My learning needs were really threefold. Firstly, I felt I needed to develop a stronger knowledge base in the area of adolescent literacy. Secondly, I wanted to learn how to most effectively help students to develop their literacy within a range of curriculum areas. And thirdly – because of my position as the school’s literacy leader – I needed to learn how to work effectively as a pedagogical leader. How would I identify where teachers – my “learners” – are at? What do they know? What do they need to know? How can I help them get there?
Not all of the heads of department I was working with were open to the school’s literacy programme. Sometimes there was real pressure to come up with tasks and templates that wouldn’t require teachers to change or commit to professional growth. I needed to learn about providing leadership and working towards a sustainable model of literacy teaching and learning, when the pressure was sometimes for quick-fix solutions.
So my inquiry question became: “How can I best provide pedagogical leadership that builds teachers’ literacy content knowledge and supports our school culture of professional learning based around responsiveness to students’ identified needs?’"
How does this inquiry question relate to your practice?
Describe a recent situation when you were acting as a pedagogical leader – that is, you were leading professional learning within a specific curriculum area, perhaps from within a school or perhaps as an external provider.
Why did you act as you did in that situation?
In what ways were your actions based upon identified learning needs of the students or teachers?
How did your actions enable or hinder the school or teachers to improve their practice and to sustain the improvements?
How do you know? What evidence do you have?
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