Beliefs

What did Melanie believe about supporting others towards self-regulatory practice?

"In order to be self-regulatory, teachers need really sound content knowledge, and they need to understand how they can most effectively support their students to learn. This means knowing “what to notice” about their students – what to listen for in their talk, what to look for in their reading and writing. And it requires teachers to be continually vigilant in checking the impact of their teaching and thinking about how to change it when it’s not meeting their students’ needs."

"What did I believe about supporting teachers towards self-regulation? My colleagues and I had identified three elements within feedback conversations:

talking processes

learning processes

content.

We’d spent a lot of time improving our talking processes – setting the agenda with the teacher, being clear about the purpose for question, and so on. But to support self-regulation, did we need to give more attention to content in our feedback conversations – that is, to discussing theory and building knowledge about effective literacy practice? And did we also need to focus more on learning processes, so that when we left the school the teachers would be self-regulatory, independent learners, able to critique their practice on an ongoing basis?

By the time of my observation with Glenda, we’d arrived at the following theory of practice analysis. But we were unsure of what it would look like in an actual learning conversation. My session with Glenda would provide me with a chance to put it to the test.”