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"If participants don’t value their learning, then what is left?"
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Elaine Long
Welcome to the ECF Staffroom. I'm Elaine Long.
Mark Quinn
And I am Mark Quinn.
Elaine Long
We are programme leaders for the UCL Early Career Teacher Development Programme. Why are we in the staffroom? We are here because this is where the best professional learning conversations always take place. This is where problems can be aired bluntly and where solutions can be explored.
Mark Quinn
Over the course of this series, we will hear the voices of different colleagues as they come in the ECF Staffroom. We will hear from early career teachers themselves and from the mentors and induction tutors who support them. We will talk about all things ECF, the challenges and the joys. So, why don't you enjoy a coffee with us, perhaps even grab a biscuit and sit down to half an hour of ECF Staffroom chat.
Elaine Long
Welcome to the ECF staffroom, Mark Quinn and Dr Polly Glegg, we're mixing things up in the staffroom today. Mark's moving from host to guest just for the purposes of this one episode, and it's brought along our much loved colleague, Dr Poly Glegg. So, we're all in for a treat. This is a special edition of ECF Staffroom in which we're going to be venturing out our usual fail a little by discussing what makes great professional learning for teachers and leaders. So, Mark, I suppose unfortunately, as you're a guest, it falls to me as the host to make you a drink and ask you to put your feet up. So, what are you having Mark ?
Mark Quinn
Well, I'm going to enjoy taking a seat, first of all Elaine. I like what you've done with the place by the way. Well, as you know, the body is a temple, so I generally don't eat biscuits. So don't offer me a biscuit. Black coffee. It takes me about 30 minutes to drink it, but black coffee, please.
Elaine Long
Okay. So, you're a man of simple but exquisite taste, so I would expect no less from me. Mark.
Polly, can I fix you a drink, get you a biscuit?
Polly Glegg
Well, that would be lovely. In fact, like Mark, my body is a temple, but unlike Mark, I like to make small offerings to mine throughout the day. So, I'll take a posh coffee if you've got one. Perhaps milk, no sugar and a custard cream would go nicely with that.
Elaine Long
Lovely classic choice and we've got loads of those in stock. So, Dr Polly Glegg, please, can you introduce yourself for our listeners? Can you tell us about your role and briefly tell us what gives you the most joy?
Polly Glegg
I will try. It's a good question, Elaine. First and foremost, I'd say that I'm an educator to the bone, so I had ten glorious years as a secondary school business teacher before I moved to the Institute of Education. So, moving here initially, I let our Teach First Business Studies programme. Since then, I've done all sorts of interesting things actually, and I try and grab opportunities where I can.
So, I've led on everybody's favourite, preparing for Ofsted. I've done some consultancy work in some far-off glamorous places and recently, excitingly I passed my doctorate in education. Yeah, So increasingly I would say that my work has moved towards developing teacher educators rather than working directly with teachers. And I've been here in the Centre for Educational Leadership now for nearly a year working with you and Mark on the early career framework, also on an exciting project in the United Arab Emirates, developing school-based mentors, which I'm very much enjoying.
Overall, what would I say? I really feel incredibly lucky to get paid for working with such fabulous colleagues, obviously, but also with teachers and school leaders across England and internationally.
Elaine Long
Thanks, Polly, and Mark, obviously we know you as the voice behind ECF Staffroom and the content lead for ECF, but what aspects are there to role that our listeners might know less about?
Mark Quinn
Well, they might not know that I was on that plane with Polly to the UAE recently. The mentoring programme that we've just begun which is fabulous, really exciting piece of work. Actually a piece of work which probably is only, you know, acceptable to us or available to us because of the work that we've been doing with the early career framework.
Funny enough, I stopped teaching in a classroom in 2016 by I still struggle to rid myself of that word. I still call myself a teacher. I still call myself a school leader. And I think the reason for that is because all of the work that we do, all of the work we do in our centre, is with teachers and with school leaders.
And so I just find myself, when I'm in a room with them saying we, you know, we know what it's like or we teach these lessons or where we're leading schools in these situations and, and it doesn't feel bogus to me, although of course I realise that, you know, having not been doing that job for seven or eight years, things do move on
All the work I do, as I say, is with teachers and with school leaders. I do a lot of practitioner inquiry work in the UK, do a big piece of work at the moment with STEM teachers across the UK, which are really excited about and we do quite a lot of international work, for example, with school leaders. I've been working with school leaders in Spain and Portugal over the last couple of years, which has been fabulous, looking at how they lead, learning, professional learning and student learning.
So as Polly was saying, it's a huge privilege to be allowed to do the thing that we do. So long may that last.
Elaine Long
Thanks, Mark. And it's interesting, when I asked both you and Polly, you both straight away talked about your own experience working in schools as teachers and leaders, and it's obvious that's really import of your identity. And I know that shapes the way you also approach professional learning, which brings us really to the focus of this podcast because the Centre for Educational Leadership has a set of six high quality outcomes that they believe is important for leaders and teachers to encounter on our programmes of professional learning and you two where the big brains behind creating them.
Your collaborative work has inspired many, many people, including myself, I think. And you know, when I first read about the early career framework, even before I worked on it, I think it was your sense of how you wanted to develop others holistically, that that really drew me to the framework.
I found that that was something unique that I wasn't reading about elsewhere. So, what I would love to hear more about is how these high-quality outcomes emerged from your own reading, your own practice, both working as developers of others, but also in schools yourself and your instincts. Because you know that can be equally valid as well.
So, if you don't mind, I'd like to take two at a time and think about why you think it's so important that leaders and teachers on our programs experience these high-quality outcomes. So, the first two are sometimes actually presented dichotomously, but I don't think they are. So, the first one relates to knowledge and conceptual understanding. Participants will develop their knowledge and conceptual understanding, and the second one, equally important, participants will be able to apply their learning to their context.
So, from your knowledge of research and practice, why did you think both of these outcomes are important? And how do designers and facilitators professional learning, make sure they get the balance right between theory and practice? Polly, I wondered if you could talk to that first.
Polly Glegg
I mean, that's a hell of a question, isn't it?
Elaine Long
You're welcome.
Polly Glegg
I’ll do my best. I might need two biscuits to get through this. So, I might begin with a little bit of the kind of framing around where this came from. Because one of the things I didn't say at the outset and actually nor did, Mark, is that I was involved in the writing of the content of the early career framework programme that is delivered at CEL. Mark and I did a lot of that development work together during lockdown. So, there was a lot of time to think and to kind of talk through the fundamental principles that were informing the thinking that was shaping the programme. And for me it's quite hard to separate that thinking from the outcomes themselves. So, my personal understanding of teaching is that teaching is complex professional practice that is deeply rooted in context.
So, what that means of teachers is that they definitely need a set of knowledge, just kind of theoretical knowledge and understanding of perspectives. They also need some practical skills because teaching is after all, you know, it happens in practice, but there's something else that goes with that. Well, there's more than one other thing. I think there's the need for really good judgement in how that knowledge and those skills are deployed in any one particular context, because each context, I think the way that we discussed it within the ECF was to say there were three CS.
So, there's the content that you're teaching, there's the children that you're teaching and the context in terms of your classroom, the school that your classroom is part of the local area in which your school sits. So, the complexity of that and the centrality of relationships means that teaching has to be much more than something you can learn from a book or learn from a unidirectional training session.
And I think that then speaks to your question about the first two high quality outcomes. I have to say we didn't order them with a lot of care. We spent a lot of time talking about what the six were, but I wouldn't for me, I wouldn't say that one and two are one and two at the expense of the others.
But we take them in order. So, the idea that participants need knowledge and conceptual understanding, Absolutely. You know, it would be massively underplaying the complexity of teaching and the development of knowledge around teaching and learning that has taken place to say that teachers didn't need that. So, we want them to understand the evidence base. We need to understand theoretical perspectives. We want them to understand the range of techniques that's out there, to understand the subject knowledge.
But that's not enough because teaching is practice. They have to then bring that into context. And so the words in the high quality outcome, participants will be able to apply their learning to their context. I think those words hide, if you like, the huge depth that's behind that. And perhaps also they mask the reciprocity between the two because for me it isn't a case of taking learning into practice, it's a case of the two working together. You know, the learning absolutely informs the decisions that the teacher makes in practice, but the nature of that content also shapes the teacher's learning. And any good teacher will be learning that kind of Donald Schon learning or reflection in practice, you're learning as you do, as well as learning afterwards.
And so, whilst that might not directly answer your question, I hope it gives some depth to the thinking around where they came from and the thinking that therefore informed the kinds of activities that we set up for teacher learning through the early career framework.
Elaine Long
It brilliantly answers the question. And Mark, I know you're probably dying to get in here as well, so I'll let you have your say as well.
Mark Quinn
Yeah. Thank you. And you can hear just from Polly's answer, just the depth of her own thinking. So, I it was great, actually a real privilege, wasn't it, Polly, to be able to spend all of that time working on this programme, as hard as it was. And it was the hardest thing, I think professionally I ever had to do, was to put this programme together during the lockdown.
But it does feel a bit like a lockdown baby now, I suppose. But there was, I think, to be honest, when we sat down to try to work out what these outcomes might be, I think our impetus was we both felt that there was a huge opportunity here for teachers and their mentors and perhaps the other teachers around them in their schools.
A huge opportunity for them to learn a heck of a lot more than inverted commas; Just the early career framework learning curve from work is is huge. There's plenty in it. There's loads of meat to get your teeth sunk into. But if you were going to put two teachers together for two years and ask them to talk about teaching and learning, there's going to be a huge amount more that's going to be generated by that collaboration than just, if you like, learning the framework.
And that's what we wanted to achieve. That's what we were reaching for when we compiled those original high quality outcomes that we're talking about today. That said, Polly was suggesting there is a lot to learn. There is a curriculum, there is a whole lot that a teacher does need to learn how to do and learn how to do well if they want to be successful in a classroom.
I agree actually with what you said, Elaine, that that IT theory and practice are not dichotomous. I think they are two sides of the one coin or even the same side of one coin. I'm not sure what sure what metaphor I'm looking for, but I don't think they're as separable as we sometimes think they are. I think it's Jay Derrick talks about practice is practice. You know, the practice that teachers do in their classroom creates what we think of as teacher practice. So, if you like, practice his theory. And I think that's really quite an important idea. I think we wanted, through the programme and through any programme that we work on because these high quality outcomes are not just applied to our early career framework programme, we're applying them across other programmes now.
We want the teachers in our programmes to know the content of it so well they want we want them to really know it so well, so that you know, because if they use it, they can choose it, which is a funny way of thinking about it. But the more they use it, the more they can select from it. They can make ethical choices about what they are about their practice. They know so much about what it is to be a good teacher. They can actually begin to make selections based upon their own preferences, based upon the needs of the students in front of them, based upon the conditions that they're working in.
So, I think that's it. So, they do probably belong these two outcomes probably do belong at the top. But as Polly said, we weren't just thinking of them as a hierarchy. We think that all of them in the mix are important.
Elaine Long
It's interesting that you both picked up on the relationship between research based theory and practice, because so often there's a tendency to think of that as linear in the sense of, you know, here's what evidence tells us about effective practice. Now it's your job to implement it. But what you're both suggesting is that that's more of a sort of cycle than a linear pattern where, you know, the teacher's learning from practice then helps them to refine their thinking about research-based theory and sort of iterative leaps of action. And I think that relationship is really important.
Mark, I wondered if you could also speak to your experience of leadership programmes and whether that's equally the case for leaders?
Mark Quinn
Definitely, yeah. I mean, leaders probably grapple with this more than other people. They turn up on programmes and they feel they actually feel quite vulnerable because leaders are especially principals, you know, by definition they're usually the only person with that job title in their school. And so they turn up to programmes and they might get defensive, they might, you know, they might like to talk about what they're doing well. But it's very difficult for a leader to feel vulnerable or to show their vulnerability about what they don't know.
And so I think that a facilitator in that context is trying to make that leader feel comfortable with being, feeling vulnerable, you know, actually surfacing what they don't know, what they don't feel secure about are also grappled with the fact that many of the choices that a leader makes are not their own choice, but choices which are kind of thrust upon them by policy, context or by just the exigencies of doing the job.
But yeah, I still think it's about, you know, whether it's leaders or it's teachers, it's still about trying to make those ethical choices where you're able to make them.
Elaine Long
And it's hard to get the balance right as a facilitator, I always think, because on the one hand you really want to validate people's experience from practice and what they're bringing to sessions. On the other hand, you also want to be able to challenge unsupported assumption and bias as well. I think research based vary can be a great way of doing that.
Have you've got any advice for how you get the balance right on that, even working with teachers or leaders?
Mark Quinn
It's trying to upset their bias, you mean?
Elaine Long
Yeah, or interrogate their bias?
Mark Quinn
Yeah, we always we very often ask them to dig deep into what we think. We talk about their theories of action. So, school leaders and school teachers spend their whole time acting Don't they, don't we, always doing things and the consequences of what we do are always obvious, you know, that they're present in the results of what the students are able to do, what they like doing or how they're behaving or how they're moving around the school.
The consequences of teachers and leaders actions are always obvious. What's always less, what's less obvious is why leaders act in those ways. What works, what their beliefs, what their values are. And so we often spend a lot of time actually on our programmes, just dwelling on that. What underpins the actions that we take. And we use that as a way in because we think that’s part of a really important dialogue that that leaders have to have with other teachers in their school.
Because if you want change to happen, if you want learning to take place, whether that's professional or student learning, if you want that to take place, you've got to grapple with, you know, what's in the belief system, what's in the value system of the of the adults whose behaviour you're trying to change. And it's very often a fear, you know, a teacher won't change the way they teach because it’s, you know, is high risk.
If they start teaching a different way, I might not get the same results I get now. It might be because something I don't know about, some skill I don't think I have. Or of course it could be that I've got a whole completely different idea of what a school is for or what learning is. So, we always talk to leaders and to teachers about that, about that value system or that belief system which underpins their actions. And I think that's quite a good way into unearthing some of those biases that you're talking about.
Elaine Long
Yeah, I mean, what a perfect segway as well into the next high quality outcome as well. And this is the one I always get asked the most questions about. Participants will experience revelatory moments and new ways of thinking, and I always get asked, what is a revelatory moment? Polly, I wonder if you if you've got a definition for us.
Polly Glegg
I wish I did. I can give you the essence of how I understand revelatory moments. So this really again, it speaks to the approach that I have to teaching. And I think I can speak for Mark on this because I remember a conversation we were having about, you know, what do we want our participant teachers to feel when they're going through this programme?
And juxtaposed with that is always the question, what do we not want them to feel? You know, because I think we teachers, I'll put myself there too. We can all remember episodes of professional learning that we haven't felt were particularly effective uses of our time. And sometimes that kind of contrast can be helpful can’t it. So, if we were thinking, well, we don't want our teachers to feel that this is being done to them, we don't want them to feel that they're just being talked at, you know, what do we want them to gain from this kind of learning, particularly thinking about new teachers, teachers who are, they're qualified, but you know, that they're still building that knowledge base that we talked about for the first high quality outcome.
Actually alongside the knowledge and we've got this in our theory of change for the programme is the situational experience. You know, just that experience of working with different students, with different content in different contexts. So, we want them to, to be building their knowledge in their experience, that conceptual framework, their pedagogical repertoire through the programme in order that their own theories of action over time or their own ways of seeing the classroom will shift.
For me, that's really what I think of in terms of revelatory moments. It's those points of shift where something becomes clearer, or something takes on a different meaning and something that perhaps was stuck becomes even just a tiny bit unstuck.
Elaine Long
From your own experience of facilitating then, have you got any examples of when you've seen a shift in thinking in sessions.
Polly Glegg
Well, I actually didn't come prepared with this, but when I was, so this is working for actually from Teach First pre-service. I remember having a conversation with one student and he was having a tricky time in school as lots of new teachers do. And I remember he was talking about questioning, and he said, I watched you, Polly, in the last session, and I wrote down all the questions that you asked, and I realised that the ones that were really powerful were the ones that made us think. And I thought, that's interesting. You know, he had had a, a realisation there and questions are so powerful, aren’t they for teachers? I had been teaching at some point about questions, but his learning hadn't come from that. His learning had come from observing me, doing my job as a facilitator and I could hear his brain going, ahhhhh….. this is what questions are for, therefore making us think.
And in fact, later in that conversation there was another point. He said, this is dreadful because it makes me sound like I'm the source of all revelation. I’m really not, but he said, it's like you said, isn't it Polly? Learning takes time. And we've been having this whole conversation about he was saying, you know, I can't see the learning happen, they don't seem to be gaining anything. And then he suddenly said, Ahh, but learning takes time. So that's two examples actually in one conversation that have really stuck with me.
So, they're not that common. Unfortunately, the points where a student, teacher or a qualified teacher is working through something which is tricky for them and they reach that point of understanding, not necessarily because of my direct action. In fact, both of those cases came about because of things that had happened prior to that conversation. But the moment of revelation came during that piece of dialogue.
Mark Quinn
Can I just come in at that point because it just occurred to me that the revelatory moment that we talk about isn't always revealed in the moment that we're with them. Sometimes that spark or that that light bulb will only come on weeks later after you've finished your session and you're no longer with the teacher, you no longer with the participant on the programme.
And this occurred to me just recently because I was talking to a group of teachers recently, two teachers who were doing a project, and they were absolutely convinced. They were saying to me, and that was part of their theory of action. They said that teachers in their schools have low expectations of their pupils, and that was a big problem. They were really concerned, these teachers had low expectations.
So, we start this big, big exploratory phase where they had to go back to their school and gather some data and speak to teachers and all the rest of it. And actually, they realised after about two weeks of investigating this, that the teachers, they were, they thought they had low expectations really didn't, that these teachers cared deeply for the young people they were working with and if anything, they had very high expectations of them.
So that was a revolutionary moment for those couple of teachers and I didn't see it. It was reported to me just recently that this happened. I think that's amazing, isn't it, that concrete learning doesn't always happen immediately. That said, I think that it is incumbent upon the facilitator to try to engineer those moments, to try to make sure that there is an opportunity for the people in the room to leave the room with something that they feel that they've learned.
What they've learned might be something, might become something completely, you know, something they never thought of before. Much more likely it is something they thought about before, but you're helping them to think harder about it. I think that's a good way of thinking about it, is try to make the teachers in the room think a little bit harder about the thing they think they already know.
It might be about trying to get them to interrogate some bias that they have. It might be, you know, inquiring more deeply into an assumption that they have. I teach this way. I always teach this way, this way always works. I think if you can get them to think a little bit harder about that, then that's probably their revelatory moment and it's really worth doing.
Elaine Long
That's very interesting, as you were both talking. I was just thinking about implications of this for the role of a facilitator, and I thought about a lot of things. Firstly, as a facilitator, you might be quite disappointed if you expect things have revelatory moments every session that people sort of jumping up and, you know, screaming with delight is probably not going to happen, but it's something that happens over time.
Also, it does kind of have implications for what your role is as a facilitator and how you structure sessions. Because you know what I was thinking as you were saying, this takes time, and it really takes adaptive expertise as a facilitator. There’s no sort of strategy we can give people for this, because the examples you have both given a very unique and you're able to talk to those examples so compellingly because you really knew your participants and you really invested in growing them as an individual.
So, I think, you know, it almost goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, that the role of a facilitator is about developing individuals and that there's no recipe for that. And it isn't just about improving their knowledge of research-based theory, but that's really important. It's also about the relationship with research based-theory and helping them to make evidence informed decisions because, you know, the leader you talked about Mark that suddenly realised that the assumptions were inaccurate, could have had the best research informed ideas in the world, but it wouldn't have worked if that leader had applied it to their context because they were thinking in the wrong way about the people they were working with. So, I think that's, you know, that there's so much wrapped up in this in terms of what the role of the facilitator is.
I guess it's really important if we think about the purpose of professional learning, being to support teachers and leaders to impact changes that are going to lead to transformational outcomes for students really, in a way that this sort of thinking has to take place within sessions.
Mark Quinn
Yeah, but it doesn't have to be. I mean, it doesn't have to be silent, right? I mean, we often create sort of reflection moments in a session and that's important and people might journal something or note something down for themselves. I also think, actually being invited to articulate what you think about something to say out loud, what you think you've just learned to another individual in the room and have it reflected back at you and maybe challenged a little bit by another expert, you know, another teacher in the room, maybe working in a similar setting to you. I think that's really powerful, and I think that's kind of the joy, isn't it, of being able to facilitate groups of teachers so that they have the opportunity to collaborate and deepen each other's thinking.
Elaine Long
Yeah, because you're much less likely to arrive at those sorts of conclusions if you're not collaborating with others, I think. I guess that kind of takes us to value as well, participants will value their professional learning. Polly, I'm assuming this kind of thing must be there for participants to value their learning.
Polly Glegg
Well, everybody wants to feel that their time invested is well invested and it would be an absolute travesty to waste the time of early career teachers who are already unbelievably busy, you know, an unbelievably mentally busy as well, because it's not just the physical acts of teaching they're so demanding. It's the thinking that goes on behind it. And when you are a new teacher, potentially in a new school, you're dealing with so many different kind of incoming signals that whatever demands we make of that person's time have to be of value to them.
So, I think for both of us, it was really important that the ECT’s who were part of this or any participants in professional learning, are able to feel that, yes, I'm getting something from this. So that is likely to mean that they have an element of direction over the kind of learning that's taking place, and it's absolutely bound up, isn't it, without kind of revelatory moments and new ways of thinking because you feel that you've gained something, if you feel that what was stuck has become less stuck or that you've had this kind of light bulb, then that was time well spent. But also in terms of the wider profession, you know, we want teachers who will stay in teaching and the whole, if you like, the theory of change behind the early career framework was that teachers would be more likely to enjoy and stay in the profession if they had this extended period of induction.
So, we needed to put that front and centre to say we need we need our participants to value this, not necessarily just to enjoy it because, you know, I think we all know that learning can be valuable without always being fun. But to get to the end of it and perhaps think, crikey, I'm a bit tired here, I've had to think really hard. I've had to really excavate some beliefs that I didn't realise I even held. And I've maybe, as Mark said earlier, you know, I've made myself a bit vulnerable here, but through that whole process I'm going away with something that I find valuable, something that I'm going to use to improve my professional practice. Without that, what do we have? You know, we have sessions running with unwilling participant and very little impact. That's not what we want.
Elaine Long
We definitely don’t Polly. Mark, I know you're really passionate about participants valuing their professional learning, so I wondered if you wanted to talk to that one.
Mark Quinn
Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing we should say about the ECF programme is the single bit of it that our participants love more than anything else, and that the value more than anything else is the mentor ECT relationship. Mentors love mentoring their ECT’s. We know how hard it is. We know that it takes up a lot time. We know that this whole argument about how much time it does take, but mentors who do it love doing it and ECT's gain hugely from it and value it. They know they're gaining hugely from it.
I think that's something that Polly and I would have hoped for back in the early days when we were putting this thing together, but we never could know just how valuable ECT’s would find that relationship with our mentors, let alone how valuable mentors found that relationship with their ECT’s. So, I think I think that's the biggest win I think for all of us for this programme over the last few years, I think that we always thought that, you know, teachers can be technically proficient, but that's not enough.
You know, teachers, like I said before, could know every item of the early career framework and still not be a good teacher and still not love teaching and I think that a teacher who doesn't love teaching as a teacher is much less likely to stay in teaching. I think it has to be true, right? Because it's a tough job being, you know, turning up every day, seeing hundreds of students every day, particularly you're a secondary school teacher, being responsible for so much. All those, you know, the lives, the future academic careers of all those young people, having that responsibility on your shoulders is huge. And if you're not enjoying it, then why on earth would you stay in it? I like to say that retention requires joy.
So, we do want the programme to be joyful but as Polly said, that's not the same thing as a value-ful all or valuable. But we do think that joy does matter as well. And just seeing the progress you're making, if you're in early career teacher or any teacher in any programme and you can see the progress that you're making, you see the difference is making to you, then that's a reason to engage further in it, I think.
Elaine Long
And Mark, what about leaders, do you think for leaders it's equally the same. Retention requires joy or does it change as you become more experienced in your career?
Mark Quinn
That's a really good question. I think it becomes more specific perhaps to the individual. There are obviously fewer leaders in the classroom teachers out there. I think the pressures of leadership are a bit different from the pressures of teaching. I think those who go into school leadership must have a very heightened sense of, you know, their purpose, their mission, their values that take them into school leadership, because it's not for the faint hearted.
So, I think that a school leader might find long periods where they maybe don't feel valued or they may not even value their own professional learning, but they stick at it because they can see that there's a wider purpose, that there's a wider moral or community purpose in the work that they do. But I think that has its limits, right?
So, you can't fuel a career on moral purpose. You need other things as well and I think it does require, I think it does require some of that joy. I think comradeship perhaps, you know, leaders who find other leaders to work with to learn with, to collaborate with. I think that's really valuable, and we see that more than anything else probably, we see that factor emerging on programmes that we run is that leaders love actually sitting down with other leaders, sharing their complaints, sharing their insights, refuelling each other. So yeah, I think ultimately, they need it too.
Elaine Long
Yeah, I’m thinking particularly, you know, about the fact that leaders have huge influence on other people and in their setting. So, one of the things I think's particularly important when we're involved in leadership development programmes is to get leaders to reflect on the impact on others because that has a huge knock-on effect on creating professional learning cultures in their schools as well. So, there's almost like another element to it if we can get them to value their professional learning in sessions, hopefully they can then think about how they're leading the learning of others in a way.
Mark Quinn
Yeah, there is an argument here, isn't there? You know, is kind of leadership a function of culture or does or the leaders create culture? And I think we would say much more the latter, right? So, leaders have the opportunity to create the culture, not lead not an individual leader necessarily, but, you know, leaders more generally within the school, within a system, have the potential to create the culture, certainly create those opportunities for professional learning, certainly make wise and humane decisions about how things are staffed or how the teaching timetable is fairly distributed, those sorts of things, those can make a massive difference to the wellbeing of the teachers and others in their settings. I mean it's a responsibility but it's also a massive opportunity isn't it for school leaders to have that kind of durable impact.
Elaine Long
Thank you, and finally, thinking about the last two, I know that there's no hierarchy or order to these, but the two remaining are participants will develop their voice, confidence, and professional identity, and they'll also develop their reflective capacity. I wondered if you could just talk to those two and what your thinking around those is?
Polly, do you want to go first?
Polly Glegg
Well, I’ll have a go. So, looking at the one, the final one, if you like, the reflective capacity and seeing the progress they've made, I think that speaks ready to the point that Mark was just making around seeing the progress you've made, valuing therefore the learning that you're engaging in, feeling more joyful and wanting to stay in the profession and the reflective capacity aspect I think speaks back to the points that I was making earlier around how I personally understand teaching and the ability to use good judgement to deploy the knowledge that you have, the skills that you have.
And that reflection is built up in that because your judgement comes from reflecting on situations, making sense of experiences that you've had in the past, pulling on the theoretical, the evidence, that research-based evidence that you know about pulling on the situations you've been in, your own experiences, your own values, your own identity as a teacher. That doesn't necessarily happen without some care, if you like, because teaching is so busy. You know, it's very easy to act, you know, from this action to this action to this action without really having the space in your day as a teacher or thinking to carve out that space to stop and really make sense of what happened, looking at the links that might be across different individual sort of events that have happened.
So that kind of critical incident analysis, if you like, while we might not ask the teachers on the ECF to do that using that language, certainly if you look at the guided activities in the mentor sessions and also the pre work, what we're often doing is we're asking ECT’s to think about a particular situation, either an event that's happened or a student or a topic that they're teaching and to focus in on that through the lens of a particular piece of the content of the early career framework and really what we're doing there is where we're sharpening the reflective capacity of the teacher. We're modelling ways to make sense of experience and think about it deeply in order to come up with refined ways of acting going forward.
Though for me, I've particularly spoken there to the final high-quality outcome. The fifth one participants will develop their voice, confidence and professional identity. That speaks to, I think, our understanding of the profession, that we want teachers to be vocal, agentive members of their profession, that it's really important that they don't see themselves as being done to. There's a lot of there's a lot of noise, if you like, in the profession telling teachers you should do this, this is the best way, you should act like this and the programme, the intention behind our approach to the programme was really around teachers having the opportunity to develop their own voice, to be able to articulate their perspectives, to be confident, to be part of the conversation.
I think that's a really lovely way of thinking about it. You know that professional practice should be a conversation between the professionals that are engaged in it. So, how do we invite, how do we as a senior educators, if you like, as experienced teachers and those with some kind of impact, how do we invite the newer teachers in the profession into that conversation in a way that equips them to increasingly lead the conversation as they go through their career?
Elaine Long
Thanks, Polly. I think that really links to what we know about adult learning faring and the fact that if we impose our ideas on adults, we tend to get resistance very quickly, whereas if we work with them and invite them to connect, you know, ideas from research with their practice and their ways of thinking, it's much more motivating for them.
And certainly, as a facilitator, I think that that's often at the forefront of my mind. Mark, I know you're desperate to get in here.
Mark Quinn
I was going to say that the more we encourage our participants to develop their voice, the less we know what they're going to say, right? So, when it's not predictable and I think actually that's quite important because when we sat down and came up with those particular high quality outcomes, I know we had in the back of our minds that we were putting in front of our teachers a big set of statements of, you know, what they needed to learn about and how to do, and that they could perceive our programme as learning that and to learn those techniques or if they learn that set of instructions, somehow that would be, that would make them the teacher. But of course, that was never going to be the case, it never could be the case, that teachers are not people who just follow a set of instructions.
You know, technicians might have to do that, but teachers are professionals. They have to think about what they're doing. They have to make choices in the moment about what they do and, you know, so if you know the theory of, you know, the practice really, really well, then you can make those decisions, but actually you also want people to be confident.
You want them to realise that they are part of actually a huge community. I remember years ago when we first were talking about this, talking about the army of mentors that we would need to recruit to make this programme happen. We now have an army of mentors and the army is growing and mentors across the country have all been tutored and developed in a common language, a common language around educative mentoring, but non-judgemental, about sitting side by side with a mentee working to develop as co professionals to co-think their way through problems.
I think that's hugely important, and I think that maybe we don't hear it all of the time, but I think we can be pretty confident that we've got lots and lots and lots of teachers in the profession that have a sense, a different sense of who they are as a teacher or who they are as a professional. It will be their own sense, not one that we've imposed upon them, not one that we've told them they have to be. We haven't told them the kind of teacher they have to be. They're going to be the kind of teacher they can be, I hope, and I think that has to be celebrated.
So, certainly that's what we wanted. We thought that’s what we wanted when we set out and this thing about reflective capacity, I think it's really important because again, if you don't have the reflective capacity, all you can do is just repeat what you've done before and that means you not getting better at it. You’re not thinking about the structures of the thing you're doing. You're not actually asking the important questions about the curriculum you're teaching or about how you are speaking to young people. All those things are really important. The language you use to talk to young people reflect upon that a little bit.
So, I hope that the way we've designed the programme and Polly talked about the way we put the mentoring materials together, encourage that kind of reflection, gives our participants kind of the reflective tools they need so that they're not just repeating experience year after year, but they’re developing and growing and they're thinking deeper.
Elaine Long
Mark that comment about you might end up doing the same thing if you don't build your reflective capacity reminds me of one of our first podcasts with Jamie Stubbs. He said, do you want ten years’ experience or one year repeated ten times? And it really made me think about that comment. And the other thing I was thinking as you were both talking about this, is how important these things are, but also how difficult they are for facilitators because, Mark, you mentioned the problem with voices. You don't know what people are going to say and it's much easier as a facilitator if you're just sort of sticking to a script because it can't stick to a script if we're going to do all these things. So, I wondered if, you know, you're a very seasoned facilitator, Mark. You work with teachers and leaders all the time and Polly, I know your expertise really, really rests in teacher development.
What advice do you have for facilitators on how you do this? Because these things aren't easy and, you know, they're not necessarily things that are going to be evident in one of sessions, but over time, working with groups, I think this is something that you can nurture with participants, but did you have any advice on how facilitators could go about that?
Mark Quinn
Well, I’m going to let Polly go first.
Elaine Long
Are you going to put Polly on the spot?
Polly Glegg
Yes. Be curious. That's my real advice is, because most facilitators will also be teachers. I think there's a, I mean, that curiosity is a huge part of teaching as well, but there can be a kind of orientation towards thinking there is content that I must get through. You know, that's absolutely understandable in a school setting for really good facilitation, I can often think about as having a series of topics about which I want to get my participants to think deeply.
And my role is to be curious about that process, to notice interesting lines of thinking and to do a bit of digging around those or to identify perhaps common threads that appear to be linking the thinking that different participants are doing and my role then is to look for those interesting threads or look for those interesting topics rather than to tell. So, it's very much not teaching in the sense that we might think of it with a preset body of content.
Obviously, you know, when we're facilitating on a programme, there is some content to be included, but a session that is oriented towards content for me will be less powerful than a session which is oriented towards generating opportunities for really deep thinking that uses that content. And the facilitator who comes in with that attitude, who asks powerful questions of their participants, but also asks themselves, what's going on here? You know, which threads should I pull? That's the facilitator that's going to create the really interesting learning opportunities.
Elaine Long
Well, that's fascinating.
Mark Quinn
That has given me my answer. So, thank you.
Elaine Long
I know that that set you up for a tough job Mark, that was such a good answer.
Mark Quinn
Well, no because, well it was such a good answer, but it's has inspired my own because, you know, they say about barristers, barristers in the courtroom never ask a question that they don't know the answer to. I think that's probably the opposite is true for a facilitator, is that facilitators often ask questions they don't know the answers to, and that's why they should ask them.
And it's not only that the facilitator doesn't know the answer to it. The person they're asking at that moment perhaps doesn't yet know the answer to the question. But you're giving them as a space to explore a possible answer to the question and others in the room might help, enter that space, and help contribute their answer to that question as well.
I mean, it can be very, it can be you know, it can be tense, it can be scary because you ask a question, there's nobody is saying anything but also into that, into that silence, sometimes kind of beautiful thoughts kind of come in and call and flow together and then you get this great conversation. Deep, deep thinking, deep learning can take place. It doesn't always happen, of course, but I think that you can do that if you've got if you, I think Polly the best word, “curious” if you're genuinely curious when you go into the room and you're genuinely humble because facilitators, we can often think that we know it all or when we, you know, people turn up because they want to listen to me.
Well, you know, if that's my attitude when I go into the room as a facilitator, then I don't think people are going to learn enough from just what I can tell them, but they might learn quite a bit from what I can ask them.
Elaine Long
Yeah, thanks, Mark, but I think that's really, really powerful. It's interesting that we're linking back to the dispositions that, you know, facilitators need to have, need to be curious, they need to be humble. It's not actually about the facilitator being the font of all knowledge, although they do need to be knowledgeable. You never need to know knowledge of the research base and the curriculum but that doesn't mean they're standing up there directing the learning or transmitting that all the time. But they're supporting participants to make their own journey through that, and that's hard, I guess. I mean, how do you develop those skills as a facilitator? You know, because presumably you don't just you don't just start with them, right?
Mark Quinn
No, but you remember, quite a useful thing to do is to look across the people in the room and just count up the years of experience that's there, right? Whether that's a bunch of new teachers or a bunch of very experienced teachers. There is this experience in that room, and there's life experience in that room, and there is, you know, you know, all the humour and all of the weight and all of the intelligence. If you combine all of that in the room, a facilitator, goes and says, right, what can we make out of this? You know, what was the maximum that we can make out of this for the next hour or two or three and can we do it together? And I think if you go in with that spirit, then you've got a fair chance.
Mark Quinn
Yeah, that's a great piece of advice there. And Polly, what about you? How did you as a leader of adult learning, go about honing your craft?
Polly Glegg
It's a really good question, and I can't really tell you a specific answer except that I know that things like listening to the radio have been really important. So, listening to radio for listening to different presenters doing interviews and the kinds of questions that they ask that create the space for their interviewees to speak, the way they respond, when you get a really good interview and actually it's not just the radio, someone like Michael Parkinson would do it as well.
Mark Quinn
Or someone like Elaine on a podcast.
Polly Glegg
As a second example. You know that ability, listening to other people, spot points of interest in what they're hearing from their interviewee has actually been really powerful for me in thinking, that was a good question. You know, that was phrased well, or I haven't spotted that thing in, in the response and how interesting that the interviewer went there.
So, surprisingly that has actually had that's been a really powerful thing for me, I think. And then noticing when I've been in good sessions with other people. In fact, one final example, I played a lot of tennis with varying success, but I've been really blessed with two tennis coaches who are incredibly skilled at their work, and I can remember moments when I've been learning from them and they've said something to me, you know, drawn my attention to a particular aspect of either the way that I'm reading a tennis game or the way that I'm hitting a ball.
And that construction has been really helpful for me and I think the ability to switch between, you know, thinking I'm a learner now, how does this feel for me as a learner and what is that person doing to set up this experience for me? And therefore, how can I do that for my own, you know, learners of whatever age.
So that's two things, completely outside teacher learning that have been really powerful for me.
Elaine Long
No, I really like that, it’s very meta, isn't it, thinking about how learning happens yourself and what helps you to learn and then how you can apply that to others. And really, you know that the dialogue lies at the heart of a facilitation, really, and also noticing, I guess, because you have to be able to notice things about your participant in order to know where to take the dialogue.
In terms of noticing, I've just noticed the time and as Mark knows, the format of the podcast, I know he'll be furious with me if I don't now give him an opportunity to write something on his post-it note. So, Mark Quinn, I'm handing your post-it note. What are you going to write on it and where are you going to stick it?
Mark Quinn
Okay, so I'm going to write this for facilitators. I think that's the main invitation and probably on any of our programmes, in fact, facilitators in any of our programmes or any programmes out there, I think I mean, I've been really lucky to be able to watch so many brilliant facilitators as I sort of travel around quality assuring and visiting parts of our programmes are a great joy.
But actually, the greatest joy of my job as it is now, is being able to co-facilitate. So, I get to work with other brilliant facilitators side by side. So, my message would be to keep learning. As a facilitator, please just keep learning. Usually we come to this job, we come to this job, actually not as experts in adult learning, but as experts in people learning that that's the main route for anybody who's facilitating professional learning for teachers.
So, there are similarities. We know there are similarities between the two, but there are important differences. So, learning about those differences, learning about those high-quality outcomes that we've been talking about here would be a good start for that. But the facilitators to be humble and keep learning.
Elaine Long
Thank you, Mark, and Dr Polly Glegg. I'm going to hand you a Post-it note. What are you going to write on it and where are you going to stick it?
Polly Glegg
Well, if I'm going to follow Mark in writing something for facilitators, I think I would return to the point that we both raised earlier around staying curious and I also think that I would want to write that focus on the thinking that really good facilitation sets up deep thinking in the participants. You know, it's much more about the way the participants engage than the amount of content that you get through. And of course, that's no different really than what I would say to really good teachers. But I think it's also at the heart of really good facilitation.
Elaine Long
Thanks so much, Polly and on that note, I think that's the sound of a bell I can hear ringing. So, I think that signals the end of the podcast episode for today. But Polly, Mark, thank you so much for joining me in the Staffroom, I learnt a lot from that conversation myself and I know other people are really going to benefit from your wisdom and experience, so thank you so much for joining us and do take a coffee and a biscuit on your way out.
Mark Quinn
Thanks, Elaine. See you soon.
Elaine Long
Our thanks go to Mark Quinn and Dr Polly Glegg for sharing coffee with us this week in the ECF Staffroom. Please get in touch with us if you would like to chat about your ECF experience. In the meantime, do join us soon for a biscuit and a chat with another colleague in the ECF staffroom and if you've enjoyed this episode, there's more where that came from.
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