Developing Leadership Language in Education Leaders
Description
The aim of this project is to increase professional efficacy in the explicit teaching of thinking skills, including metacognitive processes and research the impact. The aim is to increase teacher capacity in one of the research-based High Impact Teaching Strategies outlined in the DET’s Frameworks For Improving Student Outcomes (FISO) and in the Curiosity and Powerful Learning (CPL) Strategies.
This initiative draws heavily from research conducted on increasing teacher instructional practice and highly measured effect sizes on student outcomes. The focus on increasing student engagement and improving learning outcomes through the development of teacher instructional practice in building Metacognitive Strategies.
Participants: Approximately 10-25 teachers and 520 students.
Investigators
Research outcomes
Describe the anticipated professional outcomes for teachers – in what ways will they develop or improve their classroom practice?
Once the team have developed their knowledge of the curriculum and how to implement it, they will again work with a Dr Crawford to develop tools that teachers can use to measure and assess current practices and growth in student learning, both pre and post delivery of Thinking curriculum lessons. This will mean that teacher capacity is built and sustained, not only to teach the curriculum, but also to effectively monitor and analyse growth in student learning. This monitoring process will also involve the development of a Collegiate Observation program based on the action research framework, for further assessing the building of teacher practice and the impact on students, and to continue to provide professional development to the C2L teaching team. The requirement for evidence based practice means that this needs to become a core element of teachers work, however, teachers need support to develop efficient tools in which to reflect and gather evidence to assess the impact of their teaching.
Improving classroom practice through the collegiate observation program
The Collegiate Observation program will be trialled with the C2L teaching team, with the program constantly being refined to ensure greatest improvement in classroom practice. The potential model for these observations will be the triad model within an action research framework. In this model, one of the teaching team will deliver a lesson designed to implement the Thinking curriculum. Two other teachers will observe and take notes. There will then be a feedback session where the teacher delivering the lesson reflects on which elements of practice were successful and which were not. The team discuss feedback and reflections, and then work on refining the lesson plan to include any modifications identified for improvement.
The benefits of this method are twofold:
- Changing the instructional teachers practice through reflecting and identifying strengths and challenges in the strategy used to implement the curriculum.
- The team collaborates to make improvements to the lesson plan based on reflection, and then have the opportunity to refine practice by reteaching the lesson.
Research strategies
The research tools that will be developed will measure the impact of improved teacher capacity on two levels. Firstly, looking at the achievement of student learning outcomes, which will be measured through the assessment of predetermined indicators of the thinking curriculum. This will be done through formative and summative assessment tasks embedded within lessons delivered by the teaching team. This direct measurement will provide authentic data. We may also consider administering a survey to students as an indirect measurement that explores how students perceive their learning. This will provide an extension of the metacognitive practices implicitly being worked on and provide insight into students thinking processes.
Secondly, the development of teacher pedagogy and explicit teaching of thinking skills will be measured using qualitative data tools such as classroom observations, semi-structured interviews or focus group interviews and reflective practice journals.