Conference Agenda

This panel will discuss, How can European education systems support collaborative in-school professional learning as a culture, and how can universities play a useful role?

The panellists will draw on their experiences and separate research in Ireland, the Netherlands and Scotland, to explore current opportunities and challenges, and identify what may be useful to European systems going forward.

As evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic, both autonomy and collaboration are important to strategic planning and management at the meso-level, enabling schools to develop ways to tackle their most pressing issues. Autonomy and collaboration are equally important in designing learning for students and adapting national curricula to the micro-level classroom context; what is often termed ‘curriculum-making’.

Professional learning here refers to an active and structured engagement with the new knowledge, skills and attitudes that are necessary for the development of one’s individual and collective practice. Professional learning happens whilst challenges are faced and must also pre-empt future challenges, which means that an ongoing dialogue of collaborative, critical and creative enquiry needs to take place in schools to complement the professional development of individual staff members during their careers.

Despite these ideals, meaningful professional learning still struggles to find a sustained and school-embedded place in European education systems. The obvious challenges are adequate time, reward, and the opportunity to focus on topics of actual need, spurred on by the pandemic. Perhaps less well understood are leadership issues of navigating relationships between staff, and ambodying a credible mentor identity that seems to be caught between innovation and compliance.

The professional community needs members at all levels to take responsibility and possess a deep understanding of professional learning in order to lead others in the process from their various starting points and in a way that is relevant to the local context. At the start of their career, teachers are focused on developing their own practice and have limited appreciation of the complexities of the profession. School and system leaders, whilst arguably more experienced, also do not automatically possess an informed understanding of purposes, process and approaches to professional learning to enable them to effectively design and lead it in a meaningful way. It is risky for education systems to assume that such a capacity exists and, with the approaches of either informal sharing or the selling of pre-packaged professional learning, the concern is that diverse perspectives are lacking and the role of universities is being overlooked.

This panel will consider how universities can evolve their engagement and partnerships with schools and educators in order to better support them to have the capacity (the confidence and competence) to lead and sustain meaningful professional learning. Panellists will respond to the questions with examples from teacher education research in their countries:

In the Netherlands, despite focusing mainly on initial teacher education and induction, a growing number of initiatives are based on lesson study and on strengthening the capacity of teacher leaders. However, professional development as a systemic feature is hindered by the structure of schools and a static perspective of the profession, characterized by isolation. In Scotland, the focus on collaborative partnerships with schools and local authorities underpins university approaches to supporting school strategic development and building capacity in leading professional learning, including through specially-designed part-time master’s programmes. In Ireland, the Teaching Council have initiated a Researcher in Residence Scheme to support school-university partnerships that aim to build capacity for and sustain professional learning mutually between educational researchers and practitioners.

The panel discussion will dive into the common issues in a broader European context and consider some positive actions for the future.