It is, of course, teachers who have the primary role not only in improving the academic performance of their students but also in creating an environment in which learning to learn, and learning to manage learning habits and behaviours, successfully underpins classroom culture.
In earlier sections, we have examined the part that the way in which learning is presented and practised in school plays throughout the life of the young people whose minds, as teachers, we have the privilege of nurturing.
We have explored learning and leadership, the steep learning curve that the Head Teacher responsible for the well-being and competitiveness of our school will experience in creating and delivering a collaborative vision of what it can become.
Nonetheless, the principal role of every Head is to bring out the best in their people, to give them the opportunity to exercise initiative and responsibility. Their teachers are their ‘ringmasters’ and those in whose hands the future lies.
- Change and the habits of the teaching professional
Learning Power, the development of the students’ power to learn, has implications not just for student learning but for staff learning. Teachers’ habits as learners become as relevant as the changes they are aiming to bring about. So much so, that staff learning must, necessarily, undergo the same shifts as student learning.
- Changing the habits of a professional lifetime is far from easy!
Introducing learning-powered practices involves unlearning and re-learning, experimentation, unpacking current practices and creating different and more effective ways of working. In short, this is about teachers using their own personal Learning Power to effect changes in themselves.
Why make the effort to adopt new habits when what we do already has the necessary results? Does it? The development of Learning Power in our students is not just about the effect that research tells us it will have in their attainment but understanding what it means to their teachers and the way they operate.
This is not just about changes in the way in which teachers think and what they believe, but how they talk, act and plan. Students need to notice, and respond to, a difference in the language their teachers are using. They should find themselves engaged in a learning experience that builds learning partnerships with their teachers, feeds their imagination, provokes persistence when the going gets tough and takes the learning experience into the world beyond school.
Many learning-powered schools have concluded that the shift in classroom practice will not be brought about by the usual professional development training days or accredited courses. This can only come to fruition by teachers living new ideas and practices as they develop their own ‘learning’ characters.
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