Teachers will often talk about teaching: best practice, new strategies, tasks and activities. However, in your role as literacy leader you will need to challenge teachers to be more critical about the effect of these on how students learn. Do your teachers have clearly articulated theories of learning? Do they monitor students to notice when and how learning is occurring, and for which students some strategies are working/not working? Professional discussions need to focus on how children learn, using evidence of students’ learning in multiple ways, and how they might learn differently. An effective literacy leader will deliberately question, prompt and support these discussions at staff meetings, monitoring meetings and in informal conversations with teachers. You will promote the concept of teachers as adaptive experts, exploring multiple ways of teaching and learning and support teachers to evaluate what has worked best for particular groups of students, using data as the touchstone.
‘It is a way of thinking that makes the difference’ (Hattie, 2012)
Published on: 02 Mar 2016
