Schools have different structures and resources, and unique student and teacher learning needs. Therefore, there can never be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ professional development model that will be effective in all secondary schools.
It is important that there is a person or team with designated responsibility for leading literacy in your school. Being a Literacy Leader in a secondary school is a challenging and pivotal leadership position.
Key tasks a Literacy Leader might undertake include:
The principal and senior management team have a critical role to play in any school-wide professional learning intervention.
The Best Evidence Synthesis of School Leadership (Robinson, Hohepa & Lloyd, 2007) identified that leaders ‘promoting and participating in teacher learning and development’ can have a large educationally significant effect on student outcomes. No intervention can be effective without strong and active senior management support.
Key roles for the Principal and Senior Management Team include:
Principal leadership is a key to success. While this link relates to Principals’ leadership in implementing NZC, it is highly relevant to literacy.
It is useful for Literacy Leaders to have access to people outside the school who have expertise in literacy and who can offer alternative viewpoints. You may be able to get help from your local School Support Service or other provider, or join a professional development programme such as the Secondary Literacy Project.
Other ways to enlist external expertise include:
There is no single model of professional development that is suitable for all secondary schools. Much will depend on the existing culture and organisation of professional development in your school.
School-wide level
While whole-staff workshops alone are seldom sufficient to positively change teacher practice, they are an important part of any school-wide professional development intervention.
Such meetings can send a powerful message that literacy is highly valued in the school and that all teachers are expected to be effective teachers of literacy. They are also an opportunity to present and discuss analyses of school-wide student achievement data and evidence about teaching.
Some schools use whole-staff meetings to promote common literacy approaches that ensure students get consistent messages about literacy in all learning areas.
Approaches would be selected on the basis of identified student learning needs and might include the following:
Some literacy leaders regularly include literacy tips or examples of easy-to-use literacy activities during staff briefings. These can help remind teachers of the ongoing literacy focus and be a useful addition to more in-depth PD.
One approach that some secondary schools have found effective when they begin a literacy intervention is to do some more intensive work with a smaller ‘focus group’ of strategically selected teachers.
It is useful for focus groups to have a natural unit of organisation – something the teachers all have in common already. Two ways to group focus teachers are by:
Advantages of the common-class approach are that:
One limitation of the common-class approach is that teachers may need additional support to apply learning to their specialist subject areas. For this reason it may be best to take a two-pronged approach. The diagram below illustrates a model that combines a common-class with a subject-specific focus.
In this model, all the teachers of 10AL meet to examine student achievement data, carry out collaborative inquiry, identify common learning needs, and trial common teaching approaches to address common needs.
10AL’s mathematics teacher also regularly meets with other mathematics teachers so they can focus on specific issues of literacy in mathematics such as teaching students to abstract relevant information from word problems with an unfamiliar context.
Ideally you would also be able to work with individual teachers in their classrooms to:
In an effective professional development programme teachers will be provided with a variety of professional learning activities such as:
Whatever professional learning activities you decide to include it will be essential to:
Teachers often demonstrate an appetite for easy-to-prepare practical teaching activities they can use with their classes tomorrow. One risk is that teachers use potentially useful activities in inappropriate and unhelpful ways. Therefore, it is important that teachers see how new activities fit in the inquiry framework:
Ki te Aotūroa is a set of learning materials for people like you who support their professional learning and development of classroom teachers.
Robinson, V., Hohepa, M., & Lloyd, C. (2009). School leadership and student outcomes: Identifying what works and why best evidence synthesis. Wellington: Ministry of Education.
Timperley, H. (2008). Teacher professional learning and development. Educational Practice Series – 18. International Academy of Education & International Bureau of Education Paris. UNESCO.
Timperley, H., Wilson, A., Barrar, H., & Fung, I. (2007). Teacher professional learning and development: Best evidence synthesis iteration (BES). Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education.
Published on: 05 Jan 2018
