The following two proposals, presented during the consultation with stakeholders in reaction to the National Education Strategy 2024-2030 presented in January, are meant to support a drive to nurture sustainable leadership in our schools. As already argued in previous articles, we need to invest in our schools and leadership. To do so, schools need to be given greater autonomy and responsibility to plan their development and improvement plans.
Sustainable leadership matters, spreads and lasts. It is a shared responsibility adopting an activist engagement with the forces that affect it and builds an educational environment that promotes the principles of social justice, diversity and capacity.
Increase college/school autonomy
The first proposal sees a different governance structure to the one we have. The current system sees schools fulfilling the demands/expectations of central authorities in terms of standards, outcomes and results.
A performativity culture permeates our education system. As a small island state, we need a model of governance that establishes a balance between quality control and local/college empowerment. This requires a commitment by central authorities to ensure greater participation in the reform and policy-making processes.
We need to understand the critical and central role that internal and external review play, and how an engaged and reflective environment is needed and can be created and sustained over time.
Teacher-driven continuing professional development and learning
It is my belief that we need to focus on turning our schools into professional learning communities (PLCs). A PLC is an ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve.
Teacher-driven continuing professional development (CPD) designs empower teachers because they are centred not only on what they know, but also on what they want to share and learn with colleagues. Such designs challenge our traditional culture of teacher learning. The key to improved learning for students is continuous job-embedded learning for educators.
Such teacher-learning models are driven by collaboration and not compliance; and are rooted in shared solutions to developing knowledge about teaching and learning. The focus is on teachers supporting teachers, and teachers learning together within and across schools offering robust models for CPD. Such CPD exemplifies ways of how practice, research and policy can merge and transform our current views and practices of learning for teachers and students.
Let us not forget that the highest-achieving countries on international measures, such as Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), have been particularly intent on developing teachers’ expertise both before they enter the profession and throughout their careers.
What the international studies are showing us is that collaboration among educators is critical, not just because working with other teachers is a nice thing to do and it makes school a more pleasant place to be in. In fact, it turns out that high-performing schools organise people to take advantage of each other’s knowledge and skills and create a set of common, coherent practices, so that the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts.
The OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) data provide evidence for this: participating in peer networks is a key element of teacher professionalism, which is associated with teacher satisfaction and self-efficacy.
Teachers in high-performing countries spend a great deal of their learning time in collaboration with peers. This is possible because, in many of these countries, teachers spend less of their working day directly in front of students.
Darling-Hammond et al., (2007) found that an average of 49 hours spent on staff CPD over a year boosted student achievement by 21 percentile points, whereas more limited time (five to 14 hours) showed no statistically significant effect on student learning.
We can ill afford to have a strategy that ignores the impact that collaborative/networked learning can have. Yes, there are various implications behind this that need to be addressed, but it is the road that needs to be taken.
Education requires massive investment, not patchy work. It is here that, when exploring Pillar 2 – Growth and Empowerment within the National Education Strategy, we need to introduce measures and initiatives that address the provision of a quality education through nurturing professional learning communities. This is currently lacking in the proposed strategy.
These two proposals help to highlight the potential that lies in developing a culture that empowers individuals and schools to take the lead, rather than work in a context that sees central authorities constantly seeking to control the decisions and lives of others.
Christopher Bezzina is a professor at the Department of Leadership for Learning and Innovation at the University of Malta’s Faculty of Education.