A tool for capacity building: teacher professional learning about teaching writing

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on qualitative research from an Australian, K-6, faith-based school about teachers’ experience of a job-embedded professional learning initiative (the Whole-School Benchmarking of Writing, WSBoW) that was designed to improve teachers’ capacity to apply data-driven decision-making to achieve improvements in student learning. Teacher interviews provided the data about experiences and influences on teching practice. The findings demonstrated that the professional learning initiative provided teachers with a supportive pedagogical tool for focusing their teaching practices on improving student learning. A research based evaluative framework was used as a heuristic to analyse the change initiative. This study used the framework and employed a social constructivist and sociocultural epistemology that recognised the importance of leadership and school context in the development of a culture focused on collaborative communities of practice and data-driven teacher decision-making. The study has significance for leaders, schools and systems that engage teachers in professional capacity building.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher professional learning
• capacity building
• data-driven decision-making
• leadership
• school culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. NAPLAN is the ‘National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy’, an annual assessment for all Australian students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. It tests the types of skills that are essential for every child to progress through school and life. The tests cover skills in reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, and numeracy. The assessments are undertaken every year in the second full week in May. For more detail, see http://www.nap.edu.au/about.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jenny Johnston

Dr Jenny Johnston is currently lecturing in Southern Cross University’s Bachelor of Education programs at the Coffs Harbour campus, NSW, Australia. She has a PhD in education and her thesis focused on teacher identity and power relationships in contexts of change. She teaches and researches in the areas of literacy teaching and English curriculum, school leadership and change reform, teacher professionalism and quality teaching and learning.

Stephanie George

Stephanie George is a primary school teacher at a faith-based school in NSW, Australia. Inspired by the challenges of workplace change and imperatives for school reform, she took up the opportunity to complete a Master of Education thesis by research, the findings of which are summarised, in part, in this article. She continues to be actively engaged in the processes of teaching and its attending challenges and to apply her academic knowledge to the contexts of school life.