The importance of reaching out, sharing, and visiting other schools

I’ve been very lucky over the last week or so. I’ve visited not just one, but three schools – for various reasons. In this blog post, I want to reflect on the importance of school visits for professional development.

School visits and 'communities of practice’ When I worked on a school-based PGCE hub in North London, school visits were key to our programme. My colleague, an incredibly experienced former primary headteacher and school improvement advisor, was key to this work, drawing on his diverse network of contacts across the South of England and beyond. Whilst our trainees were mainly based in schools which served disadvantaged communities in North London, we were able to deepen their sense of the wider educational landscape through this approach. We visited independent all-through schools, independent prep schools, and smaller-than-average and larger-than-average state schools serving disadvantaged communities. There was so much value in these visits. As a teacher-researcher, my ‘ethnographic senses’ relished the chance to trace the histories, values, and practices in each school. Through a carefully planned programme for each visit, our trainee teachers got the chance to observe lessons, talk to teachers, have candid discussions with senior leaders about their educational settings, and, finally, discuss their own insights into these diverse contexts.

Crucially, these visits helped our trainees to understand their own professional identities, illustrating their membership of a vast and diverse community of teachers. I’ve written before on how social learning theory can illuminate the trajectories of early career researchers, but I’ve also signposted its relevance for early career teachers, with our Primary School Direct Lead at Warwick’s Centre for Teacher Education incorporating it into our mentor training programme as a result. Briefly, the theory suggests that trainee teachers are joining a community of practice when they enter the teaching profession. They then move from the periphery of this community towards its core as they take on more of the practices associated with membership, from planning lessons to supervising students on break duty, and so on (Wenger, 1998). But we shouldn’t stop there with this model. As teachers, we grow and change over time, partly in response to external policy shifts, but also in response to the needs of our pupils and schools. As we embark on leadership roles, we move closer again to the core of our own community of practice, but arguably we also enter another community of practice: the ‘leadership community’. I imagine these different communities as linked and overlapping. I see myself as a member of many of these: I am a researcher, an English teacher, a leader, a teacher educator, an education consultant, a member of the team at my own school. All of these communities have their own sets of distinct practices as well as shared ones. I benefit from my membership of all of them.

A primary school visit Last Thursday, I visited a primary school in a large city in the East Midlands. I didn’t drop into any lessons, but I got a tour of the school’s reception, hall, intervention rooms, nurture provision and outdoor spaces. Whilst I’m not a primary school teacher by training, I’ve taught PGCE Primary and BA (Hons) Primary Education modules across different universities, as well as having supported primary schools with curriculum development and pedagogy as a consultant. More importantly, I love primary schools and primary school teachers! The senior leaders I met were incredibly welcoming, as was the school business manager and other staff. Alongside this, the atmosphere along the school’s corridors alone was fantastic. Each was beautifully decorated with hessian-backed displays, featuring recent images of children learning and examples of their work. It was obvious that these are a real labour of love, with the displays being used like whole-school working walls. Even better, lots of them were linked to some fantastic texts like The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy. The school features a stage, boasting more book-related displays and the school’s very own book vending machine, which is being used innovatively as a strategy to support intrinsic motivation for reading (Ryan and Deci, 2000, Clark and Rumbold, 2006). Outside, the school’s assault course leads to a double decker reading bus, lovingly restored as a library space for pupils (and sometimes parents) to use. Recent Twitter debates have featured some pretty inflammatory condemnation of engagement strategies such as these (that’s Twitter for you!), but there was something truly special about reading being showcased in such a bold, interesting way. More than this, there was real synergy between the double decker bus and the children’s lives, with many relying on public transport rather than private cars in order to get around. In my view, there is magic in the act of drawing interconnections between literature and children’s everyday lives.

A secondary school visit Earlier that week, I visited an incredible inner-city school, meeting with the Headteacher and a Senior Leader in order to gain insight into their approaches to inclusion and behaviour management. The eventual plan is to bring teachers from my school to visit this school so they can see the key practices that make this school so inclusive in action. The visibility of these is impressive. Students arrive smiling and are calmly greeted by a mass of teaching and support staff, who are on hand to address any concerns or issues. Small-group teaching and nurture provision is provided for vulnerable or struggling students and sessions were going on as I toured the building that morning. More than this, every teacher I chatted to was thoughtful, philosophical and profoundly committed to the achievement and wellbeing of all their pupils. A real commitment to social justice was clear at every level of the school community. The children were open, friendly, and didn’t mind me getting over-excited about their lesson on Frankenstein in English! Students and staff are so lucky to be members of this community of practice, flourishing in the heart of a council estate associated with social disadvantage and poverty.

The Headteacher and Senior Leader were incredibly generous with their time, sharing the school’s journey and providing advice and guidance to me. Inspired and thoughtful, I realized that these kinds of conversations offer an important opportunity to move a little closer to the core of the ‘leadership community’. By reflecting on different schools, different settings, different contexts, different staff, and different pupils, leaders are able to reflect on their own practices in new ways. In the same way that our trainee teachers were able to grow as professionals through their school visits, these kinds of opportunities can support leaders in flourishing.

Gratitude

I am so grateful to the leadership teams and staff at these schools for being welcoming and open. There is so much to be learned from the work of others – not to ‘copy and paste’ into other schools, but to develop our own understanding of how different communities of practice operate and turn their intentions into impact. References Clark, Christina and Rumbold, Kate (2006) ‘Reading for Pleasure: A research overview’, available from https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-reports/reading-pleasure-research-overview: The National Literacy Trust (Accessed on 25th May 2018)

Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. (2000) ‘Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being’, The American psychologist, 55(1), pp. 68–78. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68.

Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity / Etienne Wenger. Cambridge: University Press