Six principles of professional learning

What does it take to have an impact?

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I think we all know bad professional learning when we see it: Some new initiative is launched at the start of the academic year, by mid-year it’s struggling and as we approach the end of the year, it becomes embarrassing to talk about it. I have lived this kind of professional learning, but it is worth understanding that it exists for a reason. It is not an accident.

I recall, for example, being an ambitious young teacher seeking my first deputy principal post in London around 2007. One key piece of advice I was given was that at interview, I would need to be able to talk about an initiative I had introduced and led. It sounds innocuous until you realise the implications of lots of ambitious people being given the same advice. Initiatives pile up and all to come to naught. Nobody ever declares them officially dead—they just stop talking about them—and so nothing is ever taken away.

In the literature, there are reviews of the effectiveness of teacher professional learning as well as critiques of such reviews. I’m not sure it is the kind of topic we can easily subject to a scientific approach and so the principles I will outline below are based more on an engineering philosophy—these are the principles I have arrived at over the years through a mix of experience and an iterative process of retaining and developing what seems to work best.