Building a Network for Chartered Teachers
This Autumn we celebrated the graduation of the first 15 students to be awarded the
MEd. Professional Enquiry in Education. By successfully completing the course they also
achieved the status of Chartered Teacher. The Standard for Chartered Teacher (Scottish
Executive, 2002) specifies that those who are awarded the status must demonstrate that
they contribute to their profession through a commitment to collaboration, fostering
professional debate and developing evidence-informed practice. This requirement to
exercise professional influence challenged us on the CPD team to think about our own
role in this regard. As a result of our discussions we decided to set about building a local
network to facilitate debate and knowledge creation about ‘new’ forms of teacher
professionalism and agency.
For two years now, with assistance from ESCalate, we have been running seminars where
we invite both our students and other people in the field of Scottish education to spend a
day with us debating issues that are of key concern to us all. This year the title for the
seminar was: Constructing Collegiality: changing the nature of leadership in schools.
Whilst ‘teacher leadership’ and ‘distributed leadership’ are currently very fashionable
concepts amongst educationalists and policy makers, our students and their managers find
that operationalising these ideas in schools is often far from straightforward. Teacher
activism, professional action enquiry and collegial practice do not always fit easily with
structures, cultures and processes in schools and education authorities which have
developed on the basis of a rather different set of assumptions.
Together with some of our students we wrote six short papers on the topic of collegiality
and published them in a booklet a week or so before the seminar. The papers were limited
to two thousand words so that they were accessible and focused and they formed the
basis for the discussion on the day. One of the real pleasures of the day for the CPD team
was that not only did some of our new CTs share in the writing but also in planning and
leading the discussions and activities on the day. For all concerned this was one further
piece of evidence that they met the Standard for Chartered Teacher by exercising
professional influence.
All those who attended got the chance to debate three strands in relation to the topic
which were: changing models of teacher professionalism; the interface between teacher
leadership and the role of senior management teams in schools, and the feasibility of
collaborative action enquiry. The structure allowed for debate between teachers,
headteachers, local authority officers, representatives from GTC Scotland, HMIe and the
National CPD Team, and staff from various universities across Scotland including some
visitors from England. Having such a mixture of participants made for some very
interesting and lively discussions. Those who attended the seminar certainly seemed to
find it stimulating:
The opportunity to discuss in depth, with colleagues the very real concerns of our
present systems and procedures and the sharing of differing positions / aspects of
our roles in education has been highly successful.
I’ve found it useful to explore “what next” and have found the discussions
heartening. I liked your papers in the booklet that drew on CT participants’
experiences. It has become clear that structural change is going to be required to
accommodate this ‘new’ professional role, which in hindsight was created with
little thought as to the big picture; interesting times obviously lie ahead.
The strength of these seminars, as Christine Forde from Glasgow University pointed out
in summing up the day, lies both in the different perspectives and methodologies used to
explore a key issue and in providing people with very different roles a place where they
can meet to express and debate their ideas with each other.
We intend to follow up this seminar with the publication of a web magazine which will
serve as a site for accessing the articles from both the CPD seminars, as well as sharing
the outcomes of collaborative and individual professional enquiries in schools, reflections
on policy issues, and news items. With ESCalate’s assistance we have got off to a good
start with this new venture which we hope will serve as an important site for learning and
the generation of new ideas for all those involved, including ourselves.