Brian Annan

Responsibility for assessing the impact of many professional learning programs continues to lie in the hands of expert agents external to schools.   Researchers, evaluators and inspectors are often called upon to verify positive impacts on teacher and school leader practices and on student achievement.   External support of that nature is useful because it is running evaluative lenses over professional learning programs to assess what generates success and what is best discontinued.  Effective external evaluative support is also supporting teachers and school leaders to make sense of the evaluative findings at a deep level and to grow capability in areas of need as next steps in the professional learning program. Advancements of this nature in professional learning methodology are stopping many schools from rolling over mediocre programs or latching on to the next fad or big name that comes to town.

A problem attached to those advancements is that school leaders and teachers can become passive in the evaluative process if they remain reliant on external evaluators doing things for them.   It is important for practitioners become active in the evaluative process if they are going to commit fully to deeper professional learning.  That claim does not suggest a wholesale hand-over of evaluative tasks to practitioners.   Expertise from researchers, evaluators and inspectors remains critical as long as early dependency changes to co-construction and eventually semi-autonomous practitioner-led evaluation of professional learning programs.

The seminar will explore some examples of evaluative responsibility being transferred from external experts to school principals and lead teachers.   They show how the external expert coached the principals and lead teachers into evaluative tasks across one another’s schools.   The principals and lead teachers discovered considerable variation in the interpretation of the professional learning program across schools. They relished the opportunity to analyse the trends and patterns, to write a critical report and to present and discuss the findings with their colleagues.  They also greatly appreciated feedback from external experts about their attempts to take responsibility for evaluative tasks that they previously considered beyond their role.  The internally-led and externally-supported process energised the school leaders around next steps in their professional learning. 

The question now is how students take greater evaluative responsibility as 21st Century learning focuses more sharply on self-regulated student learning.  

Dr Brian Annan is director of Business Development at the Faculty of Education, Auckland University, New Zealand.
At the Stockholm Summit 2008 Dr Brian Annan held the seminar “Developing inquiry-based learning practices through networks to solve complex achievement problems”. In 2010, he talked about his latest work with buildning evaluative capability in schools and across thes system. He shared a tool that helps school leaders and teachers to evaluate themselves on a capability continuu in key areas.

Consistency and Connectivity to Improve Instructional Practice (2007)
Read Dr Brian Annan’s thesis is about a theory for school improvement that facilitates the process of raising the level of achievement.

Read the thesis >>