The output of collective teacher action

 I've already written about what it looks like when teachers get together and share practice. I was sitting in a staff PLD session this week and our leaders of learning referred staff to the collective output of two terms of 'Teacher Summits', of two terms of teacher sharing.

I clicked on the link to the web page on which we have accumulated the outputs of these two terms of sharing. (Notice that I use the word 'output', because this is what our teachers from across Uru Mānuka have produced. To use the word 'outcome' would mean to talk about the impact on student learning.)

I was profoundly struck by what I was seeing: the distillation of just a little bit of the teacher wisdom, experience, and skill, just a little of the net result of years of that wisdom and experience in how to be more effective in. causing learning. A bit like 'creative commons' on the web.

This is ABSOLUTE GOLD. It is a resource of immeasurable value. It captures what I suspect almost every teacher in training might hope for: a direct statement of what good teaching practice might look like. Of course you don't need to be a teacher in training to see the value of this resource. All of us can find something here that we could apply almost immediately in our daily practice - the holy grail of teacher PLD, the thing that leaves every teacher feeling that their time has been well spent.

And this web page shares the output of just two Teacher Summits, of just one year's work in sharing practice. Wow!!!

This output is one of the many results of our participation in The Manaiakalani Programme in which we have clarity over our pedagogy, an agreement about what we believe matters, about what we believe works, in causing learning. It is the net result of our overt commitment to the pedagogy 'Learn Create Share', our commitment to ubiquity, visibility, and equity, in education. It reflects shared beliefs about what works, supported by strong positive achievement data. That is the Collective Teacher Efficacy I have discussed previously.

And it's deeper, even, than that. These resources are the collective wisdom of teachers cross all age groups. They represent the cross pollination of ideas and strategies across the primary/secondary divide. I hope that this mahi might well mean that we are on the way to eliminating that divide. Because we are all teachers of children.