1. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 Reflective Practice: Implications for Leadership Professionalism = Competence + Virtue A Commitment to practice in an exemplary way A Commitment to practice towards social ends A Commitment not only to one’s own practice but to practice itself A Commitment to the ethic of caring (Sergiovanni)

2. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 Emerging Consensus on School Improvement Twin Pillars for Transformation “Quality of a schooling system cannot exceed Quality of its Teachers” (McKinsey)

3. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 School Leadership Matters (OECD) Empirically validated Indirect impact Greatest where learning needs are greatest

4. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 The Challenge Redesigning/repurposing Leadership -Instruction centred -Learner centred

5. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 The Case For School Effectiveness Research The Fatal Flaw They assume that the major determinants of the quality of pupils curriculum and pedagogical experiences are systems, rather than teachers’ (Elliott)

6. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 “The quality of education depends on the quality of teachers’ deliberations and judgement in classrooms” (Elliott) “To be effective, school improvement efforts must be directed towards what happens inside classrooms” (Hill)

7. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 Easier said than done “Substantial changes in pedagogy and in the way teachers work together on instructional matters is stubbornly elusive” (Fullan) “The hardest core to crack – is the learning core – changes in instructional practices and in the culture of teaching towards greater collaborative partnerships” (Fullan) “The priority for school improvement at the level of management is how to encourage a process of deliberative reflection on the part of teachers at the classroom level” (Elliott)

8. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 Strategies for learning-centred leadership Dialogue Modelling Monitoring Southworth (2004)

9. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 Personalising Learning Learning how to learn Assessment for learning Teaching and Learning Strategies Curriculum Choice Mentoring, Coaching and Support

10. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 Move Learning to top of the agenda -Governors’ Meetings -SMT -Staff Meetings -Middle Leaders Forums Reframing INSET Focus and Use of PRSD

11. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 Effective Use of DATA -Achievement Gap(s) -Internal Variability “Quantum improvements in student learning can be achieved if the performance of students in all classes is brought up to the level of students in those classes in which students make the greatest progress” (Hill) “When school leaders seriously address within school variation it can make a significant difference” (Munby)

12. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 “Systematic data collation, analysis and USE … can lead to the improvement of education as has no other educational innovation of the last century” (McLean)

13. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 Build a Culture of Collaboration rooted in reflective practice amongst teachers “The Capacity of the staff working collectively to learn, defines the limit to which the school can support ambitious reform. Therefore school leaders must adopt collective learning as a central role” (NCSL)

14. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 Handling education and change: Coping Limited to managing the school and responding only to directions from higher sources Diffusion ‘Christmas Tree Schools’ Goal Focused Selecting a few key goals, establishing priorities and ignoring other pressures

15. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 Reflective Practice: The Leadership Challenge “…discover and provide the conditions under which peoples learning curves go off the chart” Barth (2001)

16. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 What does it look like? A group of people who take an active, reflective, collaborative learning oriented and growth promoting approach towards the mysteries, problems and perplexities of teaching and learning. It will not happen by accident!

17. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 Organizational Learning Frame Are there regular opportunities to examine and reflect on classroom practice and student learning together? Do we engage in dialogue about program and practice across departments and grades? Is there a common understanding about what counts as progress across grades and subjects? From the students perspective, is there some consistency in expectations about their learning experience across grades and departments? Do we evaluate?

18. Dr Tom Hesketh - Director RTU/GTC (NI) June 2009 Do we gather and share data about the student’s learning experience? Are there opportunities to read about, examine and share “best practices”? Are there opportunities to network with others about classroom practice and procedures? Do we try to learn from our students about how we are doing as a school? How can we learn this better? What methods and processes could we use? Is our relationship with parents a learning relationship (where we learn from them, as well as them from us). How do we do this? How can we do it better? Hargreaves, Shaw and Fink (1997)