Leading Professional Learning 1 (EDUC90826)

Contemporary organizations such as schools, to be effective, require the ability to adapt and transform their professional practice to respond to changing circumstances. An aspect of this transformation is the professional learning capacity of the organization and the leadership necessary to build and direct this.

This subject builds on a number of concepts; professional knowledge and learning at the individual practitioner level and intellectual, cultural and social capital at the organisational and systemic levels. It develops a model of professional learning that involves five elements: (1) a shared commitment to the goals and outcomes of the learning activity, that is, a professional learning community; (2) role differentiation in terms of professional learning and distributed leadership of learning to achieve this; (3) an explicit model of how to learn professionally that is referenced on contemporary theories of knowledge enhancement and embedded in professional practice; (4) issues associated with contextualising the learning in particular school cultures, that is, the climate for professional learning; and (5) the extent to which autonomous, self-managed and directed learning is possible in the professional community.

The model will be applied to a range of issues confronting contemporary schools and educational provision. Approaches to distributed leadership, including middle leadership of professional learning, will be evaluated.