How Teachers Learn: Helen Timperley

After writing my last post, I remembered something Helen Timperley said earlier this year about the teacher as 'adaptive expert'. Timperley is a lecturer at the University of Auckland, and (among her other distinctions) is a big fish in the relatively small pond of the study of teacher professional learning. She looks at all the different kinds of professional learning that teachers engage in, to figure out the features of professional learning that is successful enough to actually get all the way through to the classroom. Her publication on Teacher Professional Learning and Development is here.

She based her discussion on How People Learn, in her words 'one of the most profound pieces of work in education.' Teachers are people too: so how teachers learn is the same way as how students (and everybody else) learns:

1. Learning must engage the learner's preconceptions
2. It needs to lay a deep foundation of factual knowledge organized in a conceptual framework - again this is the same for students and for teachers, and for people in general.  Learning plans for students need to be developed so that they are linked to a conceptual framework. The key job for school leaders leading professional learning in schools is to help teachers develop conceptual frameworks that are consistent. so students see the coherence
3. It must encourage and presuppose a self regulatory approach – so teachers can take control of their own learning.  The teacher is an adaptive expert, and this way of working is critical in the age we live in now. Teachers don’t do ‘this’ or ‘that’: they have to be adaptive. Teachers need to be able to identify when routines work and stick with them, and when they need to be changed and change them. 

The difference between teacher learning and learning at large is that teacher learning needs a specific feedback loop within the classroom, as teacher learning needs to be put into practice, and the success of this is measured by the success of student learning. As adaptive experts, teachers need to respond to feedback from students on how their learning is going, and adapt the teaching accordingly. Taking this responsibility, to identify what they need to learn, learn it, apply it in the classroom, monitor the effectiveness according to student outcomes, and then