AUDIENCE: School Administrators, District Leaders, Learning Coaches, Superintendents and all other School-based Leaders are encouraged to attend.
What does it mean for professional learning efforts in schools and districts to be about the kind of learning that truly improves practice? This session takes up that question. Despite best intentions, significant research has found that professional learning is often about activity rather than about learning. What then does it mean to truly leverage the learning in professional learning? Real new learning is hard work. It is about people thinking, knowing, and understanding differently than they did before. Research has shown that the reason why this is so difficult is because human beings are not naturally inclined to make these kinds of changes. Simply put, and contrary to conventional wisdom, our minds tend to get in way. There are a range of “cognitive biases” that work to impede new learning – things that our minds do that get in the way of changing what we think, know, and understand.
Getting to real learning requires disrupting our natural propensity to avoid it. This is challenging and requires intentional facilitation of a particular sort – what we call “intentional interruption”. It’s about an intentional interruption of the subtle cognitive and affective supports that work to preserve the status quo of thinking, knowing, and doing, and that impede new learning. This session will outline what it means to intentionally interrupt the status quo of professional learning in order to enable real new learning that takes the form of permanent changes in thinking and practice.
At the end of this session participants will understand:
- The “problem” with most professional learning
- What professional learning is from a psychological perspective, and why it is so difficult to make it happen
- How focus, collaborative inquiry, and instructional leadership can enable real professional learning
- How our minds get in the way and interfere with professional learning
- Tools and strategies for intentionally interrupting the psychological barriers to professional learning