Leading change is a crucial responsibility for school leaders, and 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for all of us. Adopting a strategic and evidence-based approach to implementing change is essential for creating sustainable shifts that positively impact classrooms and student learning. This coming year’s change should not be viewed as a one-time event. A fundamental aspect of this process is establishing the necessary structures to support ongoing change and improvement as part of the school's routine practices.
In a series of articles for this publication, the Education Review Office will share good practice that it has seen in school improvement and effective change implementation.
The intention is to support principals with practical guidance, including links to useful tools and some key steps to take towards implementation. This first article focuses on the strategy of building a school professional learning community as a means to introduce, navigate and implement revised curriculum expectations, grow the use of assessment data and embed the associated shifts in teaching practices.
Professional learning communities have been part of the school landscape since the 1990s. The concept has been variously defined in a wide range of studies which could be summarised as “a group of people sharing and critically interrogating their practice in an ongoing, reflective, collaborative, inclusive, learning-oriented, growth-promoting way”[i]. While Hattie does not identify professional learning communities specifically, his analysis emphasises the importance of Collective Teacher Efficacy which is closely related. At 1.57 the approach has an impressive effect size.
Through ERO’s research programme over a number of years, we have found that in highly effective schools, leaders and teachers work collectively to build knowledge, collaboratively solve problems, seek to achieve shared goals, provide mutual support, and embed a culture of continuous improvement and collective efficacy.
ERO’s School Improvement Framework (SIF) highlights essential elements of effective strategies for enhancing professional capability. These strategies promote growth and facilitate knowledge-sharing among teachers, enabling them to identify and refine practices that lead to better student outcomes[ii].
Given the implementation of the new English and maths/ Pāngarau and Te Reo Rangatira curricula, now might be the time to revisit your approach to professional development and teacher inquiry. Take the time this term to explore how you can foster a strengthened professional learning community aimed at supporting professional growth, and collective and collaborative ownership of the required curriculum, assessment and pedagogical shifts coming into play through 2025.
Leadership really matters
Effective leadership is crucial for rallying teachers around a shared objective. In this it's essential to cultivate a common vision and establish clear expectations regarding the changes you aim to implement in your school. This involves promoting professional learning opportunities and ensuring that teachers are accountable to each other for improving student outcomes.
When reinforcing expectations and the school’s strategic priorities for the coming years boards and leadership teams might consider aligning the school’s priorities with explicit performance objectives for their teaching team as part of their performance and appraisal system.
Leadership should also be seen as a functional role rather than just a positional one. By establishing distributed leadership responsibilities among staff, your team can feel empowered to play a part in the school's improvement initiatives, ensuring that the responsibility for change is collectively shared. It’s important to think about your leadership roles and who might facilitate and lead out on elements of change. For example, who might be the lead teacher or Learning Area champion for an aspect of the change?
Planning is crucial
Now is the time to map out the year ahead and align the school community around the change programme. This allows leaders to effectively allocate resources, such as time, staffing, and funding. This process also helps identify potential challenges and obstacles early on.
Critical to facilitating the change process will be ensuring that teachers have access to the necessary resources, including learning materials, guides, exemplars and supports.
Equally, staff need to have regular slots set aside to meet to discuss their development; share ideas; to observe and be observed; to give and receive feedback and to discuss the progress and needs of various groups learners. Explicitly setting aside weekly, through to monthly slots for this can establish a cadence and culture around continuous professional development and improvement.
ERO will be looking explicitly at school Annual Implementation Plans in the early part of 2025 to identify the strategies adopted by schools to give effect to the government’s reform programme.
Organising your Professional Learning Community
There are multiple options in considering how best to support the learning needed to implement curriculum, assessment and pedagogical change. Whole school or syndicate approaches provide for common understanding around expected changes allowing teachers to share experiences, discuss challenges and support each other in implementing new practices. Their adoption will depend on school size and complexity, and the effectiveness of current change processes in the school. Key questions should begin with whether a whole school process is needed to establish initial traction and embed accountability, or is the learning culture mature enough to offer choices for inquiry groups that give some autonomy and flexibility to staff? Options may equally involve collaboration across a number of schools where curriculum and change leadership might be shared.
Part of your planning will be to evaluate the effectiveness of your current professional learning approach, and what you know about its impact, so you can set the priorities that are most important for your own context. “Instead of others trying to insert something into the school’s culture, the school… and especially the leadership, should first analyse what it already has”[iii].
ERO’s School Improvement Framework (SIF) is a useful tool to support your internal evaluation of professional capability and collective efficacy, and your leadership of teacher professional learning. You may already be using this tool with your ERO Evaluation Partner and have a sense of the current state of the following indicators:
- High aspirations and shared responsibility
- Trust-based communication and collaboration for professional agency
- Collective approaches to improving teaching practice
- Prioritisation of ongoing professional growth
- Strategic, evaluated professional learning
Based on your evidence and judgements on where you place your school against these indicators you can prioritise the next steps to take, and the support and structures you might need to achieve this.
Effective Professional Learning and Development
What we know about effective professional learning is that it should be an ongoing process rather than a one-off event[iv]. Shifts in teaching practice take time. Sustained programmes that allow continuous reflection and practice embedded in the realities of the classroom lead to more significant changes in teaching practices. Effective professional development must link pedagogical theories and evidence with hands on practical application appropriate to the teaching context.
Regular feedback from peers, from a coach and from students along with opportunities for reflection all help teachers to assess their progress and the impact they are having for their learners.
Most importantly, school leaders must be part of the process: they influence student learning by influencing teachers’ learning. Therefore, your leadership team must be part of the learning community. This is reinforced by ERO’s findings in highly effective schools, where leaders promote “teacher collaboration and growth, and participate in teacher professional learning and development, contributing to enhanced collaboration, improved teaching quality and subsequently, improved learner outcomes”[v].
Structuring Professional Learning Community inquiry and exploration
Studies by ERO[vi] have explored the features of what effective teacher professional development and professional learning communities should focus on. The overarching findings of these studies are that:
- Reliable, well analysed and well understood information about the learning and wellbeing outcomes of all students must inform the school’s strategic priorities and within this establish clear measurable goals.
- Professional learning and professional learning community inquiries must be linked to the school’s strategic priorities.
- Teachers need to be equipped to use evidence effectively to inform teaching practices and understand their impacts on student learning outcomes. This helps in tailoring teaching practice to meet student needs.
- Collaboration among teachers should focus on student learning and be guided by concrete examples of student work and progress.
- Establishing “safe” approaches for providing and receiving feedback among colleagues enhances teaching practices and student learning.
- As a professional group it is critical to recognise and share successes “the wins” to motivate and inspire continued efforts.
- Professional learning must be systematically evaluated to judge the impact they have had on student outcomes.
We will continue to explore these conditions further in future articles.
So, what would it take to introduce, reinstate or strengthen a professional learning community as a key strategy for implementing 2025’s key initiatives? Now is the time to begin planning:
- How (the systems and structures you need to have in place for the beginning of the year); and
- What data-informed strategic priorities you will require them to focus on, and how you will evaluate their impact on student outcomes.
Notes:
[i] Bolam, R., McMahon, A., Stoll, L., Thomas, S. (2005). Creating and sustaining effective professional learning communities. DfES and University of Bristol; Doğan, S., & Adams, A. (2018). Effect of professional learning communities on teachers and students: Reporting updated results and raising questions about research design. School Effectiveness & School Improvement, 29(4), 634–659; Hargreaves, D. (1999). The knowledge creating school. British Journal of Educational Studies, 47 (2): 122-144; Lieberman, A., & Miller, L. (2008). Developing capacities. In A. Lieberman & L. Miller (Eds.), Teachers in professional communities: Improving teaching and learning (pp. 18–28). Teachers College Press; Senge, P. (2000). Schools that learn: A fifth discipline. Nicholas Brealey Publishing; L. Stoll & K. S. Louis (Eds.), Professional learning communities: Divergence, depth and dilemmas. Open University Press.
[ii] ERO (2024) School Improvement Framework Guide
[iii] Mulford, B. (2008). The leadership challenge: Improving learning in schools. ACER Press.
[iv] ERO (2021) Exploring Collaboration in Action: Kahukura Community of Practice
[v] ERO (2024) (p. 6) School Improvement Framework Guide
[vi] ERO (2017) Professional Learning and Development in Schools | Education Review Office