Professional Learning Conversations: Challenges in Using Evidence for Improvement

✍ Scribed by Lorna M. Earl, Helen Timperley (auth.), Lorna M. Earl, Helen Timperley (eds.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 139
• Series: Professional Learning and Development in Schools and Higher Education 1
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume provides informed arguments, theory and practical examples based on research about what it looks like when educators, policy makers, and even students, try to rethink and change their practices by engaging in evidence-based conversations to challenge and inform their work. It allows the reader to experience these conversations. Each story reveals the depth of thinking that change requires and gives important insights into the challenge associated with changing thinking and practice. Some of the stories are encouraging and others are frustrating. Taken together, they give tremendous insight into "what it takes" for conceptual change that will fundamentally shift educational practice.

"This book moves beyond just promoting the use of evidence to examining just what is known and how it occurs in a range of settings, especially in interaction with others. This type of book will be key in a desired move to where professional educators reestablish their knowledge and responsibility base in educational policy and practice." Bill Mullford, Professor of Education, University of Tasmania

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xiv
Understanding How Evidence and Learning Conversations Work....Pages 1-12
Raising Student Achievement in Poor Communities Through Evidence-Based Conversations....Pages 13-27
Structuring Talk About Teaching and Learning: The Use of Evidence in Protocol-Based Conversation....Pages 29-42
Leadership for Evidence-Informed Conversations....Pages 43-52
A Cross-Grade Learner Conversation....Pages 53-67
Evidence-Informed Conversations Making a Difference to Student Achievement....Pages 69-79
Honey, Wooden Spoons, and Clay Pots: The Evolution of a Lithuanian Learning Conversation....Pages 81-93
Learning to Think and Talk from Evidence: Developing System-wide Capacity for Learning Conversations....Pages 95-107
Learning Conversations Stillborn: Distrust and Education Policy Dialogue in South Africa....Pages 109-119
Using Conversations to Make Sense of Evidence: Possibilities and Pitfalls....Pages 121-126
Back Matter....Pages 127-132

✦ Subjects

Administration, Organization and Leadership; Educational Policy and Politics; Learning & Instruction