Professional Capability

Domain 5: Professional Capability and Collective Capacity

Building professional capability and collective capacity is a core function of leadership. This means that leaders need to ensure that teachers are continuously engaged in professional learning that increases their knowledge and skills and develops their adaptive expertise.

Students are the focus of all effective professional learning: enhancing student outcomes is both the purpose of professional learning and the basis for evaluating its success.

Effective professional learning involves ongoing cycles of evidence-informed inquiry. It begins with leaders and teachers collecting and analysing a range of evidence that will help them answer the question, ‘What is going on for students in relation to the outcomes that we value?’ The perspectives of students, parents and whänau will be included in this evidence along with that of professionals.

When discrepancies emerge between what is wanted and what is happening, these will provide a catalyst for challenging low expectations and deficit theories and for engaging in further collaborative analysis and investigation to uncover the reasons. This collaborative sense-making process will inform decisions about what needs to change in the way of beliefs, practices and organisational conditions.

Leaders and teachers then identify focus areas for professional learning, select opportunities that will deepen knowledge and refine skills, and engage students in new learning experiences. The effectiveness of changes in practice will be evaluated in terms of improved student learning and outcomes.

Powerful professional learning draws on the best available research about ‘what makes a bigger difference’. It integrates development of teacher content knowledge with understanding of how students learn the content and how it can be communicated in meaningful ways.

The evidence-informed inquiry process supports development and evaluation of innovative practice and the use of technology through collaboration across the professional and student learning communities.