In this video, Andy Hargreaves talks about professional capital. I recently read his book with the same title where he describes the importance of Human capital, Social capital and Decisional capital. He emphasises the importance of communities working together collaboratively to constantly improve their teaching. In his book, he lists 10 points in a guideline for teachers. Here I would like to focus on the following points:
1. Become a true pro. Teaching like a pro means connecting with the latest research evidence, inquiring into your won practice- with other colleagues and other schools, down the street and across the world – to find new ideas, get advice and sift what works from what doesn’t.
10. Connect everything back to your students. The purpose of teaching like a pro is to improve what you can do for your students. This needs to be kept front and center all the time. Professional learning communities should be places where focused conversations and inquiries, supported by data and experience, lead to improvements and interventions that benefit real students whom the community shares in common.
My questions are: How do we support teachers to become connected across the world? How do teachers build professional learning communities? How can we make sure that every student gets the best possible education? In Norway, we have all the necessary resources needed, highly qualified teachers and computers for every student at high school level. Today the ed-tech community offers a lot of helpful software from math programs to grammar software to improve students learning. Example: “Grammarly makes you a better writer by finding and correcting up to 10× more mistakes than your word processor”; advertisement)
Schools, where school leaders and teachers are unaware of these opportunities for their students, create a digital divide. We need communities working together collaboratively to constantly improve teaching and learning. Connected educator month could be one way to start.