Co-designing professional learning to address evolving challenges

Using the ‘exemplar approach’, this session introduced the TEachers Learning to Teach languages (TELT) programme to provoke critical thinking and discussion focused on the design and impact of professional learning (PL) opportunities and explored what ‘success’ means in such a context.

The session established that the PL model of the OU’s TELT programme and follow-on programmes building on this model comprise flexible online delivery, opportunities for direct application in practitioners’ settings, reflective practice, and peer support, as well as the benefits of multi-stakeholder working. Furthermore, we introduced our most recent development, a cross-Nation eTwinning initiative, a practitioner-led intervention that brings participants and their pupils together in their language learning journeys.  

We explored what success means in the design and delivery of collaborative PL opportunities as ‘knowing to have helped others; being able to use/implement learning from the PL activity to inform and improve practice; sharing good practice with colleagues’. Furthermore, participants defined efficiency in PL programmes as facilitating application in participants’ contexts; allowing time to implement learning that is meaningful for individual participants.

The participants explored how challenges they had experienced in PL can be overcome (see Figure 1), and identified how the benefits of PL (Figure 2) can be realised through flexible collaborative learning models such as TELT.

• are practitioner-driven
• are fully integrated into classroom practice
• inspire significant changes in approaches to teaching practice and inspire creative pedagogies
• enable practitioners to develop new perspectives and opportunities
• have an interdisciplinary outlook
• build on the strengths of the stakeholders involved.

Learning opportunities using this approach can have a significant impact on teacher self-belief. A finding that aligns with our TELT impact study’s insight shows that confidence was the main takeaway for teachers participating in the programme (Figure 3).

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