What counts as professional learning?

This session was based on a research project that was conducted in 2022 into Scottish educators’ experiences and perceptions of professional learning. The final report raised 5 key questions:

1. What is the role of online professional learning for equity of access and efficiency of time and resource?
2. How can we best use social media and emerging technologies for professional learning?
3. Do we know ‘what counts’ as professional learning? Do we acknowledge the informal, the accidental, the in-practice critical moments that shape how we think and act?
4. How do practitioners know about professional learning opportunities, and how can we facilitate them to lead their own professional learning interests?
5. How can professional learning spaces be strengthened as site for connectivity and belonging, to strengthen their role in promoting wellbeing?

In this session, we explored the participants’ own experiences of professional learning in the last year, exploring whether their experiences aligned with the findings of the report, what their personal choices would be about professional learning and what they felt the future of professional learning would look like.  

In response to the questions and break out room discussions, some key threads were discussed in more detail. The first of these was around the potential for systems leadership to reduce the number of different groups all trying to solve similar problems in isolation without sharing learning together. The other key thread was around challenging the narratives around professional learning either being online or face to face, synchronous or asynchronous, but instead the increasing value of multi-modal, multi-time and space events that allow different people to engage in different ways that suit them and their needs. 

Transcript