PL with Tony Burkin

Last week I was part of 3 professional learning session on leadership with Tony Burkin.  From the session I had two take aways which resonated with me around developing my own growth in leadership.

TWO TAKE AWAYS:

1. Monitor - knowing which areas of my leadership I have fixed or growth mindset in
2. Intelligent failure - innovating, tweaking, piloting, trialling

Below are my notes I made in the first PL session with Tony.

Leadership is not planned - you can be blindsided!! Experience, wisdom and insight can help!

• how do we respond to feedback - is often a fight / flight response 
• feedback needs to be an honest conversation
• growth .v. compliance - how do we support are people to grow?
• we need to develop people to be leaders and not managers
• provocative / honest conversations grow capacity
• being collegial to work for the greater good of the community / culture of the school
• how do we create a school where staff and learners grow - invest in others
• high level of trust - hold yourself accountable (managing self)
• we are often relationally driven rather than living moral integrity and being honest

Mindset clashes - Affirmation (positive) .v. Developmental (negative)
“Assuming everyone has a growth mindset - help me when you ask me for feedback - lets establish the ground rules - give me 2 numbers e.g. +ve 40 / -ve 60 but you are asking me to be dishonest” Praise is different to feedback.

Mindsets can change - we can be both depending on the context - self management is key - as leader we have to monitor those moments - can learn from mistakes - knowing which areas of our leadership we have fixed or growth mindset.

3 types of failure

1. preventable - should never have happened as preventable - recipes, laws, guidelines, best practice teaching (recipes to success e.g. John Hattie)
2. complex failure - no quick fix
3. intelligent failure - innovating, tweaking, piloting, trialling (learning pit) - GROWTH MINDSET - where we want to fail!

Pedagogy verses Andragogy

Who gives feedback e.g. leader, teacher, student? Different rules apply to adults.

After the PL decided to brush up on my understanding of androgogy and found an interesting article from eLearning Industry based on Malcolm Knowles' "The Adult Learning Theory - Andragogy". My key takeaway from my readings is how adult learners need agency over their learning.

Knowles’ 5 Assumptions Of Adult Learners

1. Self-concept - As a person matures his/her self concept moves from one of being a dependent personality toward one of being a self-directed human being
2. Adult Learner Experience - As a person matures he/she accumulates a growing reservoir of experience that becomes an increasing resource for learning.
3. Readiness to Learn - As a person matures his/her readiness to learn becomes oriented increasingly to the developmental tasks of his/her social roles.
4. Orientation to Learning - As a person matures his/her time perspective changes from one of postponed application of knowledge to immediacy of application, and accordingly his/her orientation toward learning shifts from one of subject- centeredness to one of problem centeredness.
5. Motivation to Learn - As a person matures the motivation to learn is internal (Knowles1984:12).

Knowles’ 4 Principles Of Andragogy

1. Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction.
2. Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for the learning activities.
3. Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance and impact to their job or personal life.
4. Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented. (Kearsley, 2010)