FESE HandBook v03c 15112023 MEV- COMPLETO - Flipbook - Página 53
LOUISE STOLL / LANGUAGE FOR LEARNING LEADERSHIP
clearly no-one can do this alone. Collective agency is fundamental. Collective agency is a group9s collective power to shape events and produce
desired results. A group9s shared beliefs in their collective efocacy are a
key innuence. Collective efocacy innuences the kinds of future a group
will seek to realise through their collective action, how they use resources, and the effort that they put into this (Bandura, 2000). Collective teacher efocacy – the collective self-perception that a group of teachers can
make a difference to students9 learning – has beneots for their practice,
commitment, job satisfaction, orientation to professional learning, risk
taking and more (Donohoo, 2018). People9s natural desire to collaborate
needs harnessing into powerful professional collaboration and learning
with and from others, to achieve personal and collective goals in changing
times. Strategies for collaborative professionalism (e.g., Hargreaves and
O9Connor, 2018) aim to develop collective efocacy. Diverse minds enhance
critical thinking, problem solving, designing, crafting, carrying out and
evaluating projects and much more. Peers9 feedback supports renection
and further development of teachers9 practice. When everything comes
together, it produces harmony – collective intelligence of learning communities, organisations, networks and systems (Stoll, 2020). In music,
harmony results from sounding several notes simultaneously. The word
suggests blend, attunement, consonance and richness and unity. Choral
singing requires attending to detail, patience, thinking about how individual voices and group sound relate to each other, commitment to the
whole and collective responsibility for the outcome. It is about 8we9 not 8I9.
LEARNING MINDSETS, HABITS OF MIND AND BEING MINDFUL
Educators in many countries refer to growth mindsets (Dweck, 2007)
for students. Here, I want to focus on adults. Teachers, leaders and other stakeholders need growth mindsets and others – or as Art Costa and
Bena Kallick (2000) describe them, 8habits of mind9 – 8broad, enduring
and essential lifespan learnings9. A great challenge for learning leadership is changing mindsets, long-held assumptions about ourselves,
our capabilities and conodence – self efocacy, curiosity, openness to being adaptive and trying new ideas, creativity, willingness to take risks,
fail and try again and much more – in essence, to be a lifelong learner.
Emphasising and focusing on developing learning mindsets of staff8
is an essential to learning leadership.
8. For more on developing teachers9 creative habits of mind, see Lucas, B., Spencer, E, Stoll, L., Fisher-Naylor, D., Richards, N., James, S. and Milne, K. (2023 – in press) Creative Thinking in Schools: A leadership
playbook. Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing.
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