Practitioner inquiry with Christopher Hudson and RMIT’s Amanda Berry

SOPHIA ZIKIC

You're listening to the Victorian Academy of Teaching and Leadership Podcast, where we showcase conversations with some of the world's biggest thought leaders in education. We also bring you the thoughts and reflections of teachers and school leaders from across Victoria.

CHRIS HUDSON

In this episode, we'll be speaking to Professor Amanda Berry, who is currently the Deputy Dean and Associate Dean of Research and Innovation, RMIT University in Melbourne. We'll be talking about the role of collaboration in practitioner inquiry and how dialog enables teachers to become change agents in and through practitioner inquiry. Hello everyone. My name is Chris Hudson and I'm one of the master teachers in the Teaching Excellence Program at the Victorian Academy of Teaching and Leadership.

Today we're joined by Professor Amanda Berry. Amanda's research focuses on teacher knowledge development and how that knowledge is shaped and refined throughout teacher's professional life span. She's particularly interested in the preparation of high-quality science teachers and the work and learning of university science teacher educators. Amanda has been involved in many research projects focusing on innovations designed to address the quality of teacher professional learning and enhance science teaching and learning in schools and universities.

Today we are discussing the role of collaboration in practitioner inquiry. Thanks for joining us, Mandy. Let's jump straight in.

AMANDA BERRY

Thanks very much, Chris. It's great to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

CHRIS HUDSON

To start us off. Mandy, can you please tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and the work that you do and continue to do with teachers?

AMANDA BERRY

Sure. So, as you mentioned, I recently moved into a new role at RMIT as Associate Dean Research and Innovation. And basically that job involves supporting capacity building in research and improving quality of research and communicating the research that we do in the School of Education at RMIT. But another really important part of the work that I do is around, just as you mentioned, on Teacher's professional learning, how teachers develop their knowledge of practice, how that knowledge is improved and valued and communicated amongst teachers themselves and more broadly to the academic community and also to the public.

So, I work with teachers across primary, secondary and tertiary levels and at the moment I'm doing quite a few co-design projects and also as a supporter and facilitator of teachers inquiries into their own practice. So, the work that you use working with teachers is really important to me because I don't do research on teachers. The work that I do is very genuinely collaborative of how we can share expertise and be partners in this research process.

So maybe just a couple of examples might be helpful to illustrate some of these ideas. I'm working on a nationally funded project with colleagues from Melbourne, Monash and Deakin University, with primary teachers in Victoria to understand how science and maths teaching can be brought together in productive interdisciplinary ways that can support student learning and also their engagement and interest in science and maths.

Because we know this is some of the real touchpoint areas of difficulty at the moment. So, we're co-designing lessons with primary teachers on different topics and then videoing these lessons using 360-degree cameras, sitting down afterwards with the teachers and exploring that video and talking about pedagogical decision making that's going on and where the opportunities for reflection and learning about science and maths teaching and also about their development of their expertise, what they notice in the classrooms.

So that's one that's quite discipline specific, you might say. And then a different project that I'm involved with is with my colleague at Monash University, Dr. Alana…and we're collaborating with teacher groups across different secondary schools in Melbourne to work with them on participatory action research projects, bringing together the teachers and their students to investigate a classroom question or issue that comes out of students survey data that's being collected.

And what we've found is that many schools and maybe you've had this experience yourself, collect this student survey data every year and then not much seems to happen with it. So, it's either underused or underutilised for its potential for improving classroom experiences. So we're working with groups of teachers who are analysing the survey data, taking the data to their students, and collaboratively developing these participatory action research projects around how students and teachers can have a voice in their own learning.

So that's really quite exciting work as the teachers start to draw in their students into their own research projects as well.

CHRIS HUDSON

One thing that I really love there is a lot of your work at the moment is focused on the co-design element, so you're getting amongst it, getting involved with the teachers, but also with the students as well. What do you see the power of that particular approach with the teachers and I guess the effects that you're seeing from that research?

AMANDA BERRY

Yeah, that's a great question. I think the power is that we're bringing different perspectives to the research and valuing those perspectives as equally important. So, teachers bring a classroom perspective, understanding the practicalities of situations, knowing the intricacies of what's happening in their own classrooms. Researchers can bring a kind of different level of abstraction, drawing in theory, to try to understand some of those experiences, and then students themselves talking about the impact on them as ultimately, you know, well, one of the learners gets the teachers, and the researchers are also learners in this.

So, for me, some of the impact comes in terms of engagement. People are really interested in what the learning is coming out of it because it comes from their own questions and concerns and also their motivation to persist. They're really interested to know, you know, how do we improve our practice together and what would that look like?

So yeah, the collective motivation and engagement is a really important signal of the impact and changes in the way that people view their participation in school as well.

CHRIS HUDSON

And a really great way to increase student voice and agency as well.

AMANDA BERRY

Precisely. That's right. Yeah. And I think sometimes we can give these things a sort of token acknowledgment, but this is really trying to genuinely engage students in those processes as well as teachers.

CHRIS HUDSON

And that leads us perfectly to the next section here where we're focusing on practitioner inquiry. So practitioner inquiry is a big part of what the teachers do in the Teaching Excellence program here at the Victorian Academy of Teaching and Leadership. From your point of view, what dispositions do you think are needed to engage in successful practitioner inquiry?

So, when I think about dispositions for successful practitioner inquiry, my mind straightaway turns to John Dewey's attitudes for reflective practice. So probably no and the audience probably knows about. John Dewey is an American philosopher and psychologist, writing in the 1930s, and he talked about the cultivation of particular attitudes, of open mindedness, whole heartedness and responsibility when engaging in reflection.

And of course, when you're doing practitioner inquiry. Reflection is an important part of that. So that idea of open mindedness, being inquisitive, curious, open to new ideas and trying to let go of preconceived assumptions or notions of how things should be at least trying to and wholeheartedness, That idea of taking your whole self to be genuinely engaged in that activity and keeping that willingness to persist even when things seem to become difficult or there are obstructions in your way, barriers to trying to move on with a particular process and things might not always go as they should.

So just genuinely engaging them in in the activity. And the third attitude of responsibility is about carefully considering the consequences of your actions. So, what comes out of what I've found out and who might this impact in terms of myself? What's my own responsibility towards myself, towards my students, towards my colleagues, towards leadership in school, towards parents, in the community.

So really taking that careful consideration of what is going to be the consequences of the ideas or the actions that emerge from a particular inquiry. So there's those three attitudes of open mindedness, wholehearted ness and responsibility. And I would also add another disposition or attitude of trust, trust in yourself, trust in your colleagues, and hopefully trust in in your school, in your leadership that this is good, worthwhile work to do.

So, trust and confidence that you're able to undertake this kind of inquiry and you can work productively with a group of colleagues around that, a kind of mutual collective trust and that you have a community behind you who really values and things that this kind of work is important to do. So yeah, that's what I would say are the main areas.

CHRIS HUDSON

You've gone really broad. I was just reading some of Bronfenbrenner, his work this morning about the ecological systems theory that he developed. And I love how you've touched on there that practitioner inquiry can go beyond the student and the individual sort of macro system around them. And we can have the ability to influence parents and the community as well in and through our practitioner inquiry.

AMANDA BERRY

Yeah, Yeah. And I think that's a great point because so often you see this sort of microcosm of the classroom and don't tend to think about the implications of what has been learned from beyond the classroom. And so the considerations of how what has been learned can influence other aspects of the ecosystem, if you like, is really vital for the impact of what you're learning.

CHRIS HUDSON

Absolutely. And if we were to leverage some of John Howard's work and he's very big on knowing the impact, it's a really interesting question to ask, isn't it, about what is my impact outside of my classroom and who am I impacting and how and why.

AMANDA BERRY

They're great questions to ask in a community practice. You know, as you're collaborating with others in a practitioner inquiry, it really helps to have those different perspectives to ask each other, do we have a planned impact or, you know, is impact arrived spontaneously or how do we work towards this idea of impact?

CHRIS HUDSON

And it comes down to that notion of dialog with one another, doesn't it, about, well, what do we want our impact to be? And I guess what are those incidental impacts that might occur in and through our practice together and also by ourselves as well?

AMANDA BERRY

So I think that idea of open mindedness really matters here because things will emerge as you undertake a practitioner inquiry that might not be what you originally expected. And in fact in good research, that's probably what's going to happen. And what you should be looking for. So staying awake and aware of those possibilities is going to be essential.

CHRIS HUDSON

It's that contradiction between having a deductive approach and an inductive approach, which better makes him comment on, I guess, the power of going down that inductive approach and maybe having some broad impact goals in and through practitioner inquiry, but then also leveraging that inductive approach and being vulnerable in the space of not particularly knowing what the impact might be.

AMANDA BERRY

Absolutely. And I think you now identify more of those disposition irons that are important to the practitioner inquiry around vulnerability, confidence in yourself, but being sufficiently vulnerable and aware of other possibilities that can emerge.

CHRIS HUDSON

And the other thing that you mentioned there is, you know, the disposition of genuinely engaging in the practitioner inquiry, especially when things might get difficult. So you're taking a real strengths based approach to practitioner inquiry that what advice can you give to teachers to stick with a practitioner inquiry when things perhaps might not be going to plan?

AMANDA BERRY

Yeah, I think this is where it really matters to have a critical friend or a critical friendship group where people can be supporting each other when it's difficult to persist. I always say that these, you know, challenges are more than you expected in the first place, and perhaps even beginning from a position of auditing the strengths that an individual or a group brings along so that we can offer each other support, we can help to articulate each other's strengths and remind each other of, you know, you're really good at being able to draw ideas out.

You're really good at being able to pinpoint precisely what's going on in a situation, or you're really good at facilitating a discussion and perhaps even being able to make a record of those strengths would be helpful for a group to remind itself about how to persist, because it is very difficult to do this kind of work alone and it's that idea of vulnerability.

And as you start to question things, even some of your most sort of beloved or cherished ways of working, then you really need to be able to remind yourself of your own strengths or to have that kind of external conversation or dialog around where a group can be supportive and helpful.

CHRIS HUDSON

The idea of an audit, I mean, what a fantastic school improvement initiative to be able to do that through a strength based approach. We know that one of the ideal standards is know your students and how they learn, but what a wonderful thing it is to know your colleagues and how they work.

AMANDA BERRY

Yes, yes. Know yourself and how you learn and work. Know your students, know your colleagues. I think being able to see from those different perspectives is a really like mutually strengthening and reinforcing way to work.

CHRIS HUDSON

As a really positive way to, I guess, engage in a practitioner inquiry going into a room, knowing yourself and your strengths and having that recognised by your colleagues, but then also knowing the strengths of the people around you so that when you do engage in practitioner inquiry together, it's that whole collective efficacy of I believe that everyone in this room can have an impact.

AMANDA BERRY

Yes, exactly. And it doesn't mean that you need to stay with people in your own disciplinary area actually can be really helpful if you start to move out of your discipline. Because again, you get those different ways of seeing and knowing that people can bring into a group to perhaps challenge some of the taken for granted this in your own disciplinary area, too.

CHRIS HUDSON

And that's one of the things that we're doing in the teaching excellence program here. So the teachers are going to have the opportunity to engage in a collaborative practitioner inquiry that is cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral as well. So they're definitely going to be able to have that opportunity to engage with others that they might not have had the opportunity to work with in the past, which is a real value to the program.

AMANDA BERRY

Absolutely.

CHRIS HUDSON

Now, the next question here. I know that some of your research has been related to self-study methodology, which is absolutely fascinating. As someone who is more okay with the case study methodology, I think doing a self-study methodology is just remarkable. So can you just tell the listeners what self-study entails as a methodology? And what have been some of your key learnings from engaging in in self-study?

AMANDA BERRY

Well, thanks, Chris. It's always great to hear people who are interested in self-study. Yes, it is a rather demanding kind of research approach, but for those people who are keen to inquire into their practice, this is a really great opportunity to, you know, research approach to do so. So originally called self study of teaching and teacher education practices.

Most people just call it self-study these days. It's a kind of educational research that focuses on, first of all, examining and then improving the relationship between teaching and learning through studying that relationship. So even though the word is self study, it's more than the study of self, it's self in relation to others. So you become the researcher studying your self and the interactions between your self and usually your students, and you also become the researcher.

So it's an interesting kind of dual position where you have to be obviously very careful about how you can become aware of your own biases and assumptions. Of course, any good research you have to do that as well, but also how you might start to genuinely ask questions of your own practice that you want to investigate to kind of trouble problematise and learn more about.

So questions you can begin with a particular question, but often that question will become further developed or reframed as the study progresses and you gather more data again, like good research. And it has to also keep turning back on self, like, what am I learning about myself? What am I learning about my practice? What am I learning about my students and how what is the interaction between myself and practice?

So the question becomes then not just what happens in your own classroom, but how does what I've learned, how might it be applicable to others? What are some ideas and insights that I can draw out that teachers could make sense of, that they could apply to their own classrooms, practices, etc. It doesn't always result in a change of practice.

Sometimes self study can result in a change of thinking and that as you reframe thinking, then you have deeper, more purposeful approaches to practice. Hmm.

CHRIS HUDSON

Even going through my own research journey, I'm connecting with what you're saying there because some of the advice that's been given to me is to keep a reflective journal as I'm going through collecting data. And I was actually reading through that journal last night to prepare for this interview together. And one of the things that struck me was advice to myself.

I wrote a question, Why am I not getting the answers that I think I'm getting? And the next thing I wrote was I need to ask better questions. And for me, that was such a glorious insight into my own practice as a beginning researcher because I felt that I wasn't asking good questions and it was a really good reminder to ask good questions in this podcast.

So I feel like it even having those reflective journal notes and inadvertently studying yourself and your own practices has such a very big, powerful influence on the way that you think and the way that your practice can evolve.

AMANDA BERRY

Yeah, yeah. So can I ask you the question then? How do you ask better questions? How do you learn to ask better questions?

CHRIS HUDSON

Thank you for interviewing me on my on my own podcast. Yeah, it's a fascinating one. It's for me, I think I really think I need it to be more responsive. I had the broader question in there to ask the interviewees, but I felt like in those early days of asking questions in those interviews, I perhaps was a little bit too nervous and wasn't responsive to what the person was saying.

So for me to ask better questions and this might be something that teachers can relate to, because if we're doing practitioner inquiry in the classroom and we're perhaps not getting the impact or the results that we think that we might or should be getting, are we asking the right questions? Should we go to the students and ask them, Hey, do these questions hit home for you?

Is this something that we should be looking at? And it once again, it comes back to that co-design, participatory action research approach that you spoke about earlier, bringing other people in to firstly ask if our inquiry is in fact the inquiry that we need or should have.

AMANDA BERRY

And that also then identifies that attitude or disposition of courage. You've got to be courageous to ask deeper questions or different questions or to bring students into the conversation. So it's having that confidence in yourself and the courage to push a bit further or to ask colleagues to trouble the questions that you are bringing to an inquiry as well.

So I really like those ideas that about how you're developing your own questions and but also seeing what some of the barriers are, being able to recognise that sometimes you just kind of have nervously caught up in the process itself. So to sort of take a breath and look deeper and help and draw on others to be able to help you with that is really, really important.

CHRIS HUDSON

And that's a really sound advice for the teachers engaging in practitioner inquiry to maybe take a little bit a minute and just sit back and think, is this the line of inquiry that is going to benefit my students and also myself as a practitioner?

AMANDA BERRY

And it's also it's some things about putting boundaries around how far you take a particular a research project. So making sure that you don't make yourself too vulnerable in the process of and you know, perhaps you go into the classroom and say to the students, well, what could be improved in the teaching? And that might be opening you up for, you know, all sorts of uncomfortable conversations that you might not be ready for.

And depending on if familiarity with the students, the kind of relationships you've built up, the culture of the school, etcetera, think about how you can organise to start to, for example, draw students into a conversation about practice. And that may be by having small groups or doing a survey or thinking about other kinds of ways in which you can listen to these different voices, but not in a way that's going to make you too vulnerable.

CHRIS HUDSON

Much of what we've spoken about there revolves around critical self-reflection. What do you see as a key benefits of being a critically reflective practitioner when engaging in practitioner inquiry?

AMANDA BERRY

I say that the benefits of being able to engage in that kind of critical self-reflection for me anyway, is that to continually growing and learning about teaching and learning. So there's a kind of freshness and interest that comes into your work in the classroom, in your conversations with colleagues, and that teaching isn't something that you kind of master and you're done with.

It's continually evolving and there's an excitement that comes from recognising the greater levels of sophistication with which you can understand and also plan and act your practice. So I think that's really important. And also that kind of mutual growth that happens when that critical self-reflection is occurring with others. So how can we grow and build as a community, recognising those kinds of strengths that we talked about before and staying sensitive to what is going on around us?

Of course, a critical part. People talk about what does it mean to be critically self-reflective compared with just being reflective. So that's also thinking about how power works in different groups, who's got power, how that power is used, where that power might be less obvious but has an important point. So that's another opportunity for groups to talk together about what does it mean if we're going to be critical, how can we really go deeper and analyse and look at the different kinds of perhaps power relationships that are happening here?

CHRIS HUDSON

Fascinating point about that is if I bring that back to Wenger's theory of communities of practice, towards the end of that book, he finishes with in order to work with one another efficiently, it's almost like we need a theorem of love to welcome people into our own practice, to be critically self-reflective, but to also welcome other people, to be critically self-reflective themselves.

And it's an environment of trust that we need in order to do that. Theorem of love. What advice can you have or do you have for teachers that enables those conditions to happen?

AMANDA BERRY

Yeah, I think to enable that kind of conditions. And I really like that theorem of love. Sometimes I talk about it as an ethic of care where, you know, we're showing care and responsibility to others and again, about being open and trusting. It's starting to build from a small point, I guess you might say, is that finding others who are like minded to have that kind of interest in who wants to engage in these processes together and building trust.

So I don't think trust is going to happen overnight unless there's a particular group of teachers who've been working together for a long time and have already established the ways in which they work and how they support each other. So looking for, looking for like minded people, building the trust and looking for areas of mutual focus and concern.

I think is really helpful. Deciding on the limits of where you're going to go as a group and having some sort of clear expectations around that as well. It's easy to get sidetracked when you're working with other people and being careful about the time and how you spend. It is really important and I guess together, being patient and persistent because things aren't always going to work out as you anticipate in the beginning and just to working through to experiment and revise and rethink and supporting each other when it might not turn out exactly as you planned from the outset.

CHRIS HUDSON

It's like there needs to be some element of scaffolding in there to support, you know, and these might be questions that we ask each other, well, how are we going to work together and how will we work best? And then coming up with, I guess, a group consensus as a scaffold, when things do get tough or things don't go to plan, well, how do we address that?

And I guess that does build trust in itself.

AMANDA BERRY

Yeah. So I really like that idea of the scaffold that is a framework rather than a blueprint, if you like. So you might have a set of questions that you're working from or a set of principles that you develop as a group about how you want to work, but that you're not rigidly stuck with those that they can you can move away from them as the situation or the problem emerges.

CHRIS HUDSON

And it's a fluid, fluid scaffold. So it's not something that's set in stone. It's a moving goalpost that we all stick to. But it's fluid in nature and it's there to support us. When the collaborative inquiry that we go down may need that little bit more support.

AMANDA BERRY

Absolutely.

CHRIS HUDSON

Now, in 2007, you wrote a paper called Re Conceptualising Teacher Educator Knowledge as tensions exploring the tension between valuing and reconstructing experience. Hopefully I've nailed the title of the paper. It's quite that in that you undertook a self-study which we've spoken about and you looked at the nature of knowledge developed by teacher educators about their practice and how it's often embedded in complexity and ambiguity.

One of the great things that I really liked about that paper was how you explored the complexity through different tensions that you experienced as a teacher educator. How do the perspectives that tensions give us assist us in better understanding our practice as educators?

AMANDA BERRY

Yeah, great question and I'm glad you enjoyed the paper. Chris That's fantastic. So just as a bit of back story, that particular self-study study that you're referring to was the basis of my PhD. And that was a one year self-study of my teaching practice as a new biology teacher, educator, working at university. And so after a long history in schools as a biology science English teacher, I moved into teacher education and I had all these amazing ideas about the kinds of things that pre-service teachers could and should be doing in schools.

And I shared all my ideas with the student teachers that I had. They went out into schools and I hardly saw anything of what I had been talking about actually happening in their practice. And so the questions started for me, like, well, why didn't they use them? And I sort of blaming the students, you know, what was what was wrong with the students and a trusted colleague of mine said to me, did you ever consider that you might be part of the problem here?

And that was the initiator of this self-study, Like how did I see and understand my own practice? How did I put my values and actions? Did put my values into actions? And what was the relationship between the kinds of things that I thought that I was doing and how my students perceived those practices. So I used the different Steven Brookfield's lenses to look at my practice through, first of all, my own eyes.

How did I see it? Through my students. I was getting feedback from my students through colleagues. So I worked with trusted critical friends who are able to come in and watch my teaching and talk with my students and try to kind of get behind the things that I was trying to do and how they were experiencing them and also through the literature.

And after gathering a lot of information about the different sort of perspectives and activities in my class, then I came to recognise that the things that I was calling a problem were actually kind of problematic. So not necessarily bad things when I'm talking about problems and that there are particular tensions that always exist within an educator experience about things that you're trying to do, things that you're trying to support, and things that sort of pull in the opposite direction.

So these tensions take you from sort of one way to another as you're trying to achieve a balance in in a classroom situation. So instead of a problem to be solved, they were kind of dilemmas to be managed. And understanding those dilemmas was really important for me in terms of what I could name and then have a better understanding and control of in my practice.

So I named these tensions of telling and growth, like how much do we tell people in advance and how much do we allow them to grow and learn on their own confidence and uncertainty where they were building, where you need to build your own confidence to be able to go ahead and you have to feel uncertain and vulnerable enough to be able to be open to new ideas, planning and being responsive.

We all know what it's like to plan before you go into a lesson or developing a unit of work, whatever it happens to be. But then how do you pick out what is appropriate to be responsive in the moment? Safety and challenge, action and intent, valuing and reconstructing knowledge. So as you listen to me saying these things, first of all, I was thinking about them as either or either I would tell my students or they just had to figure it out for themselves.

For instance. Well, I could just make them safe or I could challenge them. But both of these things have to exist simultaneously. And that's where the essence of the tension lies, because you're always trying to figure out, you know, do I go this way or that way? And as you recognise particular situations, I could come to be able to name a particular tension at work.

Okay. That's an example of where I am pushing somebody and they're out of their safety zone and I need to help them to feel a bit more confident in order to be able to continue to do this thing, which might be a bit more innovative than they're used to, for example. So the tensions gave me a way of describing an understanding practice that was very powerful and helped me also to see the sophistication and complexity of what it is that teachers do in the classroom.

I mean, we know it, we all know it, but how do you start to create a language around that that becomes useful for me and also communicable to others.

CHRIS HUDSON

And you and I had a really amazing chat before we went into the studio today, and it's one of those chats that I wish we had recorded for the podcast because this was like, Oh gosh, we have to recreate that now. But we spoke about in that chat about the power of naming something and incorporating it into our language so that we can understand it.

And the other thing that we touched on there was that binary perspective of either role. This is something that I have to solve or I have to let go when I'm investigating my own practice. So I was wondering if you can extrapolate a little bit more information on how teachers would go about being comfortable in that uncomfortable space of perhaps not knowing how to solve something and maybe not actually having to solve it and just knowing that this is a tension that I've named and I have to sit in that space where I'm probably not going to go either way.

AMANDA BERRY

Mm hmm. And I think to some extent, this depends on your own sort of personal dispositions about a willingness to be uncertain. But I think as a science and STEM educator also myself, we're constantly asking students to be sitting with uncertainty, to be comfortable about failure, to retry or to experiment. And in that way, I think we should try to be the very models of the things that we're asking our own students to do.

So that means not going, you know, to level ten straight away when you're moving into a perhaps less than comfortable space thinking about the boundaries or the scaffolding that we might use to support ourselves to step out into a new situation and recognising that just being able to name something that maybe you hadn't been able to name before is considerable progress because, you know, in the busy daily knows of teaching often kind of we've got the plan, we know what we're doing, we've finished that lesson, we're onto the other one, and we've got a myriad of other things to occupy our minds.

So being able to take that opportunity to just focus on practice and to think about something that's happening in that moment and to be able to name it not as a problem, but as a productive way of understanding a situation, then I think that's a great encouragement for teachers.

CHRIS HUDSON

It's taken me years to get to that. I remember when I first did my Master's of Teaching, which was back with Amanda McGraw many, many years ago in Ballarat, and I remember one conversation I had with Amanda where she said, Teaching is messy and my personality is I'm very much that binary thinker where I have to solve something.

If there's a problem in front of me, I see it as my mission to move that problem away as quickly as I can, and I'm still learning how to do that, even though, you know, I've established myself in schools and whatnot. I've got better at naming it, but it's taking me a while to get to that comfortable space of sitting in the uncomfortable space

AMANDA BERRY

Mm hmm. Absolutely. Teaching is messy. That doesn't mean it's bad, but it means there's a lot of things going on simultaneously. And that's what makes teaching good teaching especially incredibly demanding, because you're seeing these things that are going on and you have to make decisions constantly about how to respond and what to respond to. And I think a lot of people that go into teaching is my big generalisation is that they do like to solve problems and they do like to have things neat and tidy.

Maybe that's just all that science people that I hang out with as well. And this is about problem monetising. And this is about recognising that high level sophisticated practice always means grappling with things that you cannot resolve within a lesson, but that you can work towards improving. And I don't want that. I don't want that to sound negative because it actually is the learning that's really important.

And as you start to refine your understandings and develop new understandings, the messiness becomes something that you can almost embrace. Like the tensions before I was trying to avoid tensions that remove them just exactly the kind of thing that you were talking about. And as I work more with them, it was like, Oh, now that I see that one

So I was kind of looking for them and looking forward to them in a way because it gave me a way to make sense of very complex environment, I think. Linda Darling-Hammond talks about teaching is not rocket science. No, it's more complex than rocket science.

CHRIS HUDSON

And I love that how you've transitioned there to actually look for the tensions and embrace them almost with a loving hug, to say, come me like I, I love these tensions in my practice because they are great opportunities to learn, aren't they? And it is what you say there in terms of the process, the learning happens as part of the process of thinking about the tension that you've just named.

AMANDA BERRY

Yeah, yeah. In fact, they're necessary to good practice, you could say. And there's a lot of pressure from the outside around simplifying, teaching, telling teachers what to do and follow these particular steps. But I think teachers know themselves that classrooms that learning and teaching is there's so much more going on than that. And if we can start to be able to recognise that there were tensions present, that there are multiple things that are drawing your attention, that you have to make decisions.

And the decisions then become based on evidence that you can draw from practice. Then teachers are in a much better position to talk about why the work they do is complex, sophisticated, important.

CHRIS HUDSON

And I'm wondering if that might be a good way to approach collaborative practitioner inquiry about coming together and explaining the different tensions that we might have in our practice around the problem of practice that we share.

AMANDA BERRY

Yeah, absolutely. And that comes from that community of trust, the willingness to listen to each other, to engage in dialog compared to the everyday conversations that we might be having with each other. So sort of sitting with person in their space with the ideas that they're coming up with compared with making judgments or saying what they would do in this situation.

So it is really about developing that supportive, collaborative, trusting environment where those problems of practice can be raised, shared, interrogated, learned from communicated.

CHRIS HUDSON

MM It would be remiss of me not to pick up on something you just said there in terms of dialog and conversation. What is the difference?

AMANDA BERRY

Well, I think as I just said, to me, a conversation is something that happens more in an everyday sense. You may be using half your ears to be listening and perhaps making responses that are more on a superficial level. So in a dialog it is about that process of active listening, caring to hear what the other person said.

And sitting in that space with them and being open to all the different kinds of possibilities that can emerge through that kind of conversation, through that kind of talk. And in conversation, sometimes it's about putting your ideas forward, but not necessarily about opening those ideas or entertaining other possibilities.

CHRIS HUDSON

It reminds me a lot of the work of Paulo Friary in terms of his notion of dialog and having that ability to bring someone in to name and challenge the world together.

AMANDA BERRY

Exactly. Exactly. And I think that goes also back to the ideas from Stephen Brookfield about how you can have these particular assumptions and carry these assumptions with you, and you need other perspectives in order to be able to help you see your own assumptions and to challenge them.

CHRIS HUDSON

So many over the years you've done some considerable work with teams of teachers in your own research, which we've covered at the start of the podcast. In your opinion, what is successful collaboration between teachers who are engaged in practitioner inquiry together look like?

AMANDA BERRY

Yes, successful collaboration between teachers who are engaging in this kind of collaborative inquiry looks like a space where opportunities for people to pursue to their individual agendas and create a mutual agenda can exist. So that means perhaps drawing on what we talked about before, recognising the different strengths of individuals within a group and how those and how within a group people can be supported and encouraged, how you can start to draw out voices and ideas so that each person has the opportunity to be able to participate in that group in a in a wholehearted and genuine way, and that you can start to build some momentum around the kind of work that's being generated.

So, for instance what comes out of those individual inquiries, how can they contribute to some sort of collective understandings that can be shared more broadly? And how does this go beyond we're doing a project together to actual excitement about the work and the motivation to continue, even when you know the official end of the project is over. People are really keen to be able to maintain that sort of those dialogs together.

So building that kind of collective momentum and the excitement to persist and working together to, strengthen individual voices and perspectives, as well as building that strength collaboratively and collectively is important.

CHRIS HUDSON

And if we can bring that back to attention, I think something that we've just named there, which, you know, what we want to do with tensions, is promoting the voice of others, but then also promoting your own voice to build that momentum and its attention to name. And I think that's something that we perhaps maybe can't escape when we work with others.

But it's a tension to recognise us and it does bring back bring us back to a lot of what we spoke about earlier, about having that safe space to be able to work with each other effectively.

AMANDA BERRY

Yeah, and also involves perhaps giving up cherished beliefs or practices, things that we think, but that always works. But that's how that how to tell the world is or that's how my classroom always has been. So really having that willingness to question what we do and entertaining the opportunities to learn from and with others, even if we're incredibly experienced teachers, learning from and with others I think is always an important part of that growth process for teachers.

CHRIS HUDSON

And everyone's got something to add to a collaborative practitioner inquiry, whether they be a graduate teacher, a leading teacher, a learning specialist in AP High School, primary school. I guess it's about not attaching, you know, existing biases around power positions, whatnot, and looking at the person and their strengths and really valuing what they can bring to the inquiry together for the learning of the group, but also the learning of ourselves.

AMANDA BERRY

Absolutely. That's right. And being genuinely open to the opportunities for learning from a variety of others. And that includes our students as well. Yes. It's fascinating, isn't it, that the students are the ones who we are supporting as learners, but we often exclude them from conversations about learning.

CHRIS HUDSON

And just on that. So how do we pull the learning out of collaborative inquiry? We've spoken about a lot on how we structure collaborative practitioner inquiry and how we support it and engage in dialog and whatnot. But what's the best way to pull the learning out of working together?

AMANDA BERRY

Yeah, I think that's a really, really important point because you can, obviously you're engaging in the project and you're doing things along the way and perhaps in reporting you're describing what's happened, but what does it mean to actually learn from that project? So one way of course, is to be able to work with a group, to talk with others about what is it that you're learning, and to have those others who can ask questions.

So it's not describing or is that learning? What would it mean to actually learn from that? So pushing deeper, analysing further the kinds of insights that people come up with. So that would help people with a kind of personal learning. And then I think bringing those insights together into some kind of collective learning. So what are we learning together that will help us to be able to progress student experience or the way that we organise classes or what we might want to change within the school, for instance, And developing some generalisations, you might say that can be communicated beyond the group, and that could be at a school department meeting.

It could be to parents or the public. It could be about writing an article for teacher magazine or collaborating with researchers like me to be able to communicate those understandings. But it's really making sure that what we can draw from an experience supports and promotes the development of how we move on in our work as teachers So, yeah, I keep going back to that idea of the difference between sort of describing the findings, which, you know, in research we talk about.

Yes, we're describing the findings, but how do you go deeper? How do you really pull out the insights? And I think you need others to help you with that. And then I think you need to be able to refine those ideas by questioning them and putting them into different audiences and seeing how those audiences react to them.

CHRIS HUDSON

So it's about the application of what it is that we've learned together and how well, I guess discussing what that application might look like.

AMANDA BERRY

Yeah, so first of all, drawing those insights and then discussing their application and for whom under what circumstances.

CHRIS HUDSON

And just lastly here, as the TEP teachers embark on their collaborative practitioner inquiry together, have you any last words for them as they venture out and start this project?

AMANDA BERRY

So I would say most of all enjoy it. It's so fantastic to have this opportunity to be able to do a project that is not usually part of what we're able to do in schools because of time, resources, pressure. It's cetera. So enjoy the space, enjoy being able to work and learn with others and make the most of the kinds of opportunities to question what you're doing and within the safety of that particular group and to start to really consider what's important to you and why that is important to you and your teaching.

CHRIS HUDSON

MM Fantastic. Well, thank you very much for your time today, Mandy. I think I speak on behalf of all of our listeners when I say that it was great to be able to take a deep dive into the central tenants of collaboration practitioner inquiry and how the two connect with each other to improve teachers practice and student outcomes.

AMANDA BERRY

Thank you so much, Chris.

CHRIS HUDSON

We hope you enjoyed this podcast episode. You can check out all the links and resources in the show notes and you can stay up to date by subscribing to the Academy podcast and following the Academy on Social media. That's all for this episode. Everyone, see you next time.