The National College for School Leadership: informal and programme networks and communities

Background

The National College for School Leadership (NCSL) plays a significant role in promoting leadership development and extending the knowledge base about school leadership. NCSL’s goals are:

• to develop excellent school leadership to transform children's achievement and wellbeing
• to develop leadership within and beyond the school
• to identify and grow tomorrow’s leaders
• to ensure a ‘fit-for-purpose’ national college.

To this end, NCSL activities include:

• programmes for all levels of leadership
• Research – for example, ECM, models of leadership, sustainability
• Campaigns/strategic initiatives (interventions) – for example, succession planning, SLICT
• national networks
• advice to government
• national initiatives, for example, National Leaders of Education

NCSL has a range of online communities - many are informal though a large number are part of the blended learning offer in college programmes. They connect peers from across the education sector to engage in professional dialogue, to stimulate debate and to learn from the wisdom of others. The college website has more than 100,000 unique visitors each month. The online collaborative communities have up to 16,000 unique visitors per month.

Our online communities are open to an increasingly wide range of school leaders - including headteachers, deputy heads, middle leaders and school business managers from schools, children's centres and further education colleges. They give confidential access to an extensive network of colleagues, experts and policy-makers for debate, discussion and exchange of ideas. As well as our online communities environment (talk2learn), we run very successful web conferences and we are evolving new online tools alongside rigorous data collection providing evidence of impact.

Wenger suggests that a community can be distinguished from a network since a network deals with relationships and flows of information but a community of practice is cohesive, shares historical processes and is composed of strong ties. This suggests that a spectrum may exist (both on and offline) from networks (loose associations) to communities of practice (collaboration of a more defined type). Investigation suggests that we can recognised examples of networks and communities in our non-programme online environment. One-off discussions often take place between transitory networks. These can be exemplified by ‘Open Forum’ - where specialist questions by isolated individuals can get a quick response.

Purposeful longer term problem-solving also takes place between groups that interact over a longer time scale and exhibit many of the factors that Wenger identifies as characteristic of communities of practice. ‘Identity sharing’ seems to be a crucial factor and our authenticated closed communities seem to support this. Our AST group connect some of the very best practitioners in particular subjects who help colleagues as they aspire to be creative about learning. Members are mutually supportive and are connected not just in online forums but also via webex, flash meeting, and so on. School business managers can sometimes be isolated and they embrace deep online collaboration wholeheartedly and work together collaboratively to solve individual problems. Much of this problem solving may exemplify Argyris single loop learning - where the learner looks at their school (or any organisation) in order to detect and correct errors, but does not alter the organisations policies or ethos, making it more likely that that error may occur again at another part of the organisation. Single-loop learning is a one time response to a problem. However there is evidence of transformational or double loop learning where the error is detected and corrected in a ways that alters the organisations polices, objectives and allows the learner to engage in ‘out of the box’ thinking.


Argyris, C. (2001) Single and Double loop learning

In terms of programme communities, since NCSL programmes are increasingly modular and personalised, it was felt that opportunities  needed to be provided for groups of school leader to ‘cluster together’ to give a wider context to their work and to seek to make connections into the wider educational system. Identification of chronological points, nodes of connection or resources - where enough people would be clustered to give the optimal chance of successful online engagement - needed to be considered. In some of the newer programmes, such points were designed as Core Days and as Optional Skills Days. Both of these are blended learning experiences with on and off-line elements.

In organising experiences, the size of the groups needed to sustain interaction was investigated. The work of Dunbar (1993) and his anthropological studies suggest that the human brain can hold a maximum of 150 social connections and the least needed to create a successful community offline would be around 80 to 90. Designers therefore experimented with the size of participant groups. Using groups of 12, 24, 36 and 48, the relationship between the number and the rate of contribution to the group was investigated. It was hard to keep variables the same as the number of facilitators in the community increased accordingly so the ratio of learner to facilitator became 1:12, 2:24, 3:36, and so on. There was a definite increase in the level of participation and interaction within the communities as the participant number grew but it was hard to determine whether this was due to the increase of numbers within the community or the increase of facilitation.

Looking further at the tutor’s role in networking learners, we used several models within the college, including those of Gilly Salmon. In her 5-Stage of E-tivities (2002), she recognises several stages a cohort go through when entering a community and maps out the general process and stages taken by the cohort and the facilitator. Initially, the facilitator is heavily engaged but leads to a point where the group themselves take over the running of the community.

The role of the tutor or facilitator in an online collaborative environment is complex, and while contextual factors such as number of participants needed to be considered, the level and quality of facilitation is under constant review. A piece of reflective work by a tutor is shown in the graph below. The conclusion was that the more visible the facilitator in the community, the more contributions the participants made.

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NCSL elearning specialists provide extensive training for the facilitators who work in the online communities. We provide them with a thorough online training course (OFAT) and have developed an e-learning facilitation online toolkit Access the e-learning facilitation toolkit and a booklet (100.00 heads are better than one) for their use. 100,000 heads are better than one

It is therefore suggested that all types of online forums, as part of a blended learning suite of tools, provide potential for collaborative learning. Networks and communities have great value in reducing barriers of time and distance and in creating solutions that may allow improvement and change. NCSL’s elearning specialists continually look at types of interaction and the means by which individuals can create new knowledge. We have developed a model of online collaboration that we use to encourage reflection by individuals and by tutors about the type of contribution they are making, and about the potential for transformational learning. http://www.ncsl.org.uk/mediastore/image2/facilitatorstoolkit/theory_04.htm

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Mr Tim McShane and Dr Kathy Seddon are e-learning specialists at the National College for School Leadership, in Nottingham, England, United Kingdom.

 

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