Creating a Professional Learning Community

One of the many things I love about my role of Education Consultant with EarlyWorks, is training and supporting educators.  When I stop and think about why I find this aspect of my role so fulfilling, it is that I get to see educators’ confidence and expertise blossom as they embrace all that EarlyWorks has to offer in creating documentation that matches the brilliance of what is actually happening in educator’s room.  I also get to see educators continually refine the way they use EarlyWorks to reflect their service’s context. 

And the icing on the cake is when an educator who had previously not been given any extra responsibility (like room leader or educational leader) is recognised as having real strengths when it comes to creating online documentation that showcases all that is happening in the service.  By default, those educators tend to become the ‘go to’ people for EarlyWorks.

This got me thinking about the distributed leadership model, and how that might be used to identify and make the most of the strengths of every staff member in a service.  So, the educator who shows a real passion for online documentation, might become the EarlyWorks Expert for the service.  The EarlyWorks Expert can then guide and continuously support other educators in using EarlyWorks.  When new educators come on board, the EarlyWorks Expert can provide training and mentoring, to ensure the educator uses EarlyWorks in a way that best reflects the context and philosophy of the service.

Then, the EarlyWorks expert can have ongoing, complimentary training directly from EarlyWorks, and then share that knowledge with the rest of their team.  A brilliant way of developing a professional learning community (NQS Leadership 7.2) and ensuring the service philosophy guides the documentation and communication processes within the service (NQS Service Philosophy and Purpose 7.1.1).

If you would like to have a chat about how the EarlyWorks Expert model might work in your service, please don’t hesitate to be in touch.