Teaching, learning and leading in today’s complex world: reaching new heights with a developmental approach

Abstract

‘What is happening in education today?’ and ‘What is most needed for the future of teaching, learning and leading?’ This article presents a developmental approach to learning, leadership and advancing professional learning—one that takes into account adults’ diverse meaning making processes—that can help educators build the internal capacities needed to meet the mounting challenges that define education today. The increasingly complex demands of our current world call for greater internal capacities that many adults do not yet have. To be more effectively equipped to teach, learn and lead in today’s world, we need to learn how to support each other’s growth and learning as well as our own, employ practices that support such growth and learn to collaborate and work together in teams in ways that help us to meet the implicit and explicit demands that we encounter every day in our work and that enable us to grow. In order for these to occur, we must create conditions that nurture such growth. This article helps us to do this by discussing the following: (1) Understanding that, as adults, we make meaning in qualitatively different ways; (2) Being mindful of the kinds of standards that can guide professional learning (all of which involve collaboration and teamwork); (3) Recognizing the need to differentiate the kinds of developmental supports and challenges that we offer to each other in order to support growth; and (4) Employing pillar practices (i.e. teaming, providing adults with leadership roles, inviting adults to engage in collegial inquiry and mentoring) with developmental intentionality so that we can grow internal capacities while engaging in these practices.