Practitioners Write Effective PracticeThinking in your head is difficult because ideas leak away. Writing is a way of pinning your thoughts down and holding them still in order to examine them. (Clark and Ivanic 1997, p113) To Fiona MacDonald of the Adult Literacies Team of Communities Scotland, this book inspired her to think about how practitioner writing could document and support effective practice. She says, For me, this quote beautifully summed up the importance of recording in order to effect positive changes to practice. I wanted to encourage practitioners to record some of the excellent work that I know they are carrying out. However, I also wanted to locate this type of reflection in a research context, to show how action research methods can have an impact not only on our practice, but in our ability to be considered as professional in our approach to the delivery of adult literacies. Furthermore, the results of this type of inquiry can be useful in other contexts too and can be helpful as supporting evidence, for example, when drawing down funding. She developed an action-research project in which practitioners reflected on their experiences while delivering a course, Introductory Training in Adult Literacies Learning (ITALL). The aims of the project were to explore how practitioners could use reflective diaries as staff development, to evaluate ITALL using material from the diaries, and to provide a tool that practitioners in the future could use to explore their own learning. Literacy work in Scotland is guided by seven principles that were outlined in the 2000 National Development Project. The principles, and how they apply to tutoring learners' , are:
These principles are meant to be applicable in general, but some practitioners felt unclear about how they might be put into practice. The researchers hoped that, through reflective writing, practitioners could develop a framework for good practice. This framework would be based on their perceptions and expressed as closely as possible in their words. Practitioners discussed their best experiences as tutors and as learners' . Best experiences were taken as examples of good practice. The practitioners then decided what indicators, or examples, could be used to recognize good practice. Here is the result:
Fiona says, The participants within this project worked extremely hard and will be very pleased that their work might be of use to others. It is worth saying that the whole process culminated in a presentation to adult literacies practitioners in the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow, delivered by three of the participants. Each of them had used different models for recording their reflections and they discussed the positive and negative aspects of their own particular recording methods. They also discussed their own anxieties of putting pen to paper and the real benefits for both learners' and practitioners of writing down their reflections as soon after the event as possible. The full report of this project, New Practice, Good Practice: the role of reflection in adult literacies tutor training, by Ann Finlay with Moira Hamilton and Fiona Macdonald was published by Literacies Scotland in September 2003. It is available online at: www.communitiesscotland.gov.uk/Web/Site/cl/al_research.asp. Sources:Ivanic, Roz and Romy Clark (1997). The Politics of Writing. London: Routledge 1997 Literacies in the Community: resources for practitioners and managers. National Development Project-Adult Literacies in Scotland. City of Edinburgh Council and the Scottish Executive (2000). Introductory Training in Adult Literacies Learning, National Training Project for Adult Literacies and Communities Scotland (2003).
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