Teach-Secondary-14.1

W e’ve all had that sinking feeling, after a full day’s teaching, when we suddenly remember that there’s a whole staff CPD session we need to attend. And that’s before we can even begin to grapple with the resources we need to print for tomorrow, the phone calls home we need to make, the lessons we need to plan for later in the week, that pile of marking that needs doing by Friday... We’ve also likely experienced the cognitive overload of two full days of INSET each September, where we’ll sit in a freshly painted school hall or theatre as 247 PowerPoint slides flow before us and we start to fidget in our uncomfortable seating – not unlike our disengaged Y9s during an hour-long assembly... Acrucial factor The importance of CPD for teachers isn’t lost on the profession’s senior leaders, nor officials at the DfE. As research by John Hattie has previously shown, the classroom teacher is the single most important factor in determining pupil outcomes (see tiny.cc/ ts141-cpd1). In their book, The Teacher Gap , Rebecca Allen and SamSims further observe that, “ Moving a child from an average teacher to a top teacher’s class means they will learn in six months what would otherwise have taken twelve. ” WHEN CPD goes wrong CPD exists to improve skills and provide better outcomes – but as Sally Newton explains, the path from ‘helpful training’ to ‘improved practice’ isn’t always a smooth one... This would seem to indicate that CPD is extremely important for ensuring that novice teachers can flourish and become expert educators, and that the already capable can further hone their craft. And yet, there’s also evidence to suggest that only 1% of training is actually effective in improving classroom practice (Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education, 2011). It’s entirely possible for CPD to go awry in both relevance and delivery – so what can school leaders do to ensure any CPD they roll out to staff is, in fact, valuable to them and appropriately implemented? Here, I’m going to outline a number of key reasons as to why seemingly good ideas shared during CPD sessions aren’t successfully transferred into practice. The first being... Time restraints and stress There are only so many hours in the day. All too often, my previous experiences of CPD have involved a ‘one off’, hour-long training session, immediately followed by staff either hurrying home at the end of the day, or returning to their packed to-do lists – and in both cases, never looking at any of the content from the session ever again. Adopting a different theme for successive one-hour CPD sessions taking place throughout the year might seem like a good way of presenting staff with a variety and range of training knowledge – but in practice, it can be overwhelming for teachers to have so many ideas thrown at them over just a fewmonths. Good school leaders will recognise that implementing CPD strategies takes time . They’ll examine their improvement plans and targets for the year ahead, and carefully select only a limited number of CPD threads to focus on between September and the following July. Working with the entire school body, they’ll then create a series of CPD opportunities that follow a spiral curriculum, where one key theme is explored across a number of facilitator-led sessions. Between those sessions, staff will also be given opportunities and space to fully embed elements from the training they’ve received “CPDshouldn’t be seen in isolation,as a sequence of ‘oneanddone’training sessions” 32 teachwire.net/secondary