Effective Professional Development: Revisiting Prior Learning

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7 January, 2022 —
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Effective Professional Development: Revisiting Prior Learning

We explore mechanism 2 from the EEF’s recent guidance report

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by Bradford Research School
on the 7th January 2022

Mark Miller is Director of Bradford Research School

In our first blog on the 14 mechanisms from the EEF’s Effective Professional Development guidance report, we looked at mechanism 1: Managing cognitive load. Today we look at mechanism 2: Revisiting Prior Knowledge.

Both of these mechanism fall under the category of ‘Build Knowledge’, which is framed in the following way:

When designing and delivering PD, it is likely to be important to present new knowledge in ways that support understanding. As any teacher would with their own class, PD facilitators must pay close attention to how they structure and build the knowledge taught through the programme.

According to the guidance, PD is more likely to be effective when we:

revisit previous topics or techniques later in the programme;
quiz participants on information provided in past sessions; or
use tasks that require teachers to draw on past learning.

When delivering a CPD programme with a finite timescale, it is a little more straightforward to build these things into the overall design. Where it may prove more challenging is in the ongoing life of a school, where the C of CPD is important. How do you ensure that content is revisited, while adapting to the ongoing priorities of the school, staff turnover, various levels of staff experience (both teaching experience and experience with the material)?

When and how will we revisit this?

If we make the choice to focus on something as part of professional development, why wouldn’t we want to revisit it? But we also know that schools move at a hectic pace and priorities change – there is always something new to focus on.

So when preparing the initial PD, we can ask when it will be revisited and make plans for that to be done. This may be some more training that reinforces and expands on the ideas, a reminder or quick quiz at the start of a session. Things don’t always have to be revisited in an identical PD session. They can be revisited in subject teams, pastoral teams, through informal conversations and coaching. They can be built into the artefacts of the school, its norms and routines.

As a matter of routine, you can design follow-up slides and questions as you create the PD materials. If a diagram is used, create a version without labels to complete at a later date. If a classroom routine has been learnt, design a quick cribsheet to be picked up in a coaching session when the routines are a little rusty.

What should we revisit?

We might not be able to revisit every thing that has been covered in previous sessions, so prioritising is important.

We should revisit the active ingredients, those key elements that are crucial to the success of the approach. Let’s say there is a PD session on knowledge organisers. An expert is brought in to speak about how cognitive science can inform their design/use and active ingredients are clearly communicated and generally understood. As a follow up, staff are given time to design them with active ingredients in mind. Two years later, every subject has a suite of knowledge organisers, but only some of the staff body have had that initial training. And even those who were involved may not have revisited those ideas. And what happens? Mutations – suddenly the principles are less well understood and design becomes inconsistent. So we should revisit them – and plan for this to happen at the outset rather than waiting for these misconceptions and mutations to appear.

Another useful thing to do is to return to important overarching concepts that underpin things. Key concepts that are useful to know but can also act as a foundation for new ideas too. One way that I have approached this is to think of key ideas that underpin a range of concepts and revisit that idea. For example, in our training on cognitive science we will revisit models of memory such as Atkinson and Shiffrin’s multi-store model of memory. Not only are these worth revisiting, but can then act as a foundation for the next session.

Here’s an example from Dixons Kings where they revisit Doug Lemov’s concept of ratio. This is good to be reminded of generally as its so useful, but in this case is applied to the focus of the CPD session, which is the use of mini whiteboards.

Low maintenance approaches

Beginning a new PD session by asking participants to review prior learning can be an easy request. Questions, or prompts or cues can help. Simple questions like ‘how does this session link to last?’ can also be useful. And taking opportunities when they arise can also be helpful. Sharing slides with staff can also ensure that they then reinforce messages in their own sessions, in coaching or in subject teams.

See the full list of mechanisms below, and the other blogs in the series.