Research School Network: Leading CPD in Schools: Challenges, Strategies and Successes Where to start when leading CPD for such a diverse workforce?

In a school with over a hundred teachers from ECTs to those who have been teaching longer than I’ve been alive, a multitude of support staff from caretakers to mentors, established leaders and aspiring leaders…where to start when leading CPD for such a diverse workforce?

There is a myriad of research and advice on leadership and getting the most out of your teams (almost overwhelmingly so!), and while I always buzz with ideas after dipping into these, the best go-to is the Education Endowment Foundation’s ​‘Effective Professional Development’ Guidance Report and ​‘A School’s Guide to Implementation’. The substantial research underpinning these means that the arduous legwork has already been done and the most effective aspects have been sifted out and synthesised for you, and all within the context of education. Grounded in these, the guiding principles behind our CPD design are:

> High quality teaching improves pupil outcomes; effective professional development is a crucial tool to develop practice

> Professional development should be evidence-based, both in terms of the contextual needs of the school and the underpinning research

> Professional development must be supported by the school leadership team

> Professional development cannot be a one-off event. Mechanisms need to be in place to ensure learning is acted upon and embedded into practice e.g. revisiting prior learning and action planning

In recognition of the EEF’s recommendations, the perennial time constraints and the numerous pressures affecting a teacher’s cognitive load, we reviewed and adapted how we allocated our INSET time in consultation with staff. We decided that instead of having 5 INSET days spread across the year, we would keep 3​‘standard’ INSET days (two at the beginning of September and one at the beginning of January) and have the remaining time of two INSET days spread across the year in shorter 30-minute sessions for the whole school teaching and learning focus (the disaggregated time allowed us to finish two days earlier for the Summer holidays which feels like a big win when you get to it!). This meant that we were able to spread professional learning so that it was a ​‘little and often’ approach in order to incrementally deepen understanding and build in knowledge retrieval to ensure pedagogy is secure and strategies are embedded into practice.

Once the practical structures were in place, the next step is to decide what to focus CPD on. Of course, CPD activities are widely varied, from practical First Aid training to exam board webinars. For the purpose of this blog, I am going to focus on leading whole school teaching and learning CPD for teachers and zooming in on some vital elements.

To begin, there needs to be a thorough investigation to identify what should be the priority for the teaching and learning focus which can be through a range of methods: staff CPD survey, lesson drop-ins, book looks, question level analysis of students’ examination results and auditing against the most impactful strategies in the EEF’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit. In my first year of this approach, we choose metacognition as the unifying focus for teaching and learning CPD across the whole year – (a one-off afternoon simply wouldn’t be enough to do justice to the intricacies of metacognition!). This was also included as a key action area in our school improvement plan which was reviewed each term in our SLT line management meetings.

It’s a delicate balance trying to veer away from the one-size-fits-all approach whilst also ensuring secure knowledge across the body of staff. Rather than skewed self-reporting of confidence as a baseline, I began with setting a ​‘Metacognition quiz’ to actually check staff knowledge as a starting point. Being deliberately transparent with the rationale behind the CPD design helped with buy-in, reassuring that I wouldn’t be singling anyone out on their quiz results and acknowledging that I was having to brush up on metacognition myself, alleviated any grumbles. This low-stakes strategy was really effective in enabling me to gauge the knowledge of staff, identify gaps to inform my planning of areas to focus on and explicitly address misconceptions. Following the quiz, I shared the whole staff results to recognise where knowledge was assured and which areas we needed to work on.

As a tangible way to measure the impact of the CPD, teachers then completed the same quiz at the end of the year. This was carried out in subject teams of two or three in real time – this worked really well as teachers were able to discuss to get to the correct answer which bolstered the collegiate intelligence and avoided putting anyone on the spot. The added competitiveness of seeing live scores always goes down well! Of course, prizes were awarded for the top teams and I was really pleased with the accuracy of results – it all came down to who was quickest in the end!

Within the overarching teaching and learning theme for the year, this was broken down into key elements which we worked through in half-termly cycles. I recorded a video to provide knowledge input and give examples of how it could be put into practice, as well as more nuanced, challenging applications for those teachers who already had a secure understanding of this aspect. Having ran separate sessions with them in advance, the Heads of Faculty were a crucial implementation team in guiding their own faculty to discuss how they could apply it to their subjects and plan what they would do to implement it in upcoming lessons. This action planning was key in giving thinking time and collaboration to merge the pedagogical knowledge with their content knowledge to empower teachers to enact the pedagogy in a way that best suited their subject.

In the next faculty meeting at the end of the half-term, staff shared within their faculties how they had applied this element. This extra layer beyond the knowledge input meant they were more likely to carry out their planned actions as they had dedicated time to plan for it together, followed up with the accountability of knowing they would be sharing best practice after implementing. This also increased the collective knowledge of subject teams and facilitates increased adaptive expertise.

Undertaking the NPQ in Leading Teacher Development has been the most significantly beneficial professional development that I have completed which has helped me to expand my own knowledge to better plan, deliver and review the CPD offer in my school. As well as detailed engagement with the relevant EEF Guidance reports, the networking opportunities were also extremely valuable to learn from other CPD leads about how professional development is enacted in other schools.

So, while leading on professional development for a large and varied team of staff poses difficulties, there is ample support available and masses of talent to harness in your school to be able to maximise the educational experience and outcomes for our students.

Leading teacher development national professional qualification – GOV.UK