Research School Network: Charting our Course: Steering PD Through the Choppy Waters of School Life How we can chart a purposeful and steady course of high quality personal development to ensure high quality teaching.
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Charting our Course: Steering PD Through the Choppy Waters of School Life
How we can chart a purposeful and steady course of high quality personal development to ensure high quality teaching.
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by North Yorkshire Coast Research School
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Angela Harrison
Assistant Director of North Yorkshire Coast Research School
Angie is a secondary English Teacher who also leads the SCITT and is a Curriculum and Research lead at The Educational Alliance (TEAL). In addition, Angie is a Learning Behaviours content lead for the EEF
Research tells us that high quality teaching can narrow the disadvantage gap. (Slater et al., 2012).Therefore, ensuring our staff have access to high-quality professional development is crucial. However, in the dynamic reality of busy school life, even the most carefully curated professional development plans can be disrupted. What begins as a clear, well planned, research informed strategy can be interrupted as leaders find themselves firefighting: covering absences, managing the unexpected or dealing with sudden timetable changes. Unforeseen pressures have the potential to disturb the consistency and momentum that effective professional development relies on. As a result, leaders must navigate the constant tension between urgent operational needs and the vital long-term work of improving teaching and learning.
Navigating the Unexpected
As a leader of teacher development, this is precisely why I keep in mind Recommendation 3 of the EEF Implementation Guidance Report as it highlights the need for a ‘structured but flexible implementation’ plan. Despite undertaking a diligent pre-mortem exercise and asking those challenging “what if” questions it is not always easy to predict implementation glitches prior to delivering a new teaching strategy. So, as the guidance suggests, it is crucial to continually reflect on barriers and enablers and address implementation challenges in a responsive way. For, when we build in flexibility – anticipating obstacles and preparing adaptive routes – we are in a stronger position to be able to protect long term professional development work from being blown off course by the inevitable turbulence of the school year.
Time Waits for No Teacher
Taking my lead from the EEF PD Guidance Report, I have learnt to implement programmes using school time strategically and efficiently heeding the guidance that, ‘those who develop PD programmes must balance the desire to promote lasting and meaningful learning with the imperative to minimise the pressure they are placing on teacher time.’ This might mean embedding buffer weeks, planning for lighter touch drop-ins during high pressure periods in the school calendar and designing PD approaches that can scale up or down without losing their core purpose and integrity.
So, How Can We Chart a Purposeful and Steady Course?
The EEF PD Guidance Report offers us a powerful compass. Its focuses on purposeful design, coherent sequencing and gives us a framework robust enough to navigate choppy waters. Below are the three key things I try to keep in mind:
Anchor PD in Clear, Evidence – Informed Mechanisms
– Underpinned by key mechanisms (e.g. such as‘revisiting prior learning’, and‘prompting action planning’)design PD around what staff will learn and how they will embed it.
Build a Structure Yet Flexible Implementation Plan
– Anticipate pinch points in the calendar (mock exams, reporting periods) and build in protected ‘PD islands’ and buffers that cannot be repurposed.
Treat Professional Development as Cultural ‚Rather Than Calendar Based
– Strive to build a safe and supportive learning culture, for staff as well as pupils, so that PD lives and thrives in classrooms and is not something that is ‘done’ to staff once every half term.
Higgins, S., Major, L. E., & Coe, R. (2014)‘What makes great teaching?’, What works (and what doesn’t), Professional Voice, 11 (3), pp. 11 – 16. Available at: https://www.aeuvic.asn.au/sites/default/files/
Slater, Davies, and Burgess (2012), Do Teachers Matter? Measuring the Variation in Teacher Effectiveness in England, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 74 (5), pp. 629 – 645
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