The Importance of Subject-Specific CPD

Imagine walking into a hall of around 100 students, with some who have just started school and others who are near the end of their academic journey.  Perhaps you plan to read out the content of a PowerPoint.  Or maybe you will engage them all with a game of table tennis with students?

Either way, how confident are you that you would be able to deliver a lesson that would effectively meet the learning needs of such a wide range of ages and abilities?  I certainly wouldn’t be, and the same would go for delivering a whole-staff training session that would effectively meet the needs of staff who are at different points in their career and approach their teaching in different ways.

This is one reason why I feel CPD on a whole-school level is problematic.  Every single teacher should be able to leave one of these sessions feeling that they have had time to think and reflect in order to improve the learning of their students.  Instead, many leave with a list of strategies that they’ve already tried (and perhaps didn’t work) or aren’t relevant to their classroom.

It is sensible that schools are leaving behind the ‘whole-school CPD’ model, in favour of subject-specific development.  This is vital as the time spent working on specific subjects allows teachers to develop their subject knowledge, support their workload through team-planning and focus on pedagogy/research that is specific to their discipline.  Furthermore, the fact that the training is led by a head of department means that they know their teams and can plan sessions to support the needs of each member of staff in their department.

This being said, it is crucial to train middle leaders if this is to be effective, or we run the risk of department meetings that consist of a list of notices rather than time to enhance the development of our staff.  CPD time should be primarily based in departments, with middle leaders trained in the best ways to train and develop staff.  Part of this also means planning out the focus for a department; we often consider the sequencing and revisiting of knowledge for our students, but the same is true for

our staff.  Activities could involve engaging with research and considering the impact on teaching, reflecting on recent peer observations, reading around a specific text/area of study to develop subject knowledge or even time to read books on teaching and learning.  You could even use videos of teachers in your department to discuss together what effective teaching is for you.

Overall, the main things that could improve CPD for teachers? Smaller class sizes.

Thanks to @teacherthunks , @trudygroskop , @meshishk and @bossymisst for the feedback on twitter!

My Visualiser: Small Camera, Big Impact

When I started to use a visualiser, I was surprised by some of the feedback from students where they saw it as a helpful tool.  One was the fact that I was no longer ‘in the way’ when modelling on the board (it probably doesn’t help that I’m not always great at standing still during delivery); the second was that students felt that my explanations were clearer, as I took more time.

It is true that sitting to model and write does make me slow down a little, mostly as it has made me more aware of how I am delivering the explanations whilst I model.  The summary of effective direct instruction from Barack Rosenshine (2012) was really influential here, as it made it reconsider the importance of making modelling matter.

To start with, this was as simple as me narrating my thought process (taking the effort to slow down and pause as appropriate) and annotating this thought process as I go.  This meant that students had the scaffold of this thought process when they either continued the piece I started or started anew with a different focus.  This was a big shift from the rushed models I’d previously completed on the whiteboard, as being conscious of the limited space meant that I was often restricted to a single paragraph, with limited annotations.

Over time, I also started to replace more of my pre-prepared models with a live version, using the visualiser.  For example, when feeding back after looking at students’ work, I now tend to write model to show students how to get past the misconceptions I identified by modelling those mistakes and the correcting of them.  Again, modelling the thought process has been important here as I’ve had students reflect by asking which questions I asked myself whilst writing that they didn’t ask themselves, before they redraft their original piece.  What I’m aiming to develop is the idea that they shouldn’t ‘just write’ (as is the temptation in exams where time is limited and the required knowledge is substantial); instead, I want to embed the process of ‘write > reflect > repeat’.

As well as modelling the process for written answers (which has proved more successful than the various acronyms I’ve used for analytical paragraphs before), I’ve also used the visualiser to model planning of tasks/writing and the annotation of texts.  I believe that this has supported students’ cognitive load because (as one student mentioned) I’m not ‘getting in the way’ of the explanation/modelling.  Students can look and the board and listen to my narration; they don’t need to be distracted by my physical presence.

Now I am more confident with using the visualiser, I now find that I use it without planning to, which has made it particularly useful when it comes to addressing misconceptions or sharing successes ‘in the moment’ as well as live marking a piece to model effective peer/self assessment.