In recent years, the school and trust that I work within has committed to the idea that quality CPD needs to be subject-specific by giving more directed time to subject meetings, as opposed to whole-school training.
On one level, this is an excellent opportunity for CPD to become more bespoke; the introduction of personalised, evidence-informed practice projects has also fed into this.
However, I’m conscious that - as a subject leader - much of my understanding of what makes effective CPD comes from my own wider reading, engagement with edutwitter (and more recently #edCPDchat) and external training opportunities (such as the Expert Middle Leaders course with Ambition Institute). This led to me to reflect on how I can support the other English leads across our trust without an approach that is prescriptive, as the context and priorities of each department do vary significantly.
Part of this has been to focus on collaborative resourcing, through creating folders on Teams to share slides, book extracts/blogs, videos and examples/non-examples. The launch of a ‘CPD portal’ across our trust will take this further still, as each department will record CPD sessions to share on different elements of English teaching (alongside cross-subject videos) to access as part of department time, or by individual staff.
That being said, I was still keen to ensure that subject leaders were aware of some of the ‘active ingredients’ of CPD (as - like in the classroom - quality resources doesn’t always mean quality delivery). It was for this reason that I was glad to read Bruce Robertson’s ‘The Teaching Delusion’, specifically when it came to the ‘toolkit’ he mentions (a list of what you’d want to see in the classroom, to help teachers reflect and evaluate).
I then set to drafting a version of this for CPD so that, alongside training on effective CPD and exploration of good practice, the subject leaders I work with would be able to reflect and evaluate on how to develop their delivery of departmental CPD. I used Robertson’s model for this, aiming to give some examples of what the active ingredients might look like in practice alongside a space to self-evaluate and reflect. Adam Marsh (@ajm_PE) also gave some really helpful feedback in ensuring that I’d covered different aspects of what makes quality CPD.
It’s still in its infancy at the moment, though the feedback on the draft version has been positive, as well as helping as a shared reference point for discussing the ‘active ingredients of CPD’. You can see the first part of this below, but feel free to contact me on Twitter (@rjmcdonald24) if you want more details.
