There is an unfortunate inconsistency persisting in many secondary settings which sees Teaching and Learning (T&L), despite its unquestionable importance to pupil development and outcomes, often the first thing to be paused when pressures and workloads increase. When T&L is not valued and recognised by school leadership, then it becomes secondary to other priorities, and the demotion of teaching and learning becomes justified (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). This creates an almost self-perpetuating cycle which reinforces the devaluing of T&L as teachers inevitably get busier and busier. Arriving at a new school in September 25, newly promoted to a leadership position, and rolling out an entirely new weekly CPD schedule, I was tasked with getting T&L firmly back onto the agenda in a way that, whilst enduring and impactful, does not problematise staff workload as the school year inevitably accelerates.
Trust and Transparency
Netolicky (2019) argues that underpinning successful professional development platforms in schools is a strong degree of trust between leadership and teaching staff. Without trust, cultures of surveillance and rigid compliance proliferate, and productive T&L slips further down the agenda. Considering how to introduce a new weekly CPD schedule in a way that guaranteed genuine and constructive buy in, I felt that to generate Netolicky’s (2019) trust, I would prioritise transparency and honesty in my initial interactions and CPD sessions with staff.
Running a CPD on “Alternatives to teacher talk”, I introduced the rationale for the focus by delivering to staff feedback from two observations of my own teaching. I recorded transcripts from two of my lessons and used AI to analyse the nature of the interactions. With Kostadinovska’s (2019) suggested 70:30 ratio as a starting point (70% of lesson dialogue should be from pupils, 30% from the teacher) I revealed that of all the dialogue across my two observed lessons, 88% of the dialogue had been my own. Furthermore, the AI analysis of the lessons’ dialogue found that open-ended questions with a longer wait time facilitated more evaluative, higher level comments from pupils, however such questions were only 8% of all my questions across the two lessons. By using my own observation notes, and indeed quite revealing data, it made clear to teaching staff that CPD was going to be collaborative and something that we can all engage with and benefit from, as opposed to something being implemented from the top down. It is well discussed across T&L circles that classrooms need to be mistake-safe spaces and that making mistakes is central to learning (Steuer et al., 2022), and my quite humbling observation notes help establish a culture in which this also chimes true for teacher development too.
Concerns around surveillance culture are often raised when it comes to learning walks and lesson observations, and this indeed threatened to undermine the trust and transparency I was aiming to secure. Whilst Netolicky (2019) does identify overly-critical classroom scrutiny as a significant risk to effective professional development, I did feel that, in order to better understand my role in the school and the school’s existing teaching and learning landscape, I had to get into as many lessons and see as many teachers and subjects as possible. Joint learning walks, typically alongside Heads of Faculty or the Deputy Head Academic, were happening multiple times each week and continue to do so. However, I took a several measures to ensure these were implemented constructively and supportively. All teachers were given positive feedback centred around the school’s values, and each week a T&L champion is awarded before the staff body based on what I have seen in their lessons. Additionally, when spending time in other teacher’s lessons, I try and participate and interact, either with the teacher or a few of the pupils. This helps breakdown any barriers between observer and observed, reducing the formality and the rigidity of the process, and ensuring the feeling is collaborative. I do feel that these measures have helped build a trust across the staff body that these learning walks are genuinely motivated by identifying our strengths and sharing best practice.
Make T&L Easy
Another misconception around T&L is that it typically involves, in some guise or another, increases in workload. New school-wide initiatives that enforce revisiting lesson plans and schemes of work might be a way of permeating a T&L agenda, but they unquestionably disrupt a teacher’s natural rhythms and workload balance. Rather, T&L should be made as easy as possible, centred around ongoing dialogue that staff have every single day and built around ‘little and often’. Teaching and learning is at its best, not when being imposed from on high, but when it is being chatted about over lunch, or quickly reflected on when you touch base with colleagues in the corridor.
In the after school CPD sessions that I run, I keep sessions rooted in practice by framing everything around empowering staff with new tools and ideas to add to their armoury. I try and avoid deadlines, insistencies, and overly strict applications of the T&L ideas, and allow staff to reason with new concepts in their own time and within their own contexts. And if the conclusion is that a teacher feels a new teaching tool isn’t right for them, then this is a valuable conclusion based on reflective practice rather than a teacher neglecting to engage. This freedom ensures that teacher autonomy is not lost as a consequence of trying to innovate. Other initiatives include a Pedagogy Playbook with ideas sent round twice a half term giving staff simple, concise ideas on how to nudge their practice along. Recent iterations of the Playbook have been on “High Quality Dialogic Marking” and “Effective Revision Lessons” chiming with the pressures of this time of year. The Playbook is accessible on Sharepoint and clearly signposted in email subjects so staff can find the contents quickly and dip in and out of it as and when they need. I do not measure and try to quantify the staff engagement with this, and I only receive feedback when staff comment on what they have tried in their lessons. However, the fact that there isn’t a requirement to change lessons or replan activities injects a freedom, even a curiosity, into new T&L ideas, so much so that I am confident the engagement from staff is more productive and constructive than if I was insisting on changes and forcibly prescribing implementation.
A framework for T&L
Prior to starting my new role, I read widely on pedagogical frameworks and structures that I could employ that would nudge the T&L agenda effectively without compromising the aforementioned principles of making T&L easy, and upholding trust and transparency with the teaching staff. Wiggins and McTighe (2005) advocate a “Backward Design” approach which works backwards from identified, desired goals to the learning experiences that will get you there. Alistair Smith (1998) argues for an Accelerated Learning Cycle which prescribes quite specific parameters to scenarios when pupils are being introduced to new material. Both very logical pedagogies with commendable rationales and desired outcomes, but ones which point towards quite significant structural changes to lesson planning and even school-wide academic strategy. Reflecting on both my keenness to make my T&L CPD practical for staff along with my wider aims of promoting a T&L culture in which staff are free to experiment, promoting professional curiosity, and ensuring trust and transparency, I devised a three-pronged framework which would guide my planning of T&L CPD.
- What Staff Want. Of course, what staff desire will help get positive uptake and engagement with a CPD schedule. However, this also helps build trust into the planning, trusting staff to reflect honestly and identify areas that genuinely resonate with their own practice. A few quick surveys and discussions at our staff briefing, as well as those ‘little and often’ conversations at lunch, gave me a clear idea of some gaps that staff felt had surfaced across their practice, and I could plan a CPD schedule with a collaborative underpinning.
- What the School Needs. Taking a step back from teachers and their classroom practice, there are inevitably school-wide priorities that T&L can help address. For us in our context, we identified through pupil voice that stretch and challenge was an area that needed work. Pupil feedback, particularly in years 7-9 was that they are generally very busy, but this doesn’t always translate into challenge. Outlining these findings – as always in a transparent manner – to staff clearly helps justify the CPD, and when motivations are so evidently seeking to improve outcomes and experiences for pupils, then staff will not only oblige, but invest and commit.
- What Society Demands. Likewise, when there are compelling expectations placed on a school from external sources, and these are accepted by leadership rather than denied, teaching staff will typically get on board and engage. Be it an approaching inspection from ISI or Ofsted, and a subsequent need to tighten up adaptive teaching measures, or indeed technological advancements and a need to embrace AI in a way that upholds academic honesty and genuine curiosity in pupils, responding to external pressures is inevitable in order to keep a school moving forward and ahead of the times.
As ever with educational and pedagogical research, there is no guarantee that what chimes nicely in one setting will translate smoothly into another. My reflections here may not be replicable in other settings and contexts, and indeed other schools may approach CPD and T&L in very different ways. However, I do hope that my above thoughts can serve to demonstrate what can be operationally helpful for a new leader, with a new CPD drive, in a new school.
References:
- Hargreaves, A. and Fullan, M. (2012) Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School. New York: Teachers College Press.
- Kostadinovska-Stojchevska, B. and Popovikj, I. (2019) Teacher talking time vs. student talking time: Moving from teacher-centered classroom to learner-centered classroom. The International Journal of Applied Language Studies and Culture, 2(2), pp. 25–31.
- Netolicky, D.M. (ed.) (2021) Future Alternatives for Educational Leadership: Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and Democracy. Abingdon: Routledge.
- Smith, A. (1998) Accelerated Learning in Practice. Stafford: Network Educational Press.
- Steuer, G., Tulis, M. and Dresel, M. (2022) Is dealing with errors in the classroom specific for school subjects? A study of the error climate in mathematics, German, and English. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 37, pp. 355–373.
- Wiggins, G. and McTighe, J. (2005) Understanding by Design. 2nd edn. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD).
