CPD Research into Practice
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Published: 13th December 2019 in the Times Educational Supplement.
CPD needs time and space to flourish
Teacher CPD needs time and space to flourish
When it became clear that faculty meetings at Reigate College were failing to boost teaching and learning, it was time for a radical change. Jo Driscoll explains how projects and sessions dedicated to staff development are benefiting the whole organisation.
In theory, meetings should be a catalyst for action. Once the group decides — or is told — that something has to happen, it then happens. However, things rarely work out this way.
At Reigate College, we found that, far from teaching and learning objectives receiving a boost from being on a meeting agenda, the opposite was often true. So, did we hold another meeting to find a way of penalising inaction? No. Instead, we completely changed the way we conducted our meetings.
The revelation that our meetings were not as effective as we thought they were came whenSagarPatel, the director of learning, and Lianne Wilkinson, the pastoral director, began a project to pinpoint how we could adapt our pedagogy to improve outcomes for learners. They wanted to see how far putting this teaching project on the agenda of meetings would prompt change.
They found that this would mean adding teaching and learning on to long list of items to go through, and that it would inspire little enthusiasm for the initiative. Through focusing on relevance, process and outcomes, they began to doubt the effectiveness of traditional full-faculty meetings where information was delivered to large numbers of teaching staff all at once. They decided to make a change, and the concept of “teaching and learning spaces” was born.
The core idea was to give staff a dedicated period of time in which they could focus primarily on teaching and learning. We wanted to provide opportunities for them to reflect on existing strategies, and to learn about and implement new strategies.
This aim developed into a plan to replace traditional faculty meetings with a teaching and learning time allocation. The proposal was approved by the senior leadership team in July 2018 and the plans were communicated to staff in September last year.
Variety and impact It works like this: the college provides a variety of learning options for staff to choose from. They seek out the CPD that would most impact their own teaching.
The launch materials clearly outlined the concept, and the immediate feedback was positive: most staff appreciated the idea of choice and recognised the benefit of protected time to develop their practice. However, when we moved to implementation, the complexities became clear.