t o d ev el o p o ut s t an d i n g T eachi n g an d L ear n i n g
Building on ‘Making the Network for Teachers’ (2011), ‘Going Beyond CPD’moves the discussion from the importance of effective CPD for individualteachers (building human capital) to the importance of collaboration(building social capital). This paper considers the complexity of thisjourney and how it can be effectively supported by video and web-basedcollaboration within and between schools.
In the paper ‘Making the Network or Teachers’ (2010), the inuence o individual teachers andtheir impact on outcomes or pupils was reviewed. Reerence was made to the seminal researcho Sanders and Rivers (1996) and to the more recent research o Burgess et al in English schools(2009). A central theme o ‘Making the Network or Teachers’ was that CPD paid insufcient attention toeective approaches or adult learning. In particular, the ollowing key eatures were oten missing:
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Experience based learning
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Sel review and reection
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Coaching and mentoring
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Building communities o practice The ailure o traditional CPD is neatly summarised by Michael Fullan (1991), “Nothing haspromised so much and has been so rustratingly wasteul as thousands o workshops andconerences that led to no signifcant change in practice when teachers returned to theclassrooms”.
Is there an alternative to traditional CPD?
OSTED’s Report, ‘Good Proessional Development in Schools’ (March 2010), identifed thekey characteristics o what makes good proessional development work in successul schools. Amongst a number o helpul observations, were the ollowing comments:
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The most successul schools prided themselves on being learning communities
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The Headteachers in the survey schools knew that one o the best resources or proessionaldevelopment was the expertise o their own sta
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Lesson observations led to the identifcation o teaching strengths that could beneft the wholeschool‘To the next level: Good schools becoming outstanding’ (CBT, 2011) also picked up this themeand identifed two key characteristics o outstanding schools:
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Senior leaders make sure proessional development o all sta, teaching and non teaching, isrelevant, continuous and o high quality. Most o this proessional development takes place inschools
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A key dierence between being a good school and being an outstanding school involves goingbeyond tight quality controls towards the quality assurance o a sel confdent, sel criticalcommunity in which learning is interactive and permanent This suggests an eective way orward in the development o outstanding teaching without relying
simply on providing more traditional CPD.…simply laying on more courses is not enough. Above all, proessional developmentneeds to be integrated into both an individual teachers’ career and school systemchanges
(OECD, 2011)
A CPD model for all stages of a teacher’s career:
The journey o a teacher rom air to good to great to outstanding is a complex one which involveshigh levels o interaction with colleagues. Do young teachers emerge as ‘good or great’ ollowingtheir initial training? Do they simply have to attend courses to become ‘super teachers’? Asteachers’ skills evolve, they require dierent levels o support, challenge and experience. Forexample:
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A newly qualifed teacher may enter the classroom with a ‘air’ understanding o the theory butwill require scaolding in the early years through a process o modelling and coaching rommore experienced colleagues
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As skills develop and a teacher becomes ‘good’, coaching may still continue but peermentoring and sel review will become more important
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As a teacher becomes ‘great’ they will start to initiate collaboration both within and acrossschools and, as proessionals at the ront line, they will reect more deeply on their ownteaching skills
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Some teachers will become ‘outstanding’ and they will contribute to the teaching, coachingand mentoring o colleagues at earlier stages o the proessional journey
The following diagram provides a model to describe this:
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