FEATURE FOCUS: CPD Effective strategies
“Effective collaboration strategies within and across schools bring multiple benefits and ultimately lead to an increased and higher quality pedagogical dialogue, and improved student outcomes. They can even help to reduce teacher workload. Along the way there will also be cultural benefits around making staff feel valued and part of a team – all essential in helping to raise positivity and morale in the profession.
Reduction of workload
“Collaboration can make a big impact on reducing teacher workload - crucial in the current climate of problems around teacher retention. According to the latest figures from the National Audit Office, almost 35,000 qualified teachers (34,910) left the profession for reasons other than retirement last year and half of teaching posts in the UK were filled with unqualified teachers last year, the Government spending watchdog has warned.
“A new report by the National Audit Office (NAO) has found that secondary schools teachers are leaving the profession in droves, as pupil numbers continue to swell.
Schools only filled half of their vacancies with teachers that had the right experience and expertise last year, and in around one in 10 cases, the post was not filled.
“I’m confident that a renewed focus on effective professional development would go some way towards stemming the exodus of teachers from our schools.
“It’s a lot more than sharing best practice; working together reduces workload, as it means that no one is ‘reinventing the wheel’, and it can certainly increase capacity. With UK primary teachers working on average 59 hours a week and secondary teacher 56 hours a week, it’s important to help them achieve a better work life balance. This will set them free to focus on the main job in hand - inspiring, motivating and guiding students through their learning, rather than duplicating efforts and creating unnecessary additional work, for example by creating resources which a teacher in the next classroom may already possess.
Maximising resources
“By encouraging collaboration senior leaders maximise their biggest resource - staff. Working in collaboration, the skills of a school’s best practitioners can enhance the performance of other staff. Using an online service to support staff performance and development makes it easy for individual or group expertise to be shared with others. It allows senior and middle leaders to upload teaching resources and lesson plans, and easily share these with others.
Building networks
“A silo mentality reduces efficiency and can be a sign of a failing organisation, so effective networks are essential. They can also be a real lifeline for a teacher – if for example you are the only modern languages leader in your school, then being able to network and collaborate with your counterparts in other schools can reduce that isolation.
Promoting development and learning “Collaboration has a big impact on professional knowledge and understanding and invariably
October 2017
increases the dialogue around teaching and learning with a resultant positive effect on practice. Whatever can be done to increase staff conversations about effective teaching and learning has got to be good.
Different types of collaboration “Collaboration can be effective within a school and also between schools, allowing individual and departmental expertise to be shared with others. This can be within one school, across a federation or a chain of schools and can include anything from sharing training to sharing roles. Collaborating on every aspect of professional practice enables senior leaders and their teaching teams to share and gain knowledge, between and across different schools.
Collaboration in action
“A shining example of collaboration in action is Moulton School and Science College in Northamptonshire, a high-achieving secondary school and sixth form with 87 teaching staff and 1,342 pupils. Having always prided itself on delivering high-quality collaborative professional development, the school has boosted teachers’ progress still further by designing and managing a programme of cross-school collaboration which has made a measurable impact on the school’s improvement priorities.
“To help its professional development programme have a measurable impact on its school improvement priorities, deputy head teacher Angie Dabbs designed a programme of cross-school research projects called ‘Collaborative Triples’ which, as the name suggests, involved teachers working in groups of three, carefully selected to balance interest and experience. “While the school had always aimed to give teachers an opportunity to choose their own CPL area, it realised that by asking them to choose a mini-project focused more tightly on the school’s improvement policies they could help make some positive changes and progress towards meeting the SIP. Also, by working in threes, ‘experts in their field’ could positively influence the development of others.
“Then, real transformation came when Moulton School began using the Projects area of BlueSky within its online staff performance and development solution, where individual, departmental or whole school expertise can be shared with others – within one school or across a group or schools. It’s much more sophisticated
and targeted than Facebook, but that’s a good analogy – a forum with threads where project members can lead discussions and share documents securely. It can also be used to upload, teaching resources, links to YouTube videos, lesson plans, questionnaires, other professional ideas and photographs. As soon as a new discussion thread or resource is added to a project, everyone working on that project is informed. Every project includes an outline, a method, a section for results and a conclusion. “The projects work has definitely helped to raise the profile of teaching and learning at the school. For example three years ago 10% of teachers were outstanding – now that has risen to 38%.
“The opportunity to build and develop bespoke professional development, engage teachers as researchers and also providers of CPL for their peers, has had a demonstrable impact on a culture of improvement across the organisation. “The school is also saving money from its CPL budget by maximising the potential of the expertise available within school, so that it doesn’t need to send teachers on as many external courses as before.
“The expertise may always have been there, but previously it was not so well managed and archived. It now has such an effective system for pooling the huge amount of expertise in school, and for maintaining momentum, because any communication within the project is instantly notified to the whole group. Not everyone shouts about their achievements – some teachers could be hiding their light under a bushel and NQTs often have great fresh ideas but lack the confidence and forum for sharing. Now all that work is pulled together like a huge resources folder – which isn’t lost when people leave.
Professional capital
“Collaboration will help any school develop outstanding practice through innovation in teaching and learning and build professional capital through reflective practice and peer-to- peer observation. Collaboration promotes change beyond individual classrooms, resulting in whole school improvement. When school staff gain additional expertise by learning together, all students benefit from better outcomes.”
https://www.nao.org.uk/report/supporting- and-improving-the-teaching-workforce/
http://www.oecd.org/education/talis.htm www.education-today.co.uk 27
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