FEATURE: CPD
The Teaching Life I
n our second feature this month looking at CPD Robin Macpherson, co-author of The Teaching Life: Professional Learning and Career Progression, discusses how you can get the best from CPD.
In September 2020, Carl Hendrick posted this on Twitter:
“When I think back to when I started teaching, it’s amazing just how narrow CPD was. It took me years to discover stuff. Now there’s a wealth of opportunity for teachers to become informed about their profession. We’re living in a golden age of professional development.” That’s a bold claim. The fact that such a statement can be made is indicative of the
significant changes that have taken place in professional learning over the past few years, a process that has been accelerated by the pandemic. Reflecting on my twenty years in education, I could divide my career neatly in two when I think about my professional development. In the first decade, I had no wider professional network, little encouragement to read about my craft as a teacher, and social media was not yet a driver of information sharing. Yet in the past decade all of these things have blossomed and the first challenge for teachers is learning how to navigate their way through this landscape. Yet navigation isn’t just about finding the most relevant CPD material for your own needs. It’s also about quality; if you have a built-in filter for effective professional learning then great, but most teachers need guidance and support. Even if we assume that teachers have this support, the biggest issue of all is time. The Education Policy Institute produced a report in July 2021 entitled ‘The cost of high-quality professional development for teachers in England’ which showed that funding was not as big an issue as you might think. Schools in England spend on average £3000 per head on professional learning. However, the recommended 35 hours per year for each teacher is simply not happening. If it did, the report estimates that it would equate to an additional two-thirds of a GCSE grade per pupil, whilst also retaining as many as 12,000 teachers per year in the system. Clearly, professional learning is critically important, widely available, but ultimately inaccessible due to time constraints. Something needs to change.
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www.education-today.co.uk
Progression in the teaching life When Kate Jones and I began writing about a paradigm shift in professional learning in 2021, in ‘The Teaching Life’, we soon realised that we should be writing about career progression too. There are plenty of titles on CPD, but less in the way of career advice for all teachers (not just those on a leadership trajectory). We developed the concept of ‘the teaching life’; the period from your first day in the classroom to your last. That ‘life’ may be five years, it may be over 40. What we firmly believe is that the teaching life will be richer and more satisfying if there is control (or agency) over both professional development and career progression.
Progression is an essential word to define in this context. It is an eternal truth that education never stands still; pedagogy is always evolving, research yields new insights into what we should be doing, and societal trends mean that we constantly have to refine the curriculum. Furthermore, there is no such thing as perfection in teaching. Dylan Wiliam famously wrote: If we accept that every teacher needs to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better, professional development becomes welcome – it is just the way we become better.
This means that teachers cannot keep doing the same thing year in, year out, and expect to be just as effective at what they do. We all need to progress in our skill set, our knowledge and our experiences. It is crucial here to note that promotion may be a form of progression, but progression is broader and more important. Many teachers do not wish to take on a leadership role,
October 2022
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