FEATURE: CPD


always the best test of engagement and understanding. We’ve encouraged teachers to look beyond the obvious and instead focus on the small tells of a student’s body language to help them more accurately gauge the impact on the student’s learning the lesson is having. As it’s not possible to watch how 28 plus pupils individually respond and react, we suggest our teachers focus on five pupils at any one time. The chosen students then act as a benchmark for the whole class.


The teacher decides which combination will make up the group of five and this can be any combination of abilities and genders. They then compare this group to another group in the class to assess if they’re seeing the same results and the learning outcome is what’s expected. By observing what impact the lesson has on pupils rather than what we assume it has, teachers can make small but critical improvements. Sometimes it’s recognising the dynamics of the class and changing the seating plan, other times it can be realising a set of instructions contained too much information leading to cognitive overload.


consultation with staff to install cameras to give a 360-degree view of the classroom with audio. To ensure our teachers feel supported and not scrutinised, they are in full control of when they record and who sees the clips. We use ONVU Learning as their systems have that extra level of teacher control as we wanted to give them more agency over their own development. This has made it easier for teachers to spot things they might have missed during a live lesson. Or hear on replay, what seemed like a simple way to explain a new concept at the time, contained too much information for students to process. This gives the chance for the teacher to make those small, but critical improvements. To make sure we don’t add extra work we suggest teachers only ever review 20 minutes of their lesson. To make it easier for them to narrow down the part they want to revisit we’ve given teachers an A3 size desk pad as a memory aid. It can be hard to recall what happened in first period after teaching five other lessons, so we pre-printed a timeline in the pad for them to jot down any area they might want to later review. One of our maths teachers, was disappointed to realise some pupils hadn’t grasped a complex maths problem when they handed in their homework. She had thought that everyone had understood how she explained it, but after she reviewed the clip, she saw where she had lost some pupils along the way. Pinpointing where in the lesson pupils needed a more simplified explanation allowed her to fine-tune things. We also have a series of prompts printed on the desk pad to help staff consider more deeply why a technique worked, or how confident they felt to deliver the lesson in line with the National Teaching Standards.


Multi-layered reflection


We know we have good quality teaching in our school but occasionally we need to do a deeper dive into why outcomes were not as expected. It’s important to understand whether an issue, good or bad, is on an individual, departmental, or whole school level.


We use TEEP as a pedagogy and had started to identify that the construct phase was not as


October 2023


strong as we had thought across the school. To help us understand why, we asked the teachers if they would be happy to capture a clip of the construct phase of their lessons so they could review it and identify good examples. The teachers could look at the clips on an individual basis, or if they were happy to share them with departmental colleagues, review, and plan together if anything needed to be tweaked or if the clip could be used as an example of best practice.


Teaching, as we know is dynamic and no two groups of students are the same. You can teach the same lesson to two similar cohorts in the same year and not get the same results. This can simply boil down to elements beyond the teachers’ control, like a car alarm being set off during the lesson which was an unavoidable distraction.


One of our less experienced teachers was struggling with a group of engineering students, particularly around that construct and apply phase and wanted a colleague’s advice. She agreed to share a clip of one of her lessons so they could review it together and see if any small changes, such as using more visuals, could have a positive impact. To test whether the tweaks worked, or smaller adjustments were still needed, she reviewed a couple of recordings of the lessons a few sessions apart.


This year we are focussing on Embedding Informative Assessment and teachers can use the clips to take ownership over their own learning and development to assess the impact of the strategies they put into play.


Improving understanding of our teaching on pupils’ learning


It’s our mission at AUEA to train our students to be effective learners from day one. But since they’ve already got three years of secondary school under their belt by the time they join us, this is not necessarily as straightforward as it sounds. Students in the lower year groups will have attended upwards of 40 different schools, with different syllabus’s, different teaching methods and different timetable structures. The willingness of a pupil to raise a hand isn’t


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Keeping professional and personal development relevant


Finding ways to keep our professional development fresh, with focused feedback is the bedrock to our approach. Being able to regularly link CPD to what’s directly happening in the classroom has been a gamechanger. What we like about capturing footage of the lesson is the potential it gives us to gather evidence of what’s going well in lessons so we can make things even better. It’s not about performance management it’s about self- development. The focus is on allowing and enabling teachers to improve their own teaching and learning.


Teachers feel valued when they are trusted to take ownership of their teaching practice and make any positive changes needed. Encouraging self-reflection is an essential way to support them so they can flex and adapt their teaching practice to meet the needs of their pupils. And to see how much they do get right.


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