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November 2011 Harnessing Knowledge to Practice
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Philippa’s Blog
Phew! The middle section of this term has been a whirlwind of meetings, development sessions, conferences and research visits. A special favourite (apart from a very peaceful picnic in the middle of a 10.5k paddle/walk to and from this tarn) was spending a day with 170 PGCE students in Belfast – we were really struck by the depth in which the Big Picture of the National Curriculum adopted by QCDA from the NI original is embedded in ITE. (Click here to view my recent blog posts).
Another very positive development is our partnership with the Wroxham Teaching School Alliance. Their creative launch event gave rise to some very powerful thinking about foci and development! Next stop, the Regional R&D conference in London last week – very proud of the Alliance’s connections with research at all levels. Looking forward to our day focussed on mobilising professional learning at every level to create effective and efficient staff learning environments that work for pupils too - in January.
Hot off the press are the three reports of our large scale evaluation of CPD provision for TDA. Not sure they quite count as high points in the sense that they flag up things to be concerned about as well as strengths in the system. See below for more details. I am hoping that the new OfSTED framework with the increased clarity about leadership and in particular the way leaders align CPD and the improvement of teaching and learning will help us all address some of these challenges.
You’ll get a sense of some of the other highlights of CUREE work in the rest of his e-news but I can’t resist finishing off by flagging up a more unusual learning journey I have been making. Click here to find out about a very inspiring, sobering and moving learning environment I encountered via a film and an hour long phone call with a prisoner in Angola jail (average sentence 90 years and no parole) who has completed two degrees and who volunteers as a carer in the prison Hospice. It poses some very interesting questions about learning.
Philippa Cordingley
Chief Executive
P.S. – the picture that features at the top of this enews has some friends in the new gallery feature on our website (requires log in). If you’re feeling harassed, we’ve selected them especially to be natural and calming. Namaste.
Skein
This has been a busy term for our work on Skein. By the end of term we will have completed 15 Skein reviews and so are starting to assemble a broader picture of the effectiveness of staff learning environments across all key stages and in a mix of urban and rural settings. We are delighted to announce that
The School of Education at Wolverhampton University is to become the first organization to work with us as a local delivery partner so we will be busy training Skein researchers over the next few weeks too. We are in detailed discussion with two other organisations who share our vision of and commitment to school success through teacher development. Schools who have completed the process so far have been really pleased with the way Skein helps them recognize and build on practices that are both effective and efficient and identify cost effective new approaches to linking staff and pupil learning. They also feel they have very rich and objective evidence for OfSTED visits and persuading governors and staff to maintain investment in CPD. If you want to know more about how that could work for your school
click here.
Major evaluation of CPD provision in England
We are very pleased to be able to publish a summary written specifically for school leaders of our large scale evaluation of CPD provision in England. Commissioned by TDA, the research explored how a very wide range of providers work in relation to benchmarks derived from the TDA Code of Practice and the international research evidence about what makes a difference for pupils as well as teachers.
From Higher Education Institutions through Exam Boards, LAs, subject associations, charities and other schools, we explored in-depth approaches to collaboration, needs assessment, refection and linking with pupil learning. Although the majority of provision reached only the second stage of our four stage model – this made sense for the short term, specialist top up programmes we were often exploring. More worrying is 1) the extent to which needs assessment that should be helping to shape CPD seems to fall between the school and CPD provider stools – even when the providers are other schools and 2) the huge variations between cost and depth of development. Some short term programmes, when carefully developed in discussion with schools extended beyond the second stage. But quite a number of long programmes (7-45 days) did not! Strengths include the extent to which CPD adheres to most provision in the TDA Code of practice, is supported by reflection and to which it explores topics for which there is evidence about benefits for pupils – although sadly, the CPD processes don’t yet follow that up with exploration of those connections for pupils. Read more about this on our website news pages from where you can also download a copy of the report (requires free registration).
Routemaps
This term we have seen an upsurge in demand for our bespoke route maps. Both primary and secondary school leaders recognise the power of the routemap to focus attention on development priorities, support discussion and development amongst staff and communicate complex ideas quickly to parents and governors. The familiar imagery used in an unusual context has immediate impact and is being used by primary and secondary schools to communicate aspects of the SDP; some schools are commissioning multiple maps at faculty level. We also have an FE college using it in a similar way and a national membership organisation (love to say which – but can’t!) is using the map as a means of providing structured routes to the materials on its website.
In response to demand we have begun producing some topic maps. The first two – Challenge (2 versions) and Creating Effective Curriculum Experiences are already available
here. Why not spend 30 seconds helping us decide which ones to do next by voting in a little
on-line poll.
Tweeting for teachers
We were pleased to help the Pearson team build research evidence about effective teacher collaboration into their new report about social networking and CPD. You can see short launch presentations by Philippa, Ewan Mackintosh and Tom Barratt here. In order to test out the theory on the ground Philippa has been tweeting increasingly regularly to explore Twitter’s existing and potential contribution to CPD. You can see her interpretation of the process and the evidence here.
Follow Philippa’s tweets or see the full report here.
Achievement for All
CUREE is pleased to be working with Achievement for All (AfA) in its new guise to help schools access the programme and encourage them to get involved.
AfA is a successful, research based school improvement programme focussed on raising the aspirations, access and achievements of the 20% of vulnerable, special educational needs and disabled learners. Piloted nationally in over 450 schools, the project has now been set up as an independent charity to continue the work. The programme is supported by the Department for Education as you can see in this recent
press release. If you would like to know more, please contact
Rebecca Reybould by email or phone on 024 7652 4036.
More...
Curriculum news
We have recently published three new practitioner research reports from our large scale curriculum research:
The National Education trust has also just published Philippa’s challenging analysis of what this evidence means for insuring against over prescription.
We have also created two interactive “guided pathway” sets of resources to help teachers explore the implications of the best national and international research about effective curriculum development.
The overall synthesis highlights seven research based principles or criteria for ensuring your curriculum is geared to benefitting pupils covering issues such securing challenge for all pupils, a finding highlighted by Nick Gibb (click here to view his speech), genuinely contextualizing learning and designing tasks and structuring group work to secure access for all pupils.
There are also guided pathways that combine research bites that summarise headline findings in a 2.5 minutes power point, micro enquiry tools that help you identify how your pupils experience things now and interactive CPD resources for twilight sessions or departmental or phase meetings. Click here to take a look.
Education Endowment Fund
We have really enjoyed working with a number of groups of schools assembling bids for the exciting new Education Endowment Fund. Our role has been a) to seed and support bottom up, innovative, school driven proposals b) to root these in evidence about interventions that will work (a scheme requirement) and embed formative evaluation and research in the process to ensure that development work is evidence informed and tracked sufficiently clearly to enable others to learn from it. Contact
Philippa Cordingley if you are interested in making a bid for the January bidding round.
Research Engagement for school development Raphael Wilkins
Philippa was very please to write a foreword to this deeply considered exploration of some of the major issues relating to the use of research for school improvement. The book is timely – the new Teaching School Alliances, for example, with their responsibilities for engaging in and with research will be considering many of these issues right now. And this isn’t an impersonal or or abstract piece, although theory is properly dealt with, the careful analysis is contextualized through reflections by the author on his own research in this complex and topical field.
TES Resources
We’ve said before that we are concerned about the number of resources, previously freely available for teachers’ use, disappearing from the public domain. So we are
pleased to become a
TES Resources featured partner and to make a selection of these available on the TES Resources website. Have a look and see what’s there. We will add more over the coming weeks.
The New Curriculum Skeleton
“Think of the school curriculum and its creation as the flesh and sinews of the curriculum body, and the new National Curriculum as its skeleton” – Says Philippa Cordingley in her contribution to the
Shaping Ideas, Shaping Lives strand on the NET website. “The job of developing effective curriculum experiences is rewarding, demanding and productive in equal measure”. Read the short article on the NET website
here.
