CUREE July Enews


	July 2013 Enewsletter
		Contents Philippa's June Blog Closing the gap: Test and Learn Redesigning the curriculum in Further Education Skein for FE CUREE revisits Skein schools BERA-RSA Inquiry: Call for submissions College of Teaching Survey Science teaching resources Enhancing Collaboration at Caludon Castle Out and About
Phew wot a scorcher! This clichéd tabloid headline pretty much sums up for me both the weather and what the term has felt like in CUREE. My sailor brother ascribes the reappearance of summer (last seen about five years ago) to a ‘high over the Azores’. He tells me that this tends to stay put so we might be in for quite a lot more fine weather – and it would make a change for some of this to happen during the school holidays when there’s a chance to enjoy it. The ‘high over CUREE’ right now is probably our work with Durham University and other partners in putting together what we think is the biggest ever research trial programme in education. Over 180 teaching schools and 760 of their alliance schools will be trialling over the next two years one of seven interventions focussed on closing the gap for vulnerable pupils. I’ve been inspired by the enthusiasm to engage with this enterprise I’ve met from school leaders and practitioners. I’ve felt this in the focus groups and other activities we’ve run specifically to consult people about the trials but also in spontaneous encounters at, for instance, the Seizing Success conference, the National Challenge Partners’ conference and the NTEN launch in the Houses of Parliament. It has been a mammoth task to get this far and now we are asking the schools to tell us which interventions they would prefer to trial. If you are one of the participating schools, please fill in our questionnaire before the summer holiday so we can work with your priorities! See the Closing the Gap article below to see how to do this. Meanwhile in the equally exciting world of Further Education, we’ve had a remarkably busy year. We have continued working with colleges old and new on staff development programmes, customised research route maps and the like. We’ve had the opportunity to work in a new partnership with 157 Group and the RSA supporting colleges trying out new ways of designing the curriculum. But we suspect the initiative, working again with 157 Group, that will have the biggest long-term impact is the SKEINFE pilot where we explored in-depth evidence about how colleges are supporting professional learning for their teachers and the way that vocational expertise and pedagogic skills come together. We are really looking forward to hearing about how our pilot colleges take forward their plans early in 2013-14. Some of our work this year (and a lot over several years) has been supported by LSIS and its predecessors. We reach the end of an era this month with the closure of LSIS but we look forward to an equally productive relationship with the new Education and Skills Foundation. There is plenty to build on and sufficient challenges to rise to! Many of the heads, leaders and practitioners we’ve met in the past few weeks have looked, to be honest, in serious need of a rest and with a bit of luck you are going to get one starting any day now. If you’ve still got the odd planning and/or training day to work through, I hope some of the material below and on our website is of some help. See you in September Philippa Cordingley - Chief Executive
Closing the gap: Test and Learn STOP PRESS! If you are a participating school and you haven’t yet told us which intervention(s) you’d prefer to trial, do so NOW by going on line and FILL OUT the PREFERENCES QUESTIONNAIRE. CUREE’s involvement with the Test and Learn project continues apace, as does the project as a whole. In collaboration with Durham University’s Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM), CUREE has been working at full tilt and has devised a shortlist of some seven teaching interventions which we believe have a real chance of effectively closing the attainment gap for vulnerable learners. The process of creating this shortlist has involved taking suggestions and listening to advice from a large number of classroom practitioners, as well as experts from CEM and the National College. A session ran by CUREE at the National College also involved contributions from the heads of R&D at a number of Teaching School Alliances around the country.The next step is to begin the process of getting these interventions ready for the testing phase of the project, to start in the Autumn Term 2013. CUREE is working very closely with CfBT to complete this stage. CUREE are experts in translating research and evidence about what works in teaching into effective classroom resources and practice, and will be providing CfBT with the best possible advice on how to carry this out at the grand scale required by the Test and Learn project. Other examples of our work providing effective classroom resources of this type can be found here. Redesigning the curriculum in Further Education CUREE was delighted to support seven 157 Group colleges assess the impact of new curriculum designs. The research and development work enhanced a number of key areas of FE provision, including employer responsiveness, engineering and support for foundation level students. CUREE provided expertise and support to participating colleges in the form of: establishing research aims and developing an approach to data collection and analysis signposting resources ongoing mentoring support guidance on reporting the projects to the wider FE audience. You can read CUREE’s research report for the project here. In supporting the seven colleges assess the impact of their curriculum designs, CUREE drew on longstanding experience of supporting colleagues in schools and colleges with carrying out enquiry and development work. In addition to the knowledge created, these activities provide first class CPD opportunities. The keys to success, especially in busy teaching environments, have been to: provide timely access to summaries of key research guide the process through research-informed tools and resources use naturally occurring learning and development activities to generate and analyse data, making it useful and accessible for all use the write-up as a process for learning and for sharing learning. This approach has helped large numbers of practitioners complete enquiry projects, creating a wealth of experience embodied in, for example, research Lab Site reports: http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/node/636, and NTRP outputs: http://www.ntrp.org.uk/node/3 If you would like to find out more about how CUREE can support you in assessing the impact of your college or school initiatives, or help you set up an enquiry-based approach to CPD, please contact Colin Isham at: colin.isham@curee.co.uk.
Skein for FE
			Following a successful year carrying out Skein visits to over 20 schools, CUREE has now begun taking the CPD health check to colleges. Cornwall, Derby and York Colleges have all taken part in a pilot, in partnership with the 157 Group and sponsored by LSIS. Early outcomes from the pilot show some differences between the CPD activities teachers engage in and those that they consider most likely to improve student outcomes. Whole college training sessions were the CPD opportunity respondents were most likely to be engaged in, but was also the CPD activity they felt had least impact on improving learning.
Practitioners felt that these types of professional learning benefited students most: experimentation in the classroom, collaborative planning and action research and enquiry. The research base we use for Skein suggests they are right. So what can colleges do to ensure their CPD planning and delivery is in line with best practice? How can the resources currently used on less effective approaches be channeled into areas where they will really lead to learner improvements? That’s where Skein comes in. Skein provides an overview of where you are now in five key areas of effective CPD and maps out the next steps for real improvements. To find out more visit the Skein website: www.skein.org.uk, or contact Colin Isham at colin.isham@curee.co.uk.

CUREE revisits SKEIN schools This month we had a long-awaited opportunity to pay a visit to two of our first Skein schools to see how their professional learning environment has changed since they joined our SKEIN community. We were delighted to learn how far our schools have travelled in just over a year. One of the schools, The Duchess Community High in Alnwick, Northumberland, which has disciplined enquiry at whole school, cross faculty and departmental levels running through its CPD programme, has focused its developmental work on mechanisms for identifying staff professional development needs in order to personalise and differentiate CPD better. Performance review systems have been refined, and personalised learning plans for all staff been introduced. Colleagues now have opportunities to review their progress during the newly established mid-year reviews, focused on staff professional learning and development. Importantly, professional development in the school is now more tightly focused on student learning and progression. One of the ways in which the school has achieved this was through developing new CPD tools. Planning for Learning Sheets, for example, require practitioners to articulate for each of their classes how they are going to use their own learning to ensure their professional development feeds through to student learning. To find out more about the Duchess school’s CPD journey, you can watch the presentation of the school’s CPD leader at the CUP seminar hosted by CUREE. BERA-RSA Inquiry: Call for submissions BERA, in partnership with the RSA, is conducting a major inquiry into the relationship between educational research and teacher education. This will focus on the contribution that research-informed teacher education can make to improve the quality of teaching and learning outcomes. The aims of the inquiry are to shape debate, inform policy and influence practice. To read more, click here: http://www.thersa.org/action-research-centre/learning,-cognition-and-creativity/education/bera-rsa-inquiry
		College of Teaching Survey There is discussion around establishing a new College of Teaching. Would you like to see a new teacher-led organisation that recognises top teachers, enhances their development and gives teachers a voice on professional practice? Share your views by completing a short online survey here: www.princes-ti.org.uk/CollegeofTeaching/		Science teaching resources You might want to have a look at Practical Work for Learning, a science resource website with free teaching and learning resources, films and animations to encourage good quality learning through science practical work. http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/practical-work-learning
	Enhancing Collaboration at Caludon Castle CUREE have been supporting practitioners at Caludon Castle in their enquiry-based journey to enhance collaboration across the school. To begin, we ran a session to explore the possible areas that were of interest to the practitioners, and they decided on topics of enquiry in pairs. CUREE then provided research-based materials at the next session, including tasters which provide evidence of ‘what works’ along with data collection tools to support practitioners with carrying out their own research. To bring all of this learning together for the whole staff to share, we are combining the materials, tools and case studies from Caludon Castle’s own practice in to a visually appealing Route Map on Enhancing Collaboration, in which you can easily click through to access any of the materials. As experts in designing CPD we know how important it is to access high quality evidence based specialist expertise, so each term we offer a range of open access CPD workshops (usually at our offices in Coventry), which provide the foundation for longer term professional learning in schools and colleges. Increasingly we are asked to run these in-house with bespoke additional support and resources to embed the learning and increase impact. The work we are doing at Caludon Castle is just one example of our bespoke CPD/professional learning programmes. Some other recent examples of these can be found here. Out and About
				CUP seminar CUREE was delighted to host a seminar from the 'Understanding Teachers' Learning' seminar series on the 24th of May at the University of Warwick. The aim of this seminar series is to help us take forward our thinking about the knowledge base for teachers' learning and professional growth. We explored how CPD and professional learning are working on the ground through a keynote presentation, a practitioner perspective, a view of professional learning from another profession and a good deal of group discussion. Click here for videos and presentations from the day.
	Research Alive conference Click here to view Philippa’s Keynote at the Research Alive conference in Dublin, a vibrant event where teachers, policy makers and head teachers came together to explore the different roles research can play in enhancing learning. The energy levels in the various buzz sessions built into this talk was fantastic! Philippa was absolutely thrilled that Beth, a history teacher from Tipperary just embarking on her PhD, was able to come and join her for three days job shadowing at the beginning of July and to meet the National Teacher Research Panel for the day, as they were working on the Closing the Gap project. Seizing Success You might have seen us at the Seizing Success conference. We really enjoyed exhibiting at this fantastic conference from NCTL again this year. Gateway Teaching School Alliance: Headteachers Conference 2013 Our first experience exhibiting here and it was a pleasure to be involved. Hacking the Curriculum Conference 2013 You might have seen us here. We really enjoyed the speakers and exhibiting. Using the evidence to improve staff and student learning It was great to meet new practitioners in the North East and many thanks to Biddick Academy in Sunderland for hosting the event. We are running this successful workshop on 15th January 2014 at Westminster Special schools for only £30 per delegate. For more information please contact Sian Bravington at sian.bravington@curee.co.uk Challenge Partners Summer Conference 2013 Click here to see Philippa’s workshop she presented at the Challenge Partners Conference. You might have seen us in the market place with our exhibition stand. We really enjoyed hearing about the wonderful new plans for the next academic year. Optimus conference ‘Evaluating the Impact of CPD’ and ‘Making the most of Coaching and Mentoring’ are our most popular workshops across all sectors of the education system. We are pleased to alert you that Philippa Cordingley and Lisa Bradbury will be providing input at the Optimus conference Evidence High-Impact In-House CPD: Accurately identify staff needs and lead targeted, cost-effective CPD that delivers measurable improvements to performance in London on 12th November in Central London. Click here for more information. Want to get future newsletters emailed to you? Click here to subscribe