November 2012 E-news
CONTENTS
- CUREE at Conferences
- Standards and Performance Management
- Further Education and Skills
- School Initiated Evaluation
- In Other News
Is what you’re doing making a difference?
This E-news focuses one way or another, on working out how well we are doing. There are lots of good things going on in school, but only some of them have a very big impact on pupils’ learning and so really help us meet our aspirations for them. There are obviously a lot of variables to take into account in weighing up what to focus on and do really well, and each of the news stories and details about research has been selected to help people think about just that.
Often when we think about evaluating we look for very hard and direct evidence. We have found that building evaluation into the design of new initiatives as a formative part of the learning and development process usually provides better quality and more meaningful evidence. This is true in both our large-scale research and evaluation work and the small scale evaluations we do for individual schools. Teachers and leaders who are using evidence on a day-to-day basis to fine tune what they do, as in coaching relationships or Research Lesson Study, tend to engage with it more deeply and collect it with more care. See if the examples here give you ideas about how to increase your intelligence about how things are working and how you can improve them as a natural part of the development process.
Philippa Cordingley - Chief Executive
Come and talk to us – CUREE at conferences
At National New Heads Conference on 15th/16th November?
CUREE has a stand at the exhibition and Rebecca, Rebecca (yes – that’s 2 Rebeccas!) and Natalia would be very pleased to listen to you and find out how CUREE can help you in your new role. The photo of us on Wear It Pink Day (above) should help you spot us.
NAHT National Education Conference London 16th November
Philippa and Lisa are working with over 200 head teachers across four workshops at the NAHT national education conferences. We were particularly struck in our very first session by the number of heads there who liked the emphasis on ways of making their own and their colleagues’ work-based professional development more visible; embedded, work-based CPD more visible and the strong echoes between this response and John Hattie’s work about making learning more visible for pupils.
Standards and Performance Management
AITSL
The Australian federal Government have recently launched their first ever set of national Professional Standards for the profession. The standards themselves link performance management with an entitlement to professional learning thus embedding a link between formative evaluation, CPD and capacity building. CUREE has been helping AITSL, the Australian equivalent of the TDA, to develop an evaluation strategy and a specification for Evaluation that is innovative and focussed on developing capacity across the system and at all levels. We wait with bated breath to hear who has been allocated the contract and to see how far the work really can contribute to capacity building in a complex federal system. Incidentally it is really interesting to see just how many UK HE and former policy colleagues have made a contribution to this venture!
Ofsted, CPD and performance management
The new Ofsted framework makes 16 separate mentions of CPD. It’s not surprising because their report on sustaining improvement says that, in improving schools, “A significant investment in staff training and development was a key factor in the rapid and continuing improvement in provision and outcomes”. SKEIN evidence is already helping 24 schools provide Ofsted with independent, high quality evidence about how they are connecting their school’s development plan, performance management, and the practical support they provide for CPD. Better still, the evaluation framework is helping them collect evidence to weigh up which forms of CPD are making most difference to pupils and staff, so that CPD is efficient as well as effective. Have a look at the item about Kenton School below for an example.
Performance management and CPD: Do you know how your CPD programme impacts on teacher performance and pupil outcomes?
No doubt many of you are very busy with undertaking observations and meetings for the performance review/appraisal cycle – made more complex by the introduction of the new Teaching Standards. The recent Ofsted report ‘Getting to Good’ identified that one of the key characteristics of successful school leaders is that they are absolutely clear that improving teaching and learning is at the heart of what needs to be done, but:
“ Improvement stalls because performance management and professional development are not sufficiently focussed on the individual needs of staff to ensure that the school builds the capacity for continued improvement. In schools that improve across a broad front… the capacity for good performance is built up over time.”
Over many years CUREE have been part of the international research community which has built up a solid evidence base about what really works for staff professional learning, which connects it to pupil outcomes. Click here to find out more about our CPD workshops designed to model this knowledge and ensure that your investment in CPD is focussed on individual needs and capacity building and so really does make a difference.
Transfer and Scaling Up
We have been interested to note the many fronts on which schools, networks of schools and mediating agencies are working on transferring learning at scale. Philippa met a colleague last week who told her that the research evidence about transferring learning in educations systems in this free leaflet had been the cornerstone for planning and evaluating several big programmes in the North West. The key headline for evaluation in this evidence is the importance of tracking what is being done in relation to five key aspects of transferring practice at scale, and these connect strongly with, and add some detail to, David Hargreaves’ take on Joint Practice Development in his recent thinkpiece on a self improving system. The key building blocks are:
- creating ownership;
- planning for engaging with all involved stakeholders from the start (in other words, cascading rarely works);
- planning for sustainability;
- using professional learning processes that secure depth of engagement and practice; and
- identifying a focus that mobilises moral purpose and is broad enough for all involved to feel included yet specific enough to enable accurate evaluation of impact.
The Use of Evidence to Improve Education and Serve the Public Good
Internationally renowned New Zealand scholar and policy maker, Adrienne Alton-Lee was in England recently and Philippa was thrilled to spend some time working with her and also to attend her seminar at Cambridge University Centre for Commonwealth education.
Adrienne led the creation of the amazing Best Evidence Syntheses which provide an authoritative overview of the most robust international evidence about key features of education, for instance, leadership, professional development and the teaching of subjects like mathematics and humanities.
If you would like to know more (and you really should):
- Click here to see her presentation;
- Click here for a CUREE summary of the BES on leadership;
- Click here to view a video discussion between Adrienne and Philippa.
Making a difference to classroom practice 
Large-scale international evidence highlights that teacher engagement with research is strongly linked with improved student outcomes. Our route maps provide staff with accessible research about high impact classroom strategies focused on your development priorities. Most importantly they now also help you capture evidence about the difference that teachers’ use of the route map is making to student learning.
Our new Impact Service includes online data capture and analysis, along with a 3-4 page report summarising the impact of your interventions. Because a group of schools have postponed to the spring term, we can offer a 15% discount for route maps ordered before the 30th November. If you are interested in a bespoke route map for your school, college or organisation, please contact Rebecca Raybould for an informal chat or visit http://www.curee.co.uk/resources/route-map to see a working example route map.
Further Education and Skills Sector
Commission on Adult Vocational Teaching and Learning
We have been keen to support the work of Frank McLoughlin and his commission with evidence drawn from our 15 years of analysing international and domestic research on teaching and learning. We have included major national or international studies (where they exist) with high academic credibility and generalisability. As these are often abstract and hard to relate to practice, we have illustrated them with case studies, many from the FE sector.
For some themes, the research demonstrates a strong link between a particular pedagogic approach and learner success. Small group work, for instance, is shown to be a very effective teaching and learning technique but only if constructed carefully by the teacher in the form of co-operative groups. Our analysis of the research on literacy and numeracy shows a widespread consensus in the literature of the benefits of embedding English and Maths in vocational studies but also the difficulty of achieving this. You can download a summary of our evidence from our website here
SKEIN for FE
We are very excited to be working in partnership with LSIS, the 157 Group and some partner colleges to develop a version of SKEIN for the Further Education and Skills sector. SKEIN has proved its worth in schools and the evidence base which underpins it is drawn from many countries and sectors. We know that scale and diversity of the workforce are different and will be interesting challenges.
We will be working closely with an initial group of four colleges but we are looking for opportunities to trial various elements of the process. Contact Paul Crisp if you would like to get involved or just to know more about the project.
Supported practitioner enquiry in FE
Our research evidence shows that practitioners working together on systematically investigating and solving a problem in teaching and learning not only solves the problem, it also provides excellent professional development. We developed, sponsored by LSIS, the Laboratory Site project, which offers support to colleges and other providers to run some mini-research projects. Now in its third year, we still have one or two places available for colleges or other providers who would like to try out some different approaches to teaching and learning, curriculum development or student support. Benefits for the college include:
- improved teaching and learning;
- high quality, high value, low cost professional development;
- improved Ofsted grades*
Contact Paul Crisp or Kate Holdich to find out more – or look here on our website
* Obviously, we can’t guarantee a better Ofsted grade
Online resources which make a difference
The NTRP (National Teacher Research Panel) were delighted to help evaluate an online tool being developed by Ben Levin’s team in Canada. Ben gave a thought-provoking talk at the at the National College Head’s conference about the importance of an evidence-based approach to education. He asked the Panel to comment on a new tool, which helps practitioners evaluate the extent to which online resources are rooted in evidence and are accessible and applicable to classroom practice. Of course, the Panel’s own website is a treasure-trove of teacher-developed accessible resources which do just this! If you think you have a teacher research report that could and should be promoted via the panel web site, send it to us and we will ask the panel to carry out its usual peer review so it can publish the ten best summaries from 2012.
School Initiated Evaluation
Evaluation works
Schools innovate a lot. When heads think they have a problem (particularly an ‘Ofsted-vulnerable’ one), it’s very tempting to try lots of improvements at once. But how do you know which one works? Increasingly, schools who know us for our research and evaluation work with them are asking if we can help them evaluate changes they’ve made or plan to make. This is something we’ve been doing in the FE sector for a while (see the Lab Sites article below), so now we are offering a similar service to schools. So, if you want to know:
- Is it really working? Is it having an impact on student learning and outcomes?
- Can we make our innovation better? More efficient?
- How can we connect it with our other work?
- Should we extend it or scale it up? If so, how?
- What can we learn from implementing it?
...contact Natalia Buckler for a free, obligation-free chat on how we might help. This can range from a simple mentoring session through to doing the whole evaluation for you.
Kenton School 
We were very impressed with the Case Study that Val Wigham wrote for the most recent edition of CPD Update*. The description of this as a Professional Learning Programme, the online support through the VLE, the determined inclusion of all support staff and the range, depth and diversity of the offer are very distinctive. We are also very proud that Val described CUREE as having provided “the most amazing support, helping Kenton review cost-effective approaches to professional learning by analysing what really works”.
*CPD Update is a subscription service so we can’t actually make it available. The CPD Update website is here
In other news...
Tweet Meet
Philippa has been making forays into the world of tweeting for some months, ever since CUREE supported the Pearson study of Tweeting for Teachers. So she was delighted to participate in the exciting new Teacher Development Trust’s Tweetmeet where keynote speakers had just 140 seconds to identify key things to enhance the status of the professions. Click here to see the videos of Philippa, John Bangs, Mike Griffiths of ASCL, Charlotte Leslie MP and Chris Husbands from IOE. You won’t be surprised to hear that Philippa’s theme focussed on what professional learning can contribute to improving the status of the profession!
Out and About – All Souls Group
Philippa joined Baroness Estelle Morris and Judy Sebba in offering keynote presentations to the All Souls Conference this weekend on the topic “Can research Influence practice?” The extremely lively and dynamic debates that followed ranged from Early Years to Further Education, through CPD, ITE, good and bad education and political policies, to case studies of effective and less effective approaches and effective systems. We are going to try to find out more about The Grand Challenge in physics that took place to try to establish consensus about the “wicked issues” where research (and in our case use of research) can make most difference…
Queen’s University Belfast
We were intrigued by both the similarities and the differences between teachers studying our Masters’ degrees here and in Northern Ireland during our recent half day, interactive seminar sessions at Queen’s University. We were particularly impressed by the good humour and enthusiasm of the over 80 teachers turning up for a session running from 9.00 until 13.00 on a Saturday morning, the number of supply teachers studying for Masters degrees and the ambition of their plans for taking up and working with research about mindsets and challenging every pupil !
Philippa has been making forays into the world of tweeting for some months, ever since CUREE supported the Pearson study of Tweeting for Teachers. So she was delighted to participate in the exciting new Teacher Development Trust’s Tweetmeet where keynote speakers had just 140 seconds to identify key things to enhance the status of the professions. Click here to see the videos of Philippa, John Bangs, Mike Griffiths of ASCL, Charlotte Leslie MP and Chris Husbands from IOE. You won’t be surprised to hear that Philippa’s theme focussed on what professional learning can contribute to improving the status of the profession!