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Contents:

The Philippa Blog

School-to-School Support in the West Midlands

Ongoing projects at CUREE

Monthly TES articles

New faces and other opportunities

 

The Philippa Blog

June and July have been a whirl of immersion in schools in the West Midlands, England, Wales and Scotland and also in the experiences of classroom teachers who are also research leads from 45 different countries from around the world. So I feel I am slowly assembling a 360 degree picture of the magic of the teaching profession from deep within the everyday experience and from some very inspiring outliers too! Here is a small taste of what I am learning via my list of things to think about more deeply over the summer.

Spending 24 hours with teacher research leads in Brussels from around the world meant goose pimples for 24 hours for me. There were teachers from many countries; from countries where it isn’t possible to take for granted the existence of classroom walls, pens and text books; from countries where carrying out research that compares  accurately, but unfavourably, in-school research with government narratives  has resulted in arrests; from countries where teachers have an entitlement to and responsibility to take 350 hours of research based CPD which they plan with their leaders over a three year period; countries where  progress is rising fast and where advantaged and disadvantaged pupils progress together. What was remarkable was how similar the responses of the teachers were to questions from CUREE about what makes them feel most confident and powerful in developing their professional identities.

The answers, in different words (and languages) coalesced strongly around: 

• feeling in charge of collaborative planning of schemes of learning and lessons that speak to the national and/or school curricula and priorities AND their knowledge of their pupils’ strengths, needs and interests; 

• being able to support and learn from each other; and

• seeing their pupils flourish.

Working in more sustained ways with teachers and leaders from schools in Blackpool and North Wales has shown me too just how quickly and in how much depth teacher leaders who are given time, tools and support to enable them to lead research and evidence informed capacity building for school improvement right in the midst of serious challenges can achieve. Through modelling research and evidence based professional learning, scaffolded by a coherent body of tools that make best use of their enquiry time, these champions are infecting their colleagues (like laughter rather than flu) with the research and evidence bug! Just 7 months on and they are ready and keen to plan support for developing a new wave of champions and colleagues at CUREE are excitedly reading their reports and helping them make them ready for use by other teachers. The research route maps for Blackpool and GWE will be so much more relevant and meaningful when national, researched teacher case studies are complemented by local ones. I am hoping to persuade them to add their own case studies to the wonderful, peer reviewed archive of teacher case studies on the National Teacher Research Panel library on the CUREE web site (http://www.curee.co.uk/NTRP) so let us know if you have researched teacher case studies that you would like to add to this important library too! 

-Philippa Cordingley

 

School-to-School support in the West Midlands

The much-trailed increases in funding for more and better school support finally materialised around Easter, first with the Teaching and Learning Innovation Fund (TLIF) followed shortly by the beefed up Strategic School Support Fund (SSIF). Our work in the region (for instance as Teaching and Leadership Advisers) had helped us to know where the effective support capacity was and to build relationships. We saw TLIF as an opportunity to pull together a consortium of effective CPDL providers to make a genuine evidence-based development offer to the most challenged schools in the region. So, we teamed up with eight of the better-established teaching schools and with organisations such as AfA and OUP assembled a proposal. Almost immediately after finishing that, we were asked to support a number of sub-regional groups in putting together bids for SSIF funding and, eventually, we found ourselves writing or helping others to write seven separate bids across the region. Both processes were severely impacted by the General Election and, at time of writing, we still don’t know the outcome but we remain optimistic. This is supposed to be the first of several rounds of such funding and we hope we can help the region pull in the resources it badly needs to help our more vulnerable schools to harness the help that others in the local system can provide.

-Paul Crisp

 

Ongoing projects at CUREE

GwE/Right to Succeed

Throughout the year, CUREE have been working closely with primary and secondary schools in North Wales and Blackpool, developing CPDL programmes and implementing Research Route Maps, with the aim of building research-informed practice and classroom enquiries specific to the context of learners in these areas. Already, we have seen outstanding input and support from teachers and leaders in these areas, and a number of completed and very successful classroom enquiries by colleagues. We have now concluded our sessions for the academic year; however, colleagues have produced exciting plans to hit the ground running to disseminate these projects to colleagues within their departments and schools or even to other schools from September onwards. Some schools have even changed the structure of their school days to allow planning, analysis and development time to embed this practice over the following school years.

If you would like to find out more about these projects or the support CUREE can offer with CPDL, Route Maps or enquiry-based learning, please contact: niamh.mcmahon@curee.co.uk.

PHF

CUREE has been working for over a year now to support the design, implementation, and evaluation of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Teacher Development Fund. This has been an exciting and daring project, aiming to support the development of curriculum design and teacher CPDL which can embed learning for students in the arts, and aiming to do it across all four Home Nations simultaneously. The first year of the project is now very nearly at an end, and we have recently received confirmation that CUREE will continue to support the Foundation in this project when it moves into its second pilot year in Autumn 2017. If you would like to know more about this project, or about how CUREE can support curriculum development contact us via info@curee.co.uk.

Wellcome

CUREE is about to begin working with colleagues from UCL-IoE and Durham University on a continuation of the much-celebrated work which took place in 2015 on the Developing Great Teaching systematic review of systematic reviews. DGT provided a detailed picture of the best quality research evidence about effective CPDL, and the Wellcome Trust has commissioned a Rapid Evidence Review which builds on this evidence, along with a variety of other sources, to explore the research base around science-focused CPDL, in the UK and overseas.

The team at CUREE will be exploring how schools are helping teachers contextualise CPD for specific subjects and probing differences in effective CPD processes for Science, Maths and English that emerged in Developing Great Teaching. We are also comparing UK approaches with those in high performing PISA countries.

If you lead CPD, research or school improvement in a school, please consider volunteering to take part in the interviews either before the end of term, during the holidays or at the start of the next term.

To sign up to take part, please complete this short form: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6JB9MSK

 

The 45 minute interviews will help you think about how you integrate CPD and school improvement, help teachers contextualise generic CPD and your plans for further development. It will be carried by expert researchers with extensive experience of CPD and school improvement.

The review is expected to be completed later this year, and will, we hope, help shed light on how providers of science-focused CPDL can improve the quality and take-up of their offer. If you have a research project you wish to commission CUREE to explore, please get in touch via info@curee.co.uk

EMAC (Effective Mentoring and Coaching)

We have had an exciting term on the EMAC front: John Colet school have completed their EMAC programme with CUREE and now have 12 fully trained coaches, equipped with the tools to achieve their aims and develop a coaching culture throughout the school. All 12 coaches are also furnished with the materials to train other colleagues to become coaches, and expand the coaching pool within the school; coaching has also been built into the whole school development plan for next year.

This term, CUREE have also started working on an EMAC programme with Hitchin Boys’ School. This will continue to run with workshops and remote support throughout the next academic year, concluding summer 2018; the continued support and delivery model allows colleagues time to develop and refine their skills throughout the year, with assistance from the CUREE team. By next summer, Hitchin Boys’ School will have 15 fully trained coaches, who will then be in a position to cascade the training across the school in the following years, to develop capacity and sustainability.

If you would like any further information on the EMAC suite and how it can work for your school contact niamh.mcmahon@curee.co.uk or visit http://www.curee.co.uk/mentoring-and-coaching.

 

-Bart Crisp and Niamh McMahon

 

Monthly TES articles

Don’t forget to keep an eye out for Philippa Cordingley’s articles in TES Magazine. You can find them every month included as part of an ongoing series. Make sure to follow us on Twitter (@CUREE_Official) for updates on which edition of TES the articles appear in. Previous articles include:

• How to choose the right source for your sources
• trust your own judgments to improve pupil progress
• Separating the sensible studies from the snake oil
• Can you be faithful to research and your pupils?
• Why collaboration is key to making the best of research

To access these articles, log onto https://www.tes.com/magazine/back-issues and enter your subscription number. Alternatively, you can always pick up a copy of TES Magazine at a local store. 

-Pearce Brannigan

 

New faces and upcoming oportunities

We’re pleased to have welcomed a new member to the CUREE team in the form of Megan Bradbury.

Megan is a research assistant at CUREE. She graduated with a degree in English Literature with Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and worked as a programme assistant at a literature development agency before joining CUREE in May 2017, where she will be working on projects such as the formative evaluation of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Teacher Development Fund and the research into teacher professional identity with Educational International.

You too could be featuring in the next edition of Enews, as CUREE are currently accepting applications for the role of Personal Assistant. If you’re interested in joining our friendly team please see the recruitment page on our website.