- Philippa's Blog - Philippa Cordingley
- The Future of School Improvement? - Paul Crisp
- Revisiting Revision - A route map for South Hampstead High School - Bart Crisp
- Supporting Development for innovative FE Practice - Capital City College Project - Bart Crisp
- Bradford Birth to 19 SSIF Project - Matias Landini
- ASCL - NPQEL Route Map - Matias Landini
- Response to Intervention - Niamh Mc Mahon
- Out and About: Philippa Cordingley's next few apperances - Evangelia Araviaki
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Philippa's Blog
I’ve been thinking a lot about our attitudes to subject knowledge and teacher preparation and CPD in England recently, not least as a member of the OECD Expert Group carrying out country reviews of the quality of provision. While preparing for a conference in Tokyo where we will read across all of the nine completed country reviews, I was struck by the very significant contrast between the UK approach and practices in most other countries. I think we have a lot to learn as well as a lot to offer other counties. For the former, positioning teacher preparation as something that happens after studying subjects at degree level strips ways some powerful opportunities to make important connections which in turn help with curriculum development. For the latter, other countries whose teachers and school report intense “practice shock” on entry to the profession, have masses to learn from the way in which teacher placements are planned, supported and understood as part of the profession’s responsibility to invest in its future -as opposed to the province of academics. But pretty much every country involved so far has a great deal to do to improve the quality of mentoring and a lot to learn from greater integration of CPD leadership, support for new teachers and harnessing the skills involved in doing both for school improvement. So, I approached the Japan conference with excitement and my eyes and mind wide open. You can see more reflections on the opportunities our teachers might be missing and the intriguing and surprising role of critiquing text books as a tool for filling the gap in my recent blog here. Better still you can join me and other interested colleagues, including a teacher from South Korea who has worked with OECD, at our seminar on 5th July to explore what this means for practice first hand.
Dublin
It is just four years since I worked with the Teaching Council for Ireland. Then they were launching a new programme to support teachers’ professional learning; to be driven by teachers. On the 19th of May I am excited to be re- joining them to explore the outcomes of that programme of learning and to work with colleagues to deepen our understanding of the role of different kinds of evidence in developing teacher’s professional identities and practices. I am also hoping to re-connect with a teacher who was just starting her PhD in 2014. Interestingly the induction for her PHD involved a two-week job shadowing placement. I was delighted that she asked to spend this with us in CUREE and we and she valued and benefitted from the opportunity to learn across cultures and traditions. I was particularly impressed by this very practical and emancipatory approach to induction into doctorate study!
Education International
My third international for this month was a thrilling trip to Brussels (despite Eurostar and flight cancellations) to join teacher research leads for over 60 Countries at Education International’s (EI) stunning annual meeting to explore the role of research in enhancing teachers’ experiences, practices and professional identities. Facilitating an interactive workshop for 70 plus people in three different languages was challenging but you can see from this photo that with a mix of translation, great questions, visual cues and a great deal of laughter and good will we made some interesting progress!
Philippa Cordingley
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The Future of School Improvement?
One stand-out feature of my work in CUREE in the last year has been the dominance of school improvement programmes, particularly those funded through SSIF (Strategic School Improvement Fund). I was astonished to see, when looking through a DfE list, that we were involved in 1/6th of successful Round 1 funded projects! We have also supported a more select number of Round 2 and 3 bids including actually writing three of them. We started in our own West Midlands back yard but word got around so we’ve ended up working with partners across the country including Bradford, Leeds, Blackpool and Oldham.
This has been a curious journey as CUREE is not really a bid writing organisation though we have proved to be pretty good at it. What really floats our boat is the conception, design, implementation and evaluation of classroom and whole school interventions and this is the real skill set we brought to the bidding process and which we are now using as programmes get up and running. The three things we do most of are:
- Training and supporting teachers use a specific intervention. The most common one is Response to Intervention - Literacy;
- Train coaches and mentors – particularly NLEs/SLEs and leaders in schools who are themselves providing both challenge and encouragement to teachers in classrooms;
- Programme monitoring and evaluation – our skills in designing efficient and non-intrusive approaches to collecting progress and impact data and analysing them within a credible framework has proved popular with a lot of partnerships.
None of this is peculiarly SSIF related but we have had the chance to hone our skills by doing a lot of it in a short time. We are now waiting to see how our partners have fared in their Round 3 bids.
So this is all fine and dandy but what of the future? I wrote a somewhat ecstatic blog last November in which I welcomed the “new enthusiasm at policy level for professional development as the vehicle for school improvement and, with it, some recognition that struggling schools need sustained help over months and years not weeks” Unfortunately, the word on the street is that there will be no Round 4 so those of us who thought that, at last, we had a policy which really prioritised sustainable improvement, will have to go back to being disappointed.
However, the injection of cash is welcome, even if the level of bureaucracy it came is less so. The potential risk is that servicing the SSIF process seems to have elbowed aside much other school improvement collaboration at regional level unless you are in an Opportunity Area where it was but one of several overlapping initiatives. Ah well - I’m sure that teaching schools and other local improvement partnerships will sigh, put all the SSIF stuff into a folder marked “last flash-in-the-pan initiative” and get on with the job of helping their neighbours as they did before SSIF and will do until the next ‘policy’ comes along.
Paul Crisp
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Revisiting Revision – a new Route Map for South Hampstead High School
The CUREE team are currently working on a Route Map for colleagues at South Hampstead High School, with a focus on understanding what the research evidence has to say about revision and recall. This Route Map takes ideas and material from thematic Route Maps CUREE have made in the past (available for purchase from our website here) and reorients them for the needs of South Hampstead HS. CUREE’s Research Route Maps are an increasingly popular way of providing colleagues with CPDL which puts research evidence at their disposal in a manageable way, and our approach to developing the route Map for South Hampstead HS is one which we can replicate in a wide variety of CPDL/research-evidence informed practice areas. If you are interested in discussing how CUREE can provide your school or education organisation with material describing the evidence about a particular area, contact Bart Crisp our Senior Research Manager, to arrange a conversation
Supporting development of innovative FE practice – Capital City College Group project
We have become familiar with the concept of a 'research school' in the schools system. Well, at CUREE, we have had the pleasure of working with a 'Research College' as Westminster Kingsway and City and Islington Colleges move into full operation with their Development and Innovation Unit (DIU) .We are currently delivering some coaching sessions for CPDL leaders at these colleges - part of the Capital City College Group (now the biggest college group in London) as part of our ongoing work in support of them as they establish their DIU.
The coaching sessions will support leaders to think more strategically, and in a research-informed way, about how they continue to push staff development. This Unit has been in place for roughly a year now and we have received a variety of positive feedback from colleagues across the Colleges as they make use of CUREE’s tools supporting practitioner enquiry projects as part of their CPDL. Colleagues who have worked with us on this project so far had this to say:
"From a start point of providing us with a framework of CUREE templates on the process of Project Applications, CUREE then worked with us and supported us in arriving at bespoke version templates which better met our particular needs as a large and diverse organisation. It was important for us as a Development and Innovation Unit to have a solid structure underpinned by a set of user-friendly documents which ensured project bid applications were very well thought through from a project management point of view and where evaluations clearly captured impact, evidence, reflections and lessons learned in such a way that they created an accessible repository of good practice methodologies and risk management interventions to provide stimulus, guidance, support and inspiration for a greater number of colleagues to actively participate, formulate and submit their own developmental and innovative ideas for projects based around the current key priorities of Capital City College Group."
If you are interested in setting up something similar for your school, college or educational organisation, please get in touch to arrange a conversation about your needs and what CUREE can do to help
Bart Crisp
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Bradford Birth to 19 SSIF Project
CUREE has been continuing in its SSIF projects by working closely with the Bradford-Birth-to-19 scheme. The SSIF project has two main aims; to improve student literacy through interventions, and to improve leadership and teaching through coaching. CUREE is directly involved in both!
On the 27th April, our CPD team went north to Bradford for the third time where they delivered personalised and high-quality training to a group of 17 headteachers. The session went particularly well, not only due to being tailored specifically from the feedback from session 2, but also due to the extremely receptive and positive group.
NPQEL Route Map
CUREE have completed the route map for the NPQEL programme offered by ASCL and partners. This is designed to help executive headteachers ensure that they are working within the framework set out by the NPQEL qualification. The Route Map draws together a rich array of research and evidence based resources and makes them available to the participants in an accessible and time efficient way. We are confident that these are things executive heads need to know about - and, very practically - will directly support them completing their assignments
The route map has been launched at several regional workshops and strongly welcomed by the headteachers participating.
Matias Landini
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Response to Intervention
RTI (Response to Intervention) is a literacy intervention focussed on raising the attainment of vulnerable learners, which we are currently delivering as part of two Strategic School Improvement Fund bids. We are working with Primary colleagues in Herefordshire and Secondary colleagues in Sandwell to implement this intervention which helps teachers analyse the literacy needs of their vulnerable pupils and use evidence-based interventions to raise the pupils’ achievement. The programme takes colleagues through the use of diagnostic tools to identify the specific areas of literacy their pupils need to develop and then describes in detail appropriate interventions that can be used to strengthen this particular focus. Not only are we working directly with classroom teachers and school leaders, but we are also working alongside local SLEs who will be trained as trainers. This will increase local capacity to train others in the use of RTI and work towards a self-sustaining system.
If you are interested in finding out more about RTI, how the intervention works or how you might become a trained trainer, please contact Niamh Mc Mahon at niamh.mcmahon@curee.co.uk or 02476 524036 or visit our website
Niamh Mc Mahon
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Out and About: Where is Philippa?
We don't expect to see that much of Philippa in CUREE Towers in the next few weeks as she's out there in the real world. Happily (for her) this is all in the UK for a change. Here are some of the bits of the real world you'll find her in over the next few weeks
Policy Exchange session on Behaviour - 13 June
Promoting a culture of good behaviour
Inspiring Leadership 15th June, workshop
Leading CPD effectively: We need to talk about subjects
Tony Little Centre - Eton College - 19th June
Festival of Education 21st June
Session: Is effective mentoring the key to improving teaching quality?
Panel: Philippa Cordingley, Sam Sims, David Weston and Cat Scutt
Festival of Education 22nd June
Session: Embedding learning through the arts in the primary classroom
South West Teaching and Learning Conference | Exeter | 2nd July 2018
Session title: Professional Learning that works for teachers and for pupils; combining sustainable, research-informed tools and activities
Teacher Education: An International Approach Seminar 5 July Coventry
And one for your next diary
BERA Annual Conference in September (date and time TBC-11th-13th September)
Continuing Professional Development & Learning and national construction of teachers' professional identities: an international perspective