Contents
Philippa's Blog - Philippa Cordingley
The Babcock Session in Exeter - Niamh McMahon
Train the Trainers - Niamh McMahon
Anthecology - A Lesson Study Journal by Samuel Whitbread Academy - Matias Landini
Helping Leaders Make Best Use of the Standard for Teachers' Professional Development - Rebecca Raybould
Coaching for Leadership - Rebecca Raybould
Response to Intervention in Herefordshire - Megan Bradbury
Out and About - Where is Philippa? - Evangelia Araviaki
Summer Reading List - Philippa Cordingley
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Philippa's Blog
1944 and all that: Big successes and a salutary reminder.
It has been great to see the number of schools celebrating pupil successes in the last few weeks. Music, dance and drama performances and exhibitions of visual art have given the hugely valuable but undervalued Arts a boost. Sports with their benefits for collaboration, skills development, fitness, wellbeing and leadership and competitiveness skills come centre stage for sports days. There have been shout-outs too for SATs and IB successes (English IB schools, many of which are state schools, performed brilliantly, internationally this year). These successes have enriched my conversations with colleagues during 15 recent CPDL development sessions, conversations with colleagues interested in enhancing mentoring and coaching after our very lively panel at the Education Festival hosted by @charteredcollege and enlivened my Twitter time line. Really good to hear, colleagues – next year let's have this kind of breadth in our celebration of success all year round instead of just after SATS!
Success for schools and colleagues is always and rightly rooted in student success. But, whilst relishing every crossed t and dotted i, I have also been looking for and treasuring successes that contribute to longer term capacity building within our hard-pressed education system. Here are some inspiring successes and leading indicators to savour over the summer -and a couple of “could do betters” to contribute to a system wide end-of-year report card:
Committing to the arts
First, three cheers and endless hoots of appreciation to Alperton Community School’s Andria Zafirakou, winner of the Global Teacher of the Year award, who has not only wowed everyone with her professional skills and commitment but who has also chosen to spend her absolutely personal £1m prize setting up a Trust to promote and support embedding learning through the arts in secondary schools. She reminds me of Ruskin’s assertion that:
“All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another, and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it. Truly inspiring to see this recognition of a great teaching soul.”
Increasing the rigour of leadership coaching
Second, a drum roll out for the amazing NLEs we have been training in embedding high quality, evidence-rich coaching in their support for oracy interventions in Bradford as part of SSIF @bradfordbirth19. Read more here about just how they went about deepening leadership coaching for supporting research based interventions by practising what they were preaching
Modelling depth in literacy professional learning and practice
Third, hats off to the SLEs in Herefordshire who have been learning about CUREE’s Response to Intervention (RTI), Breakthroughs in Literacy programme, alongside supporting an initial cohort of focus teachers. They too took the initiative to try out the research-based tools and resources that underpin the literacy interventions in their own contexts (in this case classes). Read more below about what this involved.
Could do better?
Next year it will be 75 years on from the 1944 Butler Education Act that established education up to 15 as a free entitlement to all children for the first time. If we stop and think, we can see many achievements over that period. But like the health service, the national education service and the act that gave birth to it, was at heart about ending inequalities. It was about addressing directly the disparities that were revealed viscerally through drawing people of all classes and genders together in a combined war effort. As @LeadingLearner’s analysis of OfSTED data suggests, no one can put their hands on their hearts and say the system and its structures are serving the white working class great-grandchildren of that community well; we haven’t made a lot of headway in meeting the needs of Irish Travelers and the Romani community well either. These communities are probably the least understood and well supported group in our schools today. We can and must do better.
Philippa Cordingley
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South West Teaching and Learning Conference
Whilst we can recognise patterns in the experiences of schools and it is often important to do so, it is just as important to remember that there are some big regional differences. For example, while many schools in the UK are struggling with teacher recruitment and retention, in the South West the pressures are distinctive. The rate at which people leave the South West is much lower than that of the rest of the country and this is true of teachers too. The number of professional vacancies in an area where most of the employment opportunities are within the hospitality industry and the quality of life is high has been traditionally much lower than in other parts of the country and this remains the case. The same is in fact true in part of the North East. Many schools in these areas experience a very low staff turnover so widening and deepening expertise depends on CPDL rather than recruitment. On 2nd July, Philippa delivered the opening, interactive keynote at the South West Teaching and Learning Conference focusing on “Professional learning that works for teachers and for pupils; combining sustainable, research-informed tools and activities”. Philippa had the pleasure of meeting and working with some extremely determined, focused and “up for it” CPD and school leaders who went on to work with two other leaders drawing on a similar evidence base but from different perspective, Dame Alison Peacock and David Weston from the Teacher Development Trust. Judging by the immediate feedback (“It was incredibly useful with lots of things we can use in our team”; “Inspiring! Excellent speakers who complemented each other”) the session was a huge success, although we counsel against judging an event on immediate feedback alone; you need to know whether it is still informing practice 2-3 months later to make a safe judgment. Colleagues fully immersed themselves in the series of practical challenges posed by Philippa. Together, colleagues unpacked research case studies of effective CPD which made a difference to staff and pupils at classroom, whole school and network levels, analysing their relevance to the needs of a small number of focus colleagues. They also explored the characteristics of exceptional schools and the role of CPDL in bringing coherence and depth to school improvement. We can’t wait to hear how colleagues have implemented their learning from the day and how they plan to keep applying research and moving their practice forward when the course organisers, Babcock International do the follow up evaluation. That’s true of every event but we don’t often get chance to explore CPDL development in a context of low staff turnover – which brings advantages but also some important challenges in, for example, bringing in new ideas and thinking!
If you are interested in having CUREE support a similar session for you, please contact Niamh at niamh.mcmahon@curee.co.uk
Niamh McMahon
Train the Trainers
As teachers and educators, our hope is to teach in a way that learners are provided with a starting point to lifelong learning. When we know our learners have successfully grasped a new concept, quite often we ask them to consolidate their learning through teaching it to their peers. This concept works for professional learning too. When facilitating and developing CPD we are providing a springboard to your professional learning in a particular area. The learning experiences are designed to put you and your colleagues in the best position to adapt and fine tune the research-based approaches we introduce for your particular contexts. That is why so many of CUREE’s products/services come with a “Train the Trainer” element. CUREE’s model involves developing and embedding knowledge from research in approaches to CPDL that are similarly proven to work, so that teachers and leaders can both:
- apply their developing understanding to their own pupils’ needs; and
- consolidate their own learning through facilitating CPDL for other colleagues in school or the locale through, for example, using research tools and appropriate support and coaching.
Not only does this deepen professional learning and draw others into well established research, it creates capacity and feeds into a self-sustaining learning environment in your school. With ever reducing funding available for schools, developing “Trained Trainers” is a very efficient way of providing highly effective CPD for you and your colleagues.
Philippa’s introductory blog highlights some of the successes form the “Training and equipping Trainers” approach. Here are some extracts form the tools and resources.
-A screen grab of the menu for the cornucopia of coaching resources including videos, practical tools like learning agreements and questions coaches can ask of coaches as well as questions for coaches tools annotated PowerPoints and facilitator notes, fully preparing you to deliver this training to colleagues:
- Questioning frameworks enabling professional learners to direct the conversation ensuring they get the most of it:
Niamh McMahon
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Anthecology - A Lesson Study Journal by Samuel Whitbread Academy
Samuel Whitbread Academy are close to publishing the fourth edition of their yearly Lesson Study Journal – Anthecology. This publication captures the outcomes of different lesson studies that every educator carries out in school. With 1750 students (including 450 in the Sixth Form), Samuel Whitbread is the largest school in Central Bedfordshire and everyone has an enquiry question as one of their performance review targets.
Our chief executive Philippa Cordingley has been invited to write an introduction explaining who CUREE are and how our work can support teacher enquirers in the context of the importance of evidence for making professional learning visible, since “so much of what teachers do is invisible and internalised”, alongside an exploration of the role of evidence in the relationships between coaches/co-coaches/mentors and professional learners.
This year’s edition of Anthecology will be published over summer and you can find previous editions here.
Matias Landini
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Helping leaders make best use of the Standard for Teachers' Professional Development
It has been an exciting year collaborating with the West Midlands CPD Partnership to develop and share an innovative tool aimed at leaders in primary and secondary settings. The CPD Standard Pathway is a school-friendly tool to help colleagues prioritise and plan effective continuing professional development and learning. Three workshops have been held to share the tool and explore how leaders can make best use of it. The positive response to the workshops and tool was particularly timely as the recent DfE consultation response highlighted that there is still a way to go before the standard is embedded into everyday practice. Feedback from the workshops certainly highlights the power of the Pathway to help leaders plan how they can make manageable changes to start embedding the standard in practice in their school. Thanks must go to the International Professional Development Association (IPDA) for supporting two of the workshops. The Pathway can be accessed here. If you are interested in finding out more about the Pathway then please contact Rebecca.Raybould@curee.co.uk .
Rebecca Raybould
Coaching for Leadership
It has been a pleasure to support the Women Leading in Education (WLiE) initiative which aims to address the gender gap in educational leadership. The WLiE West Midlands network recognise the powerful role that coaching can play in empowering women to step into leadership. They commissioned CUREE to develop coaching tools and training for local leaders. The toolkit, and workshops, developed with DfE funding, aim to support effective coaching conversations helping women at all stages of their leadership journey to take their next steps. The workshops have been a great opportunity to discuss some of the key challenges that women experience on their journey, (e.g. ‘the imposter syndrome’, concerns around ‘work-life balance’ etc.) and how coaches can help women identify how they will tackle the challenges. The leaders attending were open about their own experiences and enthusiastic about the potential of coaching and the toolkit to support their own and others’ learning.
If you are interested in finding out more about coaching training and tools please contact Rebecca or Niamh. More details about WLiE can be found at http://www.wlie-wm.co.uk/
Rebecca Raybould
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Response to Interention in Herefordshire
As you will have seen from the opening blog, this summer, we’ve been working with teachers in Herefordshire to support them in implementing Response to Intervention (RTI) for Literacy in their schools, as part of the SSIF Herefordshire project. RTI aims to improve the achievement of at-risk learners in literacy, using evidence-based teaching practices, strategies and tools rapidly to reach ARE. The interventions are provided in three levels of increasing intensity; teachers use pupil assessment data and close case analysis to decide how intensely they need to work with each pupil, and in which areas of literacy.
In Herefordshire, we have been working with six schools, along with six SLE ‘Trained Trainers’, who we have been equipping with the skills and resources to introduce RTI across the county. We have been delighted by the opportunity to work with such a wonderful group – and truly astounded by how enthusiastic the whole cohort has been not just about the learning potential in their own schools, but equally about creating a community of practice between them. Through our shared Dropbox folder, teachers have been sharing and cataloguing the resources they have created for different interventions, from planning documents to activity sheets to stimulus texts – including a fun-filled home-school pack based on David Walliams’ Gangsta Granny – and are committed to continuing to do so into the future. We are very much looking forward to working more with them next year, and excited to see how this community continues to grow…
Megan Bradbury
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Out and About - Where is Philippa?
- 17th July - RTI at Lightwoods Primary School
- 18th July - Big Education Trustees Meeting
- 20th July - President Kennedy School for Leadership Coaching
- 31st July - FLE Research Council meeting
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Summer Reading List
Summer is finally here and if you can get some time to yourself, here are some titles that should be on your reading list!
- Developing Great Subject Teaching - Philippa Cordingley, Toby Greany, Bart Crisp, Sarah Seleznyov, Megan Bradbury and Tom Perry
- Hierarchy, Markets and Networks - Toby Greany and Rob Higham
- Tes talks to... Steve Higgins - Chris Parr
- Here is an account of an interesting & very innovative approach to involving parents in their children's reading that avoids the parental anxiety or frustration linked with some interventions. It involves parents & children literally cracking a code underpinning a story book together so they are genuinely learning together - Adrienne Alton Lee