Contents
Philippa's Blog: Accountability and Literacy - Philippa Cordingley
Teachers CPD - Can we believe the evidence? - Paul Crisp
Another Pint of BERA Please, Barman! - Bart Crisp
A Quick Taste of Some Research Outcomes From International Research - Bart Crisp
Building a Community of Literacy Practice in Herefordshire - Bart Crisp
Bradford Birth to 19 SSIF - Matias Landini
Books in the Black Country: RTI in Sandwell - Matias Landini
New Additions to CUREE - Sally Curson and Ross Harrison
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Philippa's Blog - Accountability and Literacy
Over the last 3 half terms we have worked with 7 primary schools and 15 secondary schools on understanding and overcoming literacy obstacles to accessing the Key stage 2 and 3 curriculum for vulnerable pupils though a twelve week CPDL programme. What is exciting is the progress these vulnerable pupils are able to make through very precisely targeted research-based interventions. At its best the progress has been astonishing!
For example, an English teacher, a middle leader and teaching assistant in one Black Country school were able help their five focus year 7 pupils make two years of progress from early July to the end of September through a mix of intense 15 minute interventions during lessons (three times a week), a short burst of 1:1 coaching and a carefully planned holiday activity pack designed to involve parents and carers as well as pupils. The planning was based on close case analysis of the needs of a focus group of pupils against the major building blocks of literacy and the interventions were selected form a menu first developed for an EEF, year 6 trial and subsequently enhanced to work in key stage 3.
Another interesting feature of this work has been the way teachers are learning to think about and plan around the literacy demands made by different subjects and what these mean for vulnerable learners. My favourite conversation this term involved a group of 3 teachers from one school identifying key concepts and terms that would remain important throughout KS3 and 4. They wanted to work out when the same terms were used in distinctive ways in different subjects and when different subjects used different vocabulary for the same key concepts because working with pupils on vocabulary in a strategic way had revealed some discontinuities! They left with a very practical tool for ensuring that vocabulary won’t be a barrier to accessing the key stage 3 curriculum for their vulnerable pupils.
Perhaps what is most striking is how helpful key stage 2 and 3 teachers found it to have a bird’s eye view of the big building blocks of literacy so they could identify, with confidence, the literacy demands in different subjects and learning contexts; this included secondary English teachers for whom literacy can easily be taken for granted. Once this was matched with a menu and toolkit of manageable interventions, support from local SLEs and a process for sharing resources for supporting them, our teacher and middle leader partnerships all felt they had a sustainable strategy in place.
This has moved on quite some way from the days of literacy across the curriculum. What we are now looking at is 1) giving every teacher the tools to help pupils overcome literacy obstacles to success within every subject and 2) giving schools the tools to build a cumulative whole bigger than the sum of the parts. Next stop is working on this with teachers in all the secondary schools in Blackpool and the team of fabulous evidence- informed practice Champions we trained there last year! Contact sally.curson@curee.co.uk if you would like to know more.
Philippa Cordingley
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Teachers CPD - Can we believe the evidence?
Agree to disagree
Teachers’ professional development and learning (CPDL) is a contentious issue. We all agree that learning to be a better teacher (or leader) is a process which continues long after initial qualification. We probably also agree that there is not enough of it or of funding for it. After that though, opinion is more divided on what CPD should contain, how it should be done, how long it should last, how specific it needs to be to be effective and who is competent to provide it.
What does a good one look like?
Fortunately, we have over 30 years of accumulated research evidence about the effectiveness of CPDL. More recently, we’ve had the tools to interrogate that evidence to see if it contains any broadly applicable, reliable and relevant messages for those who provide CPD and those who commission it. And, by 2016, we had enough evidence to summarise it in a ‘review of reviews’ report called ‘Developing Great Teaching’. This found a number of features of well-designed CPD which the research suggested correlated with a measurable impact on learners. Central to everything was aligning CPD activities with teachers’ aspirations for specific sub groups of learners. The activities linked with high quality include:
- Sustaining CPDL through a rhythm over time to enable iterative plan, do, review cycles.
- Identifying and building on participants’ needs.
- Access to specialist expertise – some of it external enough to facilitate challenging of orthodoxies.
- Providing peer support for sustained iterative experimenting with new approaches to accelerate trust building and provide a natural environment for exploring pupils’ responses and teachers’ existing practices and assumptions.
- Developing practice and practical theory side by side
- Leadership support for and modelling of professional learning.
The DfE used this and other evidence (correlated and assessed by an Expert Group chaired by David Weston) to produce in July 2016 a Standard (actually, a set of standards) which said that effective CPDL should:
- Have a focus on improving and evaluating pupil outcomes
- Be underpinned by robust evidence and expertise
- Include collaboration and expert challenge
- Be sustained over time
- Be prioritised by school leadership.
A high hurdle to jump
The Standard is and was intended to be challenging as it reflected a concern that a lot of the CPD on offer to the system was of poor quality with negligible benefit to pupils. We know from our work with providers using our Providers Quality Review service that some things are more difficult than others. So, for instance, those who mainly offer one-day workshops struggle with the ‘sustained’ criterion. Similarly, providers who target individual teachers in isolation from their schools have problems with both collaboration and the linkage to pupil outcomes.
If in doubt, challenge the research
So it should probably not surprising that the standards and the research which underpin them should come under attack and it may not be a coincidence that that attack is emerging now. Large amounts of money are being injected into CPD via the SSIF and TLIF programmes - both of which have explicit links to the Standard built in by the funder, the DfE.
A bit more surprising is that one of the more prominent challenges should be a quasi-academic one which tried to assert that the Developing Great Teaching review was methodologically and evidentially flawed. Now, anybody publishing a set of research findings must expect to have them contested – this is a good thing and the way science is advanced. Our problems with this particular challenge by Harry Fletcher-Wood and Sam Sims were that it a) was mounted as a piece of journalism designed to grab attention not carefully lay out an argument; b) reflected a rather basic misunderstanding of the evidential underpinnings of a systematic review and c) misunderstood/mis-represented what the review and the Standard actually say.
It's all a bit more complicated than that
The challenge is representative of a broader misunderstanding of what systematic reviews and meta-analyses could and could not be used for. So Professors Rob Coe and Steve Higgins and us were sufficiently concerned about the level for that we organized a seminar about it at the September ResearchED meeting and published a series of blogs on the topic kicked off by Rob Coe on the CEM Blog site. You can find our contribution to the discussion of the broader point about evidence use here and some specific points about the weaknesses of the Fletcher-Wood and Sims article here.
So, can we believe it?
Finally, returning to the opening question – can we believe the evidence about teachers’ CPD? – we say that systematic reviews (and meta-analyses) continue to represent the best evidence available right now. Good CPD research is extremely costly because of the number of variables, so there are, inevitably, limitations to the evidence. This might change. Like the recent challengers to the review, we hope it does! But for the time being we would repeat that we believe that we have an obligation to work with the best evidence currently available on the simple grounds that knowing something is better than knowing nothing
Paul Crisp
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Another Pint of BERA Please, Barman!
September saw the annual conference of the British Education Researchers’ Association. CUREE has a presence at the BERA conference in most years, but this year was a particular highlight, as CUREE colleagues collectively succeeded in submitting 4 papers, with none rejected on review. These papers covered a wide variety of topics from across CUREE’s work over the past year, and provided opportunities for new colleagues, including our Research Coordinator Paige Johns, to experience presenting to an academic audience for the first time. This is how first-time conference attendee, Paige John (of this parish) experienced BERA:
- BERA was an extremely interesting opportunity to hear from academics and professionals from all around the globe, ranging from talks about educational leadership to education within prisons.
- One of our papers provided an opportunity to talk about our work with the Inter-American Development Bank looking into teacher evaluation systems, and what England can potentially learn from other systems around the world.. This session had a great audience who asked a number of stimulating and deep questions
- Another paper involved a presentation on CUREE’s work evaluating the Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Teacher Development Fund for arts-based learning. More information about this paper can be found on our and Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s websites. The discussion around this paper included two others with fascinating explorations of the way the arts can be used to help express ideas and emotions in both children and teachers.
Bart Crisp
A Quick Taste of Some Research Outcomes from International Research
And talking about international research, CUREE have been working for the past few months on bringing the final conclusions from our two-year research project with Education International into the factors affecting teachers’ professional identities across 7 different education systems together in a final report. This report is now very close to publication, but, as mentioned elsewhere in this newsletter, we also got a chance to preview a few of them at the British Education Researchers’ Association annual conference. While the full version of this report is far too dense to cover in any kind of depth in a short presentation setting, CUREE colleagues were able to take part in a fascinating discussion based on findings such as:
- the fact that, across the different systems, only 14% of teachers responding to our survey agreed that they participated in as much CPDL as they wanted;
- that sophisticated systems such as Singapore and Ontario make sure to provide CPDL opportunities on the basis of ongoing support linked to performance review, and;
- that collaboration and networking as part of CPDL featured in all but one of the 7 systems examined, despite their diversity
If you are interested in exploring commissioning CUREE to work on a research project, on a national or international basis, or would like to discuss the implications of this research for your organisation, please email our Senior Research Manager, Bart Crisp - bart.crisp@curee.co.uk.
Bart Crisp
Building a Community of Literacy Practice in Herefordshire
CUREE’s involvement in the Strategic School Improvement Fund (SSIF) has been a source of a number of successes, and one of those which we are proudest of is our work providing literacy CPDL to teachers and SLEs in a project run by Marlbrook Primary School in Herefordshire. Using our Response to Intervention approach, we worked with colleagues from a range of primary schools across the county to help them develop a systematic approach to helping their pupils overcome specific literacy barriers to learning. In addition to getting a chance to work with a passionate and dedicated group of practitioners, a big highlight of this project has been the chance to work with them to create a genuine Community of Practice, in which teachers develop and share resources which they have devised to bring the intervention toolkit in RtI to the classroom. If you would like to know more about CPDL for Response to Intervention through CUREE, please visit our website, or email our Senior Professional Learning Manager Sally Curson – sally.curson@curee.co.uk.
Bart Crisp
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Bradford Birth to 19 SSIF
Bradford's Birth to 19 SSIF Project completes it's training sessions!
For those who have been following our last few editions of E-News, our SSIF project in Bradford is continuing to make an impact! While we have previously been training Executive Headteachers how to be effective coaches, we have now been supporting the heads they are supporting in making good use of their coach and in leading coaching in their schools. The importance of questions in coaching is widely acknowledged. But teachers and leaders being coached are often reluctant to ask questions in case their coach overwhelms them or opens up a new agenda that isn’t one of their priorities. Knowing the right questions to ask of coaches and their likely impact on coaching conversations makes a huge difference! Our Effective Mentoring and Coaching Packs provide practical tools for resolving concerns like these! Help your colleagues make powerful use of their coaches by exploring the resources available from our online shop.
To find out more about this project or coaching training, please contact Sally Curson - sally.curson@curee.co.uk.
Matias Landini
Books in the Black Country: RTI in Sandwell
As mentioned in the opening blog, we have been running an SSIF project involving 15 schools in Sandwell, based on our Response to Intervention programme. We have completed all of the training sessions, with an SLE and Headteacher specific session on the 17th September. The training was a big success and when asked if they would recommend the CPD programme to someone else, 100% of the attendees said yes!
Following on from that day, we had our final session on the 10th October. With support from CUREE facilitators and tools, a group of 14 SLEs supported 25 teachers in analysing student work and data to identify gaps in the big building blocks of literacy and then explored the RTI menu of research-based interventions to identify a powerful way of responding. A fantastically successful session rounded up an intense and quick paced set of training sessions and interim, pilot interventions! Everyone is now well set up for supporting cohort 2 and for taking this to scale in their schools. One exersise in particular was to imagine the progress of their pupils as if it were on a graph. We did this on Over Head Projector acetate and were able to create a wonderful multi-layered graph showing all the different levels of progress these target pupils had made.
To find out more about this project or Response to Intervention, please contact Matias Landini – matias.landinin@curee.co.uk.
Matias Landini
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New Additions to CUREE
Sally Curson
Sally Curson is a Senior Professional Learning Manager at CUREE. She is an experienced coach, facilitator and Learning and Development expert with 16 years’ experience working in the Corporate Sector, most recently working as Head of Talent and Learning for innocent drinks. Sally is also HR Director for Snitterfield Nursery School and an Associate Governor for the Stratford Rural Schools Federation. She recently completed a Masters in Psychology.
Sally’s main areas of focus within CUREE are the development and project management of CPD programmes and leading our coaching and mentoring practice. Outside of work Sally’s passion is spending time with her family, especially her two young children.
Ross Harrison
Ross Harrison is a Research and Project Coordinator at CUREE. He is a qualified teacher that worked in Further Education for 4 years before joining CUREE. He has over 15 years’ experience of working with children and young people in various capacities.
In his spare time, Ross enjoys reading and playing hockey for Leicester City. Every year he plays in competitive charity golf games and participates in a family mud run. Ross loves renovating and restoring his 17th century cottage and spending time outside enjoying the British countryside.
