Effective CPD for teachers is essential. When teachers improve their existing skills and add new skills, the benefits are felt both by the teacher and their pupils.
According to John Hattie’s synthesis of 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement, CPD has an impact of 0.62 on the scale. It is in the top 20 of all practices analysed and thus reaffirms its importance.
Common challenges
Some common challenges faced by schools are pitching training at the right level:
- What training is for all staff and what training is for smaller groups?
- What types of training activities suits groups or individual teachers?
- Assessing how much it has impacted pupil outcomes.
- What mechanisms do we have in place for monitoring and evaluating CPD?
- How can we be sure that a CPD programme is making a difference if new knowledge and skills being used in the classroom are not being evaluated?
Doug Lemov, author of international bestseller Teach like a champion-now, said:
“On the whole, researchers agree that professional development programs typically have weak effects on practice because they lack focus, intensity, follow up and continuity.”
Ineffective CPD, Lemov argues, is not focused on effective teaching and is not evaluated for its impact on pupil achievement.
Teachers are already struggling to find enough time in the day to stay on top of a complex workload. Spending additional time on training needs to be time well spent. It must ultimately improve practice and maybe even reduce workload.
Planning for success
There is usually more than one change that needs to happen for a school’s approach to CPD to be deemed effective. Tom Sherrington highlights five steps to take when it comes to approaching teacher development:
- Ditch the judgement culture
- Establish a shared framework for thinking about teaching and learning
- Map and embed CPD cycles and structures
- Grow and develop a coaching team
- Transfer ownership to teachers
Giving your teachers the tools they need
Improving teaching and learning is at the heart of the ProgressTeaching platform.
CPD is easily managed with our teaching improvement platform. Teachers create reports in minutes instead of hours to paint a clear picture of how their students are doing.
Action plans, lesson observation notes and CPD goals are all documented in a structured, easy to manage format. Teachers and leaders view them at the click of a button.
Bypassing the information-gathering process allows them to move straight onto constructive conversations about how to improve their practice for better student outcomes.
Teachers easily track how they are progressing with their CPD and how this is helping them to reach their career aspirations. Moving the ownership to teachers fosters a sense of empowerment and increases motivation.
Assessing the impact of CPD on pupil outcomes is simple with ProgressTeaching. Pupil progress and attainment data are available to view at pupil, class, subject or year group level at the click of a button. Analyse trends to gain a clear understanding of the quality of teaching at your school.
