Continuous Professional Learning
At Sandringham, our approach to Continuous Professional Learning (CPL) is informed by recent research about effective professional development.
Our Vision
For staff to continue learning throughout their career, showing commitment and autonomy in developing their own professional practise. For staff to have access to a wide range of evidence informed, personalised training, which will support them in raising outcomes for pupils.
Approach
Our Growth Mindset ethos means that we encourage teachers to take control of their own professional development. CPL is tailored and personalised to individual needs and interests.
A range of CPL opportunities are planned for by the school. These include one off training sessions/workshops as well as study groups, webinars, research projects and external school visits, conferences and courses. Some training is run by school staff, some is run by experts in various fields. Staff are also encouraged to form their own groups with colleagues to pursue shared areas of interest and carry out their own action research.
The CPL on offer each term is determined by:
- Whole school priorities on the School Development plan
- Staff feedback and requests gathered from a survey distributed twice each year
- Appraisal outcomes
- Any areas of development identified through progress and standards meetings.
- Any staff expertise which could be disseminated (e.g. subject leaders and specialists are encouraged to share their skills and expertise by leading staff training, staff who attend external training courses are encouraged to feedback to staff by running follow-up training.)
The range of CPL available is then presented to staff each term so that they are able to select the training they would like to attend, making their own decisions about the professional development pathways they would like to follow.
Lesson Study
At Sandringham, Lesson Study has been used to support teacher development since 2016. We started using Lesson Study to support our second year teachers and to give them ownership of their own professional development. Since then Lesson Study has grown and developed through a whole school Lesson Study inset day and through more teachers selecting to take part in Lesson Study through our CPL programme. In the summer of 2018, it felt like the school was ready for the next step in Lesson Study; this was to take it whole school and for it to become part of the Teaching and Learning overview. This was an exciting step for us as a school and a great opportunity for us to give all our teaching staff ownership over their year group and own personal development.
Sandringham follows the Japanese model for Lesson Study and have worked closely with the Institute of Education to develop our knowledge and understanding of this and to deliver Lesson Study effectively.
What is Lesson Study?
Seleznyov (2018) describes Lesson Study as a joint practice development approach to professional learning in which teachers collaboratively plan a lesson, observe it being taught and then discuss what they have learnt about teaching and learning.
Why Lesson Study?
At Sandringham, we believe that the best person to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the classroom is the teacher therefore the professional learning needs to take place within a live classroom with children.
“If you want to improve teaching, the most effective place to do so is in the context of a classroom lesson.” (Stigler & Hiebert 1999).
Lesson study centres around the learning and development of pupils. The research theme is based on current pupil needs and the impact framework allows teachers to think about long-term goals for pupils based on where they currently are learning.
‘Students should be at the heart of professional learning. Benefits to students are not a by-product of professional learning, but its central purpose.’ (Timperley 2011)