Professional development

Great CPD on a Shoestring #ThursdayThunk

The money being thrown at school improvement seems to know no bounds.  Hundreds of millions of pounds in Strategic School Improvement Fund and Teacher & Leadership Innovation Fund projects; yet some schools are struggling to fund even the most basic professional development to staff.  Think Reading Club! Continue reading →

What Impact Your Half Year of Teaching?

We’ve reached the mid-point of the academic year; the mornings are getting lighter and the days longer.  It’s worth reflecting on what impact your teaching has had in term of pupils’ progress during the first half of the year.

It’s important to understand that this is a question to reflect on not a means for holding teachers to account.  Since the days of pupils allegedly making three sub-levels progress a year we’ve used unreliable data to make invalid conclusions.  There is a lack of precision in the question, as well as any answer, which makes high stakes or even low stakes accountability nonsensical.  Continue reading →

CPD and Teaching Quality; Solution or Emulsion

It should have been a quiet day on twitter; I hadn’t posted anything for a number of days and I needed to focus on moving a whole series of things into storage.  Panic set in when Sean Harford sent me a couple of tweets seeking some clarification. Continue reading →