Four steps to better CPD

Continuing professional development (CPD) is often seen as an add-on to teachers’ jobs. But evidence from schools and international research shows that embedding it in teachers’ day-jobs leads to better results, improved morale and a more resilient school. This requires an overhaul in the way CPD is planned and implemented, but the prize is great for schools that succeed in making it a core priority.

In 2015, the Teacher Development Trust worked alongside TES to commission a review of international research into what types of CPD really have long-term impact on students’ attainment. The Developing Great Teaching review identified the keys to success in CPD content, the process and the organisational culture within schools. The Department for Education’s teacher development expert group, that I chaired, built this research into the new standard for teachers’ professional development.

Here are four key lessons from the review:

1. CPD needs to take the form of sustained projects, not one-offs

Teachers make thousands of decisions in every lesson, the majority of which are instinctive. To change classroom practice we need to change habits and internal mental models.

Research consistently shows us that isolated one-off briefings are not only insufficient for this, they may be actively problematic. Teachers will tend to pick out the familiar elements of what they hear, down-play the unfamiliar and re-frame new ideas within their existing understanding. The effect of this is that new practices are just minor tweaks and genuine change never takes place.

The only way to create a genuine shift is where teachers actively try out new ideas in the classroom, evaluate their impact on pupil learning, discuss with colleagues and re-plan and improve in a rhythmical cycle.

3. For genuine impact, teachers need external expertise, support and challenge

With budgets under pressure, there’s a huge temptation for schools to say ‘we have all the expertise we need internally’. However, evidence suggests this is misguided. 

Professional development needs to shake up internal thinking and this is almost impossible if the expert input comes from someone who works in the same culture, sees the same children, works on the same curriculum and with the same resources. Assumptions go unchallenged, shared expectations remain entrenched, teachers are not given insights into surprising approaches from outside their institutions.

The ideal expert works across multiple schools, taps into regional and national networks of expertise and is able to bring fresh thinking into schools. This expert needs to build good relationships with staff in the school but they also need to be able to shake up the orthodoxy that develops – inspiring with examples of expectation-busting practice from elsewhere, facilitating visits, sharing video, bringing examples of student work and curriculum plans that can make teachers look at their own classrooms afresh.

4. Teachers need to be in charge of evaluating their own CPD

Less successful CPD focuses on getting teachers to focus on learning new practices and demonstrating them to colleagues. More successful CPD gets teachers to think about curriculum aims and check whether new practices are helping students achieve them more successfully. CPD is much less about teachers appearing to perform better in classrooms and much more about empowering teachers to solve problems and apply teaching tools in their classrooms.

As an example, training teachers how to perform a chemistry demonstration could simply involve getting teachers to watch a colleague carry it out and then try and replicate it later. However, it is likely to be much more effective if teachers begin with a discussion about student misconceptions, examples of lesson plans that used a previous approach and evidence from tests and exercise books that illustrate where this approach was less-than-perfect. The expert can now talk teachers through the new demonstration while cross-referencing how each element of the process challenges misconceptions, builds understanding and improves over the old approach. Teachers can also learn better questions to use during the process to more effectively check for understanding and evaluate the impact of the new approach.

Visit the Teacher Development Trust’s website and join our growing network of over 200 schools who are leading this exciting shift in approach to teachers’ CPD.

David Weston is the chief executive of the Teacher Development Trust. He is a former physics and maths teacher and was chair of the Department for Education’s CPD expert group. Follow the trust and David on Twitter at @TeacherDevTrust and @informed_edu