This post is the second in a CPD series from our Curriculum Team here at Get Further. Each post will shine a spotlight on an aspect of professional development for teachers in Further Education. Other posts in the series include:
- Why a shared understanding and common approach are key to student success.
- Why your teachers seem to ignore your feedback from learning walks or observations.
- Why you should introduce video recording to truly develop your teachers and improve learning.
In the first post of this blog series, our Curriculum Manager, Ed Noon, examines why a shared understanding and a common approach are essential to effective professional development, and how this plays our in our initial tutor training at Get Further. Today, Ed explores how we can ensure professional development is really ‘continued’ and leads to meaningful change.
A perennial issue in education is that we teachers are often living contradictions. We can say and believe one thing, yet our actions do something entirely different. We may say we believe in a diverse English curriculum, yet we teach a narrow range of texts; we may espouse the benefits of questioning using cold call and wait time, yet we take hands up and allow no wait time for students to think hard at all.
Similarly, we may lead the CPD for a team of teachers or tutors at an INSET day in September or January (picture the grouped tables, big paper and marker pens, the coffee cups). It appears everyone in the room engages, the survey responses are positive, staff say they are going to change their teaching. However, as you complete a learning walk around the site, you see all teachers invariably slip back into old, ingrained, less-effective habits.
Why do they do this? Were they lying to you? Did they think your INSET day session was nonsense? Most likely not. The truth is that teachers are just like students. They don’t hear something once to be imbued with the knowledge and skill to enact it perfectly from now on until the end of time – they forget.
That’s why, at Get Further, we truly value our Tutor Academy. Every month, tutors attend a 90-minute interactive workshop with our curriculum managers. The sessions include retrieval of key knowledge, reflection on recent teaching successes and challenges, opportunities to deepen understanding, and the chance to rehearse and receive feedback. We think of each session as interrupting forgetting (think of the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve).
Not only this, but our tutors are also assigned and complete self-directed study between each monthly workshop. Self-directed study involves each tutor reading, watching or listening to educational content to underpin and develop their understanding from the workshop. Once they have engaged with the material, tutors answer reflection questions and, most importantly, go and practise the skill, method or approach in their lessons for the coming weeks until the next session.
Combined with drop-ins and feedback and reflection visits from the Get Further team, our tutors are constantly reflecting, developing and rehearsing the most effective teaching methods, making it more likely they will remember and enact instead of seemingly forgetting or ignoring everything they’ve learned in their training.
Get Further is proud to provide professional development for maths and English teachers in the Further Education sector. Our experienced curriculum managers are former teachers dedicated to improving learning experiences for young people, ensuring they make the progress and achieve the grades they deserve.
Written by Ed Noon, English Curriculum Manager at Get Further.
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Next in the series: “Why your teachers seem to ignore your feedback from learning walks or observations:” we turn our attention to ‘observations.’
In addition to training and upskilling our own tutors, Get Further proudly offers professional development for maths and English teachers in the Further Education sector. Our experienced Curriculum Managers, all former teachers, are committed to improving learning experiences and helping students achieve their full potential.
