A few days ago I wrote a quick tweet about the fact that CPD often doesn’t stick and, considering the wonderful algorithm of twitter, it gained some traction and had by far the most likes and re-tweets of any posts I have made recently.
This is interesting to me because of a couple of things:
People appear to be highly aware of this already.
This tells me that a lot of people agree that their schools move on from things way to quickly and do not give enough time to embed things. But if awareness is so high how come it still happens? Do schools have so many issues with how information moves between the layers of organisation that classroom teachers can not get a message to leaders of T+L that they need more time? Or are leaders really so obsessed with completing a pre-made improvement plan that they have a complete disregard for the success of each stage, their itchy trigger finger hovering over the ‘shade cell green’ icon as they cackle maniacally?
Nobody challenged me on it.
Not one comment thought to challenge me on these blanket statements on CPD and ask why I, a professional CPD provider, could make these statements without admitting that I have skin in the game? These comments probably reflect poorly on my ability to do my job, right?
It’s nice that people are friendly but I was surprised. We often ignore what skin a person has in the game and we should be more open to friendly challenge and transparency. Like if I offered an online training course in middle leadership and I say that middle leadership training is best done online then I might not be the best person to listen to. Or if I offer a particular coaching approach then I might not be the most balanced person to ask “Is coaching the solution to my teacher development needs?” And we wonder why schools run in endless cycles of fads……
It’s way too easy to poke holes in things from the sidelines, without offering up an alternative so I’m going to do my best to always back up my bullshit. If I complain about something in education I will do my best to either find a way to accept it can’t be changed and is just an inherent consequence of the system’s complexity, or try and suggest an improvement. If I don’t, feel free to call me out.
Also this blog is not going to be about how my CPD is special and I am better than others. This year I tried a highly ambitious change to our T+L policy and unfortunately it hasn’t stuck yet (#growthmindset). This blog is about a common issue that I see when working with schools and what I think the alternative should be.
How to make CPD stick.
1. Do a lot less CPD
What I mean is we often think of CPD as a year-long journey. This is my improvement plan for 2023-24 and it includes X,Y,Z strategies to improve teaching over the year etc… All T+L leads I’ve worked with have a few things in common. They are all highly enthusiastic “T+L geeks” and they all care deeply about supporting their schools to the best of their ability. This creates an inevitable problem where their pedagogical eyes are bigger than their school’s stomach. Too many priorities end up on the list. I totally understand when you learning walk some lessons in your own school and you see maybe 5 different things you want to improve on, it’s natural. After all, these students only get one shot at their education. So putting 5 things on the improvement plan makes sense, but it is a question of priorities. Instead consider a multi year journey that you will progress through as fast as your can cope with.
2. Prioritise your improvement goals.
Obviously everyone knows we need to prioritise and everyone reading this will already think they have because they have three priorities. But that is not prioritising. Prioritising is having one priority. This thing is the one thing we must get right first. This is our foundation, our bedrock of improvement that everything else will grow from. Why do people have three instead of one? Hard to say. It could range from superficial reasons like “We always have three” to a more problematic idea that people have incomplete views of effective teaching, approaching each aspect as a siloed technique instead of part of a complex decision tree teachers navigate each lesson.
It is not easy to have a single priority. There will be pressure to get better as fast as possible from above, but this is why leaders get paid the medium-sized bucks, we need to stand our ground. Each priority should be ordered sequentially to build up an overall picture of what we think great teaching is. So if we think climate is the most important thing to establish then that’s the priority. If the school is calm and ordered but passive, then maybe participation is the priority. Got high participation then maybe it’s checking for understanding*. Whatever we think, it’s important we take them one at a time.
3. Establish clear criteria for success.
A lot of improvement plans have criteria that say things like “Cold Call will be embedded into lessons and seen regularly” but that really doesn’t give us much information about when to move on. If we establish a criteria that is more specific like “In a review of cold call 95% of lessons show habitual use” then we now have a measurable target. If we think we have established Cold Call we can review it by visiting a lot of lessons and recording specifically if it was used correctly. Now you might be thinking ‘why does this need to be a specific review? Why not just capture this as part of learning walks?’ and that is a really good point. This review will work within the normal learning walk process but observers will be asked to specifically comment on Cold Calls presence. If we get a large sample and we see a high success rate then we know we can start to move on to the next priority. This focus shouldn’t be broadcast across the school as we want to find the evidence of habituality and don’t want to prime the teachers to do something different.
4. Embrace, then ignore, heterogeneity.
Within all schools there is variation in teacher quality. So should a CPD system be varied to allow different people to work on different things? Ideally yes it should and in a perfect world it would be. Unfortunately we are far from perfect. The most powerful tool a school has is social support. By having a singular focus we lose the ability to stretch all staff equally, but we gain two important things. The profile of the target is incredibly high, people are very aware and focussed on it. There is also a huge amount of peer support. People are seeing good practice being modelled, discussing it often, and sharing their success with their peers. Behaviour changes are complex contagions that move through networks using strong ties (More on this here), so by flooding the system with a single message we help make this adoption more sustained and build habits faster. This means some staff will feel unchallenged. It is true their CPD sessions will be discussing things they have demonstrated skill on, but there are two saving graces. Firstly, we can always get better and secondly, experienced staff sharing their experiences helps everyone else with implementation. We know that staff like to grow and develop though and this is where learning walk feedback plays a crucial role. The high-flying staff can be given leverage points that focus them on their next step in development. They don’t need CPD for this; they might only need some suggestions and a bit of coaching and practice. These become the early adopters of the next priority and help you build a series of subject-specific examples and be emissaries for future changes.
Where does this leave us then?
I think CPD is important, if not vital for teacher retention and work/life balance. Very few teachers don’t want to be better. I also know that those in charge of CPD want to support the staff.
By doing less and being patient we can create meaningful change in the teachers in our schools and create a culture of continuous improvement. These marginal gains that will make our schools successful and sustainable as they build over time.
I am sure there are lots of people who disagree with this. I’d love to know your thoughts.
Find me on twitter, threads (@MrARobbins) or Linkedin
* As a rule I think checking for understanding is more important than the quality of explanations because a good CFU will mop up issues in explanations but a good explanation might not hit home with all students and a weak CFU will not identify those gaps.
Adam Robbins Education 
Leave a comment