Lessons from the Classroom: the importance of a curriculum for CPD
By Zoe Enser @greeborunner | Seneca Virtual Conference | Curriculum: The Big Picture | 23 Oct 2021
On the 23rd of October 2021, Seneca hosted a free virtual conference about the Curriculum, featuring four incredible speakers and 800 signed-up attendees!
You can watch the recording on our YouTube channel here and access the slides here.
Below, it’s the article written by Zoe Enser, one of the speakers, as a summary of her talk.
It has been refreshing to see how much progress has been made in recent years with the curriculum in schools. Having come through the days of complete freedom on an individual teacher level, the prescription of National Strategy tied closely to APP and AOs for levels and exams, it is good to finally see the curriculum placed firmly in the hands of teachers.
This means there has been much more dialogue around what we teach, when we teach it, and what it is our students really need. These discussions have been developmental in themselves and teachers thinking deeply about what they are teaching can only ever have a positive outcome.
But one thing it made me wonder was how much time we actually devoted to using what we had learned about this kind of development when we came to thinking about teacher learning too.
One of the things I had also experienced was a sense that the learning I was doing as a teacher, tended to be rather disparate. Often there seemed to be a scattergun approach, nobody seemed clear which bits were really important, and we never checked carefully if any of that made a difference. It was saddening for me to read the results of the CUREE research around teacher learning and development in 2014 and find that less than 1% of CPD had a “transformational” impact on classroom practices and outcomes. Yet it is something which we invest in, both in terms of time and money, and sometimes this is even reflected in the career decisions which we come to make or are made about us. Ultimately none of the CPD we do matters though unless it has an impact on the outcomes of our students, in the broadest sense, so this is why I turned my attention to thinking about curriculum and learning for my students, to thinking about the curriculum and learning for my teachers and how some of the good practice could translate from classroom to staffroom.
(You can watch Zoe’s full talk above)
When we are designing the best curriculum for our students we go through several steps or stages. We look at their starting points, carefully identifying what they do and do not know. As part of this, we may consider things like their readiness to learn, the culture in which they are working, and how we can create the right environment for them as learners. Spaces where they can take risks and chances without the fear of failure and are motivated to take the opportunities, we present to them.
We think about the endpoints and what it is we want them to know and understand and be able to do at the end of their time with us. That might relate to external outcomes, or it might relate to them as learners, but we are still clear about where we want them to go.
And we also consider the milestones, the assessment points where we can check that they are on track, and use these to tell us if we need to take a step back, slow the pace a little, or accelerate forward more quickly.
Once we mapped the route we want to take, we then think about the pedagogy, the methods by which we will develop their understanding, and the different support and scaffolds they may need along the way to make sure that even if they have different starting points, they are all able to access the most important information and have the right opportunities to develop their thinking and make progress.
More recently still we have been delving more deeply into the science of learning, looking at this in a much more granular way. We have been examining the role of working memory, the processes we go through to embed learning in the longer term. We have also been considering ways to optimize cognitive load, where we might make use of retrieval in our curriculum design and the importance of sharing both the big picture and the steps and stages we will go through, with those we are teaching.
Somehow though, when we think about the learning of the adults around us, but I think there are a few differences in what we need to do to get the most out of the learning for ourselves and our teachers.
We still need to have a route mapped out. Either as leaders or teachers, we need to think about what it is we want to achieve. We need to have a forensic approach to this too, just as we do with our students. We need to consider what our starting point is too. For each participant or for each new thing we are approaching, we need to think carefully about what we already know and can do. We might have to draw on a range of different information for this to be accurate and sometimes that can mean having difficult conversations and each other.
It is important then, for this to work, that we have the right conditions for learning established. We need to have an environment where there is a self of mutual trust; one where we know it is okay to try something and for it not to go right; one where we can receive and accept honest feedback and one where we can challenge ourselves and others without fear.
Just as with the students we then need to think about our approaches. If we are taking time to think about how we convey key ideas to students, we need to think about that for teachers too. What is the complexity of this topic in relation to their starting points? What do they already have in their schema? What might the misconceptions be? What might be the best way for them to learn? It might be there is input from an expert at the start if the learning is new. It might be that the understanding is there, but prompts are needed to reflect on how this could be further developed. It might be that time to discuss and explore with colleagues is the most effective approach at this stage and this needs to be prioritised.
Finally, we need opportunities to look at progress. Again, with the right conditions, this can be done with openness and honesty, exploring it deeply and with care. We can discuss the impact it has on our students, what our next steps might be and what, if anything, might need to be ‘ditched’.
And this final point is an important one. If our students really needed to be able to do fractions, then spending our time getting them to repeatedly draw ox-bow lakes may not be the answer. If they can do fractions well, we might want to move on to something else completely. If there is no real value in them learning about fractions, then maybe we need to rethink the curriculum again. Yet often with teachers we revisit the same element again, or jump around to something else, or ask them to do fractions at the same time as drawing an ox-bow lake, whilst standing on one leg and singing the national anthem. We need to keep a sharper focus on what we are asking, and sometimes that can mean making tough decisions about what we do and do not want them to do.
So, I want to think deeply about teacher learning; think deeply about the curriculum we want our teachers to have across the whole school, in their teams, and for ourselves as an individual. We need to think deeply about the journey we want to go on and give it the same time and value it as much as the curriculum we want to give our students.
Zoe is the Lead Specialist Adviser for The Education People across Kent. Follow her @greeborunner. Prior to this she was an English Teacher for 20 years, as well as Head of Department and Senior Leader for CPD and Teaching and Learning. Zoe also works with the EEF as an ELE in Kent, the Teacher Development Trust as a specialist adviser, working on their NQT Leading Teacher Development, and is the co-author of two books, Generative Learning in Action and The CPD Curriculum. She is currently writing a book on teaching Shakespeare as well as writing for a variety of teaching publications.