Part 3 of 4
In the last newsletter I shared recommendation 1 of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) Effective Professional Development guidance report. In this edition, I’ll focus on their second recommendation: Ensure that professional development effectively builds knowledge, motivates, develops techniques, and embeds practice.
Recommendation 1 highlighted that the more mechanisms (such as target setting, feedback, and action planning) a professional development programme has, the greater the impact on pupil attainment. The guidance report groups these mechanisms into three groups: build knowledge; motivate teachers; develop teaching techniques; and embed practice.
Building knowledge relates to presenting new knowledge in ways that support understanding, including managing cognitive load and revisiting prior learning.
Motivating teachers relates to supporting teachers to act on their new knowledge, including via setting and agreeing on goals; presenting information from a credible source; and providing affirmation and reinforcement after progress.
Developing teaching techniques provides teachers with the tools to act and to change practice having built knowledge and being motivated to act upon it. This could include instructing teachers on how to perform a technique (such as via the use of instructional coaching via the Early Career Teachers programme delivered by Bradford Teaching School Hub); arranging social support (such as community events within our National Professional Qualifications); modelling; providing feedback; and rehearsing (e.g., repeated practice within instructional coaching cycles as part of the ECT programme).
Embedding practice supports teachers to continue to change their behaviour and improve their teaching using prompts and cues; action planning; self-monitoring; and context-specific repetition.
You can download the guidance report and the supporting documentation here.
Bradford Teaching School Hub is working with Bradford Research School to provide teachers and leaders a full briefing on the guidance report via an event on 29th November 2021, 16:00-17:30. You can register for the event here.
Best wishes
Paul
Paul Butler
Director: Bradford Teaching School Hub, Exceed Academies Trust
