Part 4 of 4

In the last newsletter I shared recommendation 2 of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) Effective Professional Development guidance report. In this edition, I’ll focus on the third recommendation: Implement professional development programmes with care taking into consideration the context and needs of the school.

“The implementation of professional development is likely to make a substantial difference to the outcomes it achieves. No matter how well thought out a professional development programme is in terms of content and design, for it to succeed it needs to be feasible and appropriate to the school or setting context” (EEF, p. 30).

Those who design or select professional development need to consider how it can be adapted to suit the school’s context, including alignment with the school’s priorities, ensuring leadership buy-in and time and capacity for teachers to engage.

“It is important to find a balance between fidelity to the original programme design and intelligent adaptation: the ideal is a level of implementation that remains faithful to the mechanisms of the programme whilst also being contextually relevant and practical to implement” (EEF, p.32)

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