Focus on CPD : One School’s Story
Mount Pleasant Primary School is 116 years old and has fourth generation children amongst its 425 pupils. Situated in the heart of the Black Country, originally famous for coal, chain and glass, life was hard for the likes of Ozzie Biddell who as an ex-pupil still joins us on Friday afternoons as part of the Local History Group. At 89, Ozzie has much to share with today’s pupils and enjoys doing so. Gwen is 35 years old and is mentally disabled. She and seven other such friends join Year 6 on Tuesday afternoons and work together to produce a community news sheet. Joshua is 6months old and comes with his Mummy each Thursday to a family share session in our Children’s Centre. During the week up to 90 children between the ages of 6months and 3years come to the Centre with a family member to join in the fun as part of the Parent’s in Partnership Programme. Our school opens at 7.45a.m. for Breakfast Club and closes most evenings at 9p.m. after community use. We work hard to draw together the interest and support of the home, the school and the community to embrace the whole child and move his/her interests and development forward. All groups are actively engaged as part of a learning community. Our teaching team believes that we should be providing a curriculum and environment that motivates, inspires and challenges the child. We also strongly believe that when using assessment we should make it pertinent to a child’s needs. In order to do this we have worked hard to establish a professional openness that encourages reflection, debate and challenge and has led us to be involved with an interesting variety of CPD opportunities. You may be interested in how we have created and managed these opportunities and in order to give some coherence to our experience I have drawn our work together into 4 areas.
- Sharing and disseminating good practice.
- Individual professional development.
- Collaboration.
- School based innovation.
Sharing and disseminating good practice.
During our first Ofsted Inspection the RgI commented on the importance we attached to school self review. We have a teaching and support team of 34 and a non-teaching team of 9 and were awarded our first Investors in People status over 9 years ago. Since then all employees have had the continuing right to opportunities for professional development and I will return to this individual agenda later. However I consider the most important aspect of my CPD support for staff is to help them to share and disseminate good practice so that the school as a whole benefits. However finding the time and opportunity to share is often very challenging so here are some of the ideas I have used over a period of time.
- Staff meetings held in each year group so that display ideas and work standards are shared. Sometimes colleagues never have time to venture into other parts of the school. (Include Governors Meetings as well).
- During a Training Day set aside an hour (pre-planned), and beginning physically in Nursery allow 5 minutes (stop watched) for the Nursery Team to tell the whole staff about their methods of teaching/organisation/terms theme. Staff provide a summary as a handout for all staff. Then move on to the next year through to Year 6. (Be strict with the stop watch!).
- Again for a Training Day or Staff Meeting ask staff who have attended courses or workshops with an overlap theme, to prepare a joint presentation and allocate a set amount of time for questions. Minute and attach to a copy of the presentation and circulate to all staff.
- At the end of term ask each member of staff to write up an aspect of their classroom practice that they really enjoyed during the term and be prepared to talk to it for a maximum of 10 minutes during a whole staff meeting. Randomly select 6 (I hour) and then collect all written reports, copy and create a booklet for all staff.
- Provide a bookcase for books purchased at conferences or courses and have a regular short slot during staff meetings for staff to highlight an aspect from one of the books that has interested them.
- Purchase several copies of one book/paper based on a piece of research that is relevant to an idea or activity being trialled in school and invite a group of staff to read the work and then ask one to lead a discussion with a view to implications for the school based trial.
- Create an Interest Team each term with a named lead person around something that is interesting them and that they would like to pursue. Others will attend the meetings and take either an active or a merely interested, passive role depending on their other commitments. (Artsmark Gold and Eco School awards came from such teams.)
- Workforce Remodelling began for us with a move towards employing no dinner ladies. All the members of the Support Team are trained NVQ level 2/3 and work various time schedules. Each cohort has a member of the team working with them throughout the day including play and dinner time breaks giving continuity particularly with standards of behaviour. All support staff are involved in whole staff training sessions and if this falls outside their contracted hours they are paid for additional hours worked. In addition there is a monthly afternoon training session for the support team in key areas of their work led by either our own staff or bought in specialists.
- We have a section in our School Improvement Plan for “Projects”. This enables the “good idea” to have space and time to grow and to become part of our whole school practice.
Time spent out of the classroom is precious and the cost of training is often prohibitive. By using the above strategies we are able to maximise both our time and money to the best advantage sharing and above all embedding our whole school practice and our consistency ultimately benefits children.
CPD…Personal Development.
Through our professional development programme we engage in Action Research. This often leads to innovative practice which in turn impacts on whole school policy. In recent years individual members of staff have looked at:-
- Factors affecting underachievement.
- The role of spoken language in communication.
- Early Effective Learning.
- Accounting Early for Life Long Learning.
- Advanced Learning in ICT.
- Transition and the importance of the learning environment.
Each piece of work has been of great interest and benefit to the individual but it is important to note that all areas of research have had tremendous impact in school as teachers have shared good practice as identified above. As each teacher has led their work they have developed both subject knowledge and management skills.
1. The work on factors affecting under-achievement led to our reviewing the way in which we used pupil assessment with greater emphasis being placed, particularly in the early years, on pre-school experiences and level of family support. Eventually following a successful Lottery Bid I was able to open a Children’s Centre where we “actively engage the family with their child’s learning and development”. The teacher who carried out the original piece of work went on to be seconded to work in the Assessment Unit of the LEA.. Since returning to school she has been promoted to Deputy Head and has recently completed her NPQH training. Next term she has been invited to work with the Dfes on areas of Assessment.
2. The teacher who used her Best Practice Research Scholarship to investigate the role of spoken language in communication became our lead teacher within a Comenius project linking our school with schools in Austria and Germany. Over a period of 3 years we have joined together 8 year olds in 3 counties by using video conferencing to create a virtual classroom. The children with their teachers have used words/sounds/and pictures to create a CDRom picture and words dictionary in English and German. As well as learning a lot about language and communication we have all learnt a great deal about each others culture and established foreign language teaching in our schools.
3&4. Both EEL and AcE have been pilot studies for the wider research work of Professor Christine Pascal . EEL has looked at the importance of observation as a tool in teacher’s understanding of how a child learns and the progress the child is making. AcE has looked at a child’s disposition to learn and added to the work of our Children’s Centre has enabled us to work with children and members of their families and has resulted in a steady improvement in a child’s early years experiences and ultimately has led to a rise in pupil performance . Our focus on appropriate pupil progress led us to work on basic skills which in turn led to a Basic Skills Quality Mark. The teacher who led this work became an Advanced Skills Teacher and has just left us to take up a post at a neighbouring Teacher Training College as Senior Lecturer in Early Years.
5. Yet again the teacher who used her BPRS to set up and lead an Advanced Learning Centre for ICT on behalf of the National Primary Trust has also become an AST. As a further development she has also become part of a Learning Network (NCSL) and has been instrumental in working with other school’s to develop the use of Whiteboards.
6. A small piece of Action Research which I used to look at the transition experience of children as they moved from Reception to Year 1 led to my visiting Australia last Summer to present a paper at an International Early Years Conference. In turn this work has been picked up by the Dfes Innovation Unit and I am now leading a National Project which I have called Y1P:EE (Year 1 Project: Excellence and Enjoyment) and looks at the tensions experienced by children and teachers at the interface between Reception and Year1.
Within each school there are practitioners who have an interest to find the answer to often a quite small question. Action Research does not have to be linked to a University or indeed need an audience outside the school and yet it is such a powerful tool for bringing about change and…as can be seen from these 6 examples can be a great motivator for personal development …and sometimes a personal change in direction.
Collaboration.
In sharing and discussing with others we revise and reflect our own practice. As children find when explaining their thinking or work, sometimes it is not quite as they thought it was. So, when we are required to articulate what we do we question ourselves as to why we do things in a certain way. Is it habit or is our practice still current? Working with colleagues outside our school gives us a greater opportunity to share, develop and when necessary change our thinking. Having trained as a Primary Strategy Consultant Leader I have found it interesting to use the training to consider my own Leadership Team and review how we approach the management of Literacy and Numeracy and monitor pupil progress. Several members of my middle management team are working in collaboration with other such managers by becoming part of the NCSL’s on-line Leading from the Middle programme. Another senior member of staff has developed a role with the local University as part of their student interview panel and regularly lectures to students. As a current practitioner she works closely with the staff and plays a significant part in monitoring the7 Post Graduate teaching students we take every year. As a founder member of the National Primary Education Alliance I see the strength in joining associations together to professionally challenge Government policy : in this case, the continuing agenda around KS1 Testing. We learn from each other and we are strong together…Working Together: Achieving Together.
Innovative School Practice.
I have been Headteacher at Mount Pleasant for 20 years. Sometimes I am asked how I can have worked in the same school for so long and I reply I havn’t. In that time it has been about 3 if not 4 different schools:ever changing, ever developing, filled with interesting, often inspiring children and grown ups. Some of our current innovative practice includes:-
- Team Teaching and Peer Mentoring
- Playground Project (through our School Council see our school website www.mount.dudley.gov.uk)
- Y1P:EE Project. Extending the Reception teaching and learning agenda into Y1 and now in its second year, challenging the Y2 Assessment led agenda.
- Palm 1. A pilot that has seen every child in Y5 given a Palm to own and to use at home and school.
- Parent’s in Partnership Programme actively engaging family members with their child’s learning.
- Recently I have been involved with the government’s current thinking around Personalised Learning and found the workshops really challenged me and stretched my thinking. Working with other like minded colleagues was stimulating and I returned to school with many ideas for staffroom discussions.
Summary.
I began by saying that this is one school’s story of continuing professional development. You in turn could write your school’s story. We all have one as we all strive to be good teachers in order to do the best we can for each child. Dialogue, discussion, challenge, research, reflection. Continuing professional development gives us opportunity for all this and whether we are in our first or last year of teaching we should take the opportunities offered to stay engaged.
Gail K Bedford.
|
