CPD is NOT the answer
Welcome back to school!
You’ve sat through more CPD than real life cinema in the last 3 years, without popcorn, without feeling entertained and, I’m pretty sure, barely changing what you do day to day in your teaching.
This admin, that process, these platforms, all this compliance to safeguarding and deadlines - yes, you’ve endured all of that and complied where you can.
But has it made a difference to your students’ grades? Not likely.
The answer is also not personalised CPD.
If you want that, go out and find it. Read books, read blogs, read Substack. Then try things out and measure the impact on your students’ progress or attainment.
Anything else is just a magpie grabbing shiny objects.
Here’s a quick guide to the top 10 things that made a difference in my 28 years of teaching. Almost none of them came from CPD.
The Top 10 Things that have most made a difference to my students’ grades
1. Using the visualiser to:
Show call students’ work and provide instant feedback.
Demonstrate exactly what I want students to do or write.
Give whole class feedback on success, misconceptions, next steps.
No CPD involved - I just bought a visualiser.
2. Using model answers to:
Make explicit what success looks like.
Make explicit what grades 5 and 7 look like, instead of 9 (or equivalent at KS3). Concrete examples instead of abstract criteria.
Teach an underlying structure to writing in different genres.
Guide student practice in these.
No CPD involved - I just wrote and sourced model answers and started teaching from them.
3. Using the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve to:
Work out what knowledge to embed in long term memory
Test that knowledge through regular retrieval
Space those retrievals over all the school years at optimum gaps
Create a retrieval curriculum which includes in class Do Nows, homework and assessment as retrieval events.
No CPD involved - Ebbinghaus and Knowledge Organisers came from blogs, and the rest came from thinking hard about the implications for my curriculum and student progress.
4. Creating Booklets so that
All the resources teachers and students need are in one place
The team can work on the best activities which are likely to promote learning and standardise those books
All the model answers and success criteria students need are instantly accessible to learn and revise from
Learning can move forwards and backwards effortlessly, without jumping through folders and files
What students see on the board is exactly the same as what is in front of them, reducing cognitive load and avoiding split attention
Teachers can edit the booklets for their class and report back on improvements so that all teachers get a better booklet for the unit next year
No CPD involved - we just naturally started experimenting with booklets
5. Reading every answer ever published by AQA to work out what actually gains marks, so that
We can give students real advice, instead of what the examiner’s claim is true in training or the examiner’s reports
Students can follow simple, actionable steps which are easy to follow instead of the impenetrable mark schemes
I can train English teams by showing them what actually gets marks vs what the exam board claims gets marks - teachers find it easy to believe what they see rather than what they are told
No CPD involved - I just did the reading and analysis.
6. Using these TLAC Techniques to improve students: thinking hard, working hard and remembering more:
Cold Call
Show Call
Tracking not watching
Silent Solo
Do Now
Right is Right
No Opt Out
Apart from Silent Solo in nearly every lesson, these were all inherent in my teaching anyway. This must have happened as a result of observing what helped students make progress.
The language to name them proved invaluable in helping departments and all teachers adopt these. But, no CPD was involved, I just read Teach Like a Champion and tried to work out which techniques were likely to lead to most progress.
I then visited a school to see it in action, but most of what the school claimed was standard practice wasn’t (on the day of our visit anyway). This made me focus on what was truly scaleable.
7. Create assessments as though there were no GCSE, so that
Students practise what you believe actually makes an expert in your subject
Students receive feedback, and act on feedback, which make them better at your subject discipline, rather than the narrow focus of GCSE papers
Students get better GCSE grades (because what you value is always grade 7-9 and beyond).
No CPD involved - I just compared the GCSE questions to what I would teach if there were no GCSE exam but I wanted students to be brilliant at in my subject.
(Yes, at KS4, you also have many goes at the high mark questions - ignore the rest)
8. Create a curriculum based on what you value: so, plan backwards from the assessment tasks, so that
Everything students learn has a compounding impact on how they master your subject
We cut out the fluff, going deeper with the knowledge and skills which matter most
We create a sequenced curriculum which leads to greater schema and understanding
No CPD involved - we just thought hard about what we value, and looked for the quickest ways for students to learn it.
9. Know thy impact. Measure everything, so that we
Can never kid ourselves about what is working well - data has to tell us
Collect a range of data to sift through the noise and correlation and work out the story it might be telling
Constantly experiment and iterate to see if we can improve in every area of the curriculum - that is, what students do as a result of teaching
Do question level analysis, looking at the range of scores, not just the average, to work out what is working and what isn’t
Find where teachers are succeeding and use them to train the rest of the team on what they do
Look at books as a team and find those successes, and also realise where our students are performing less well, so we want to learn how the successful teachers do it
Share all our data so that we own the progress of the whole team rather than just reflect on or defend our own teaching
Develop each other rather than be trained, instructed, held accountable, scrutinised, judged.
No CPD involved - my thinking has always been this way, because I began life as a tax inspector, working out the lies told in data - accounts - and then rethinking what the true story might be, and proving it beyond reasonable doubt with data, so that the tax cheat paid up.
I have been influenced by Visible Learning, the first book to spell out what actually works vs what doesn’t.
10. Lesson visits rather than lesson observation, so that
Teachers receive immediate feedback on what seems to be leading to progress
The curriculum can be improved by instantly sharing good practice or improving what is not working in task design or booklets
Leaders get a much more accurate picture of the needs of their team and plan for team development rather than individual correction
No CPD involved, although this change was prompted by reading research from Professor Robert Coe, The MET Project and David Didau’s posts.
I taught for 28 years before becoming a consultant and entrepreneur. None of the CPD I received makes it into the top 10 things I have learned which make a difference.
Of course, you could deliver CPD on all of these things (and I do).
None of it is personalised. All of it is based on improving the curriculum - how can you improve what student think hard about and do.
Most CPD is a Waste of Time, Because:
Leaders don’t think hard enough about what, precisely, will lead to progress.
Even when they do, they are very reluctant to go out and measure what impact it has on students.
Leaders might look for compliance to build consistency, but they rarely look at good practice as measured by progress.
Leaders dilute training by constantly adding to it and moving away from the main thing - the curriculum.
Teachers view CPD as a personalised entitlement, and no school can deliver this. Instead they should see CPD as any change in their behaviour which leads to improved progress for their students.
Leaders don’t use the team to develop the team, and so they don’t hold people ‘able’, they simply hold them ‘accountable’ - compliance instead of growth.
Leaders are afraid of experiments, because mistakes feel costly. They aren’t. The 9 failed experiments will make little difference, but the one success will add months of extra progress every year, and half grades and full grades by the end of year 11.