Collective Intelligence: the answer to your teaching questions and PPD may lie within your own school.
My job means I’m asked about teaching in lots of ways; in-school, yes, but also on Twitter and especially by DM. Questions are formed around ‘can you give me advice/help on/about…..” I’m always happy to help. That’s what a consultant does, with ideas magpied from all sorts of places. If a consultant’s experience warrants it, schools are happy to pay for that experience and can gain terrific value for money from the right advice. My career has taken me to hundreds and hundreds of schools and 5,000+ lessons – and I’ve got a human memory – just like you. I use it in every lesson I visit. The average teacher, post NQT year, often sees next to no lessons, unless they borrow equipment from a class in their department. And there’s the rub. The ‘lucky’ schools are those who actively encourage teachers into each other’s classrooms.
If you are now reading and thinking “we see all sorts of other lessons at my school, how can this be?” You are in a very fortunate minority. I’ve talked with teachers and I often ask the question “how many lessons have you seen in the last 3/5/20(!!) years and the times the answer is ‘none, or ‘next’ to ‘none is’ worryingly high.
Teachers teach, for goodness sake! If they don’t watch each other teach, they are missing out on so much possible PPD.
I attended a super in-school #teachmeet recently at @heanorgate. Around 10 really excellent ideas were presented to staff (2 mins per presentation) and we sat there entertained enthralled. Attendance from staff was excellent as they knew they’d get something good out of it and staff knew they could use some things immediately I particularly loved the idea of breaking down the title/question for the lesson in MFL to begin learning. You can bring in prior learning, increase vocabulary and all do sorts of clever things. You then start thinking about the content of your title to promote pupil awareness of the learning, rather than it just being something you put at the top of the board. *So clever!* However, staff wanted to see some other things in context, before they could get a sense of how they could be used.
The teach meet demonstrated the huge collective intelligence of the school. Your school has that same collective intelligence.
So; instead of schools sending teachers out on expensive CPD, which is then cascaded to an audience, use that collective Intelligence that already exists. The traditional models of CPD are changing. The old-style model is to send teachers to an expensive CPD meeting/event/conference and ask then to cascade on their return, at an in-school staff meeting. Unfortunately (and I’ll bet you’ve been here many times) not all their audience will see the benefits to them. Not surprisingly, they wish to concentrate upon something they feel is more important in their teaching and will not implement what they’ve heard.
Like @heanorgate and many other schools, develop new ways of sharing new practice. A #teachmeet is a great idea. Using social media can teach you an incredible amount. Even better, devise a system to combine these ideas. Get staff to visit each other’s classrooms, always with someone else, to do no more than simply watch each other teach. Do this very regularly, ask staff to follow up ideas they see and use Twitter to ask for more information and the quality of teaching in your school will improve, as teachers have the chance, like I have had, to magpie ideas from each other, see them being used in the context of lessons and ask if they have been useful to others via social media.
I call this idea ‘Talk for Teaching’ and it allows all staff to access the collective intelligence of the school in ways which benefit them personally. It changes the whole idea of centralised CPD to PPD, which I firmly believe is more useful to individuals. It can also be far less expensive to schools with limited CPD budgets and it is more enjoyable for a lot more people. I’m always happy to hep schools to set this up, but you don’t need me. I want schools to eventually do me out of a job and to be able to completely help themselves. Twitter is a big place!!
Talk for Teaching: just steal the idea and do it for yourselves!!