Awesome INSET - a CPD celebration!

On Friday 4^th July, @dickseeboy (Ian Dicksee), @petemona (Pete Monaghan) and I held our last ever INSET day as a team of three.  We have been working on teaching and learning together for two years and wanted our final INSET of the year (and indeed of an era) to be one  that focused on celebrating the hard work and successes of the staff who have worked tirelessly to help us implement key changes over the last 24 months.

One of the most important initiatives Ian introduced when he joined the school as the leader of our team was the concept of inquiry group learning.  The idea behind inquiry groups is that staff would work on a specific area of their practice across an academic year in collaboration with other members of staff from a range of curriculum areas.  This year I was in an inquiry group with teachers of science, food, business studies, sociology and art focusing on stretch and challenge, other groups focused on written feedback (and other forms of feedback), coaching, assessment for learning and many others.  The purpose is to read and research, identify ideas, implement ideas with support from colleagues, peer observe one another non-judgementally and share good practice.  It is a powerful way of developing practice and had resulted in lots of lovely things happening in classrooms around the school.  The three of us were very aware of how good our staff are and wanted staff to have the opportunity to ‘magpie’ from one another, hear ideas, share ideas and generally feel inspired and proud by the work happening in classrooms across our school. 

We considered a number of approaches (including an internal TeachMeet style) but decided to adopt the approach of 3by3, a concept I first saw at a ‘Purposed’ event a number of years ago.  The idea was that each teacher would create short presentation – 3 slides, 3 minutes – on something they had developed from their inquiry groups.  To reduce pressure on the staff members delivering we decided to make it optional, have multiple presentations going on at once (imagine a learning and teaching marketplace) and limit audience numbers to 5 people at a time.  Each talk was delivered 6 times and the Deputy Head played time keeper.  There were two time slots – session A and session B so those delivering could still attend 6 talks and those not delivering could hear 12.  Ian then created a booklet of all the presentations so that everyone had access to everything regardless of the sessions they had attended.

We were overwhelmed by the response – 38 teachers volunteered to present, and varied in role and experience.  Talks were given by trainee teachers, heads of department, pastoral leaders, NQTs, RQTs and members of leadership team and all were well received.  One of our worries was how staff would feel if no one came to their talk – but actually it just didn’t happen, everyone had a handful of people for every session and the buzz and excitement in the room was amazing. 

Would we do anything differently? Absolutely.  Staff feedback helped us identify the even better ifs for the session – we should have given the session breakdowns in advance so staff could plan out the talks they wanted to attend in advance.  We could have introduced more time for staff to discuss in-between sessions to avoid brain-burnout after 6 high intensity sessions.  Perhaps 4 sessions of fewer talks and fewer repetitions could have helped with this but it was a minor detail – the session worked and it worked because of our fabulous staff.

Our other big learning and teaching focus has been assessment which Pete has led on.  The introduction of a new set of assessment principles focusing primarily on the development of formative and summative assessment has been a huge change for the school.  We have monitored and evaluated lot over the last two years and have seen real improvements in the quality of marking and feedback across the school.  Again, we thought it would be really good for the staff to have the opportunity to share good practice and celebrate the progress made in this area.  We didn't want to put hem through anything that would feel like a judgement or a scrutiny so wanted to go a bit creative.  Both Pete and I loved this tweet from @HarrisGreenwich earlier this year:

...and wondered if we could do something with this idea.  We asked the staff to each put forward one book that they were proud of and created a gallery style exhibition of books laid out by department.  They were laid out in the canteen with our theory being that people could grab a tea or coffee and have a look at some of the great work being done across the school.  Again we were unsure as to whether this would have the impact we wanted it to have but decided to take the gamble and, by and large, it paid off.  All staff contributed books and all staff took the opportunity to have a look with some showing all the behavioural characteristics of active magpies, making notes and taking photos of ideas that they really liked from other departments and communities.   

This activity received mixed feedback from staff, mostly in that they found it really helpful but had lots of suggestions for how it could have been developed further.  They recommended that rather than presenting books in subject areas, we categorise them by other factors such as examples of good practice or by types of student (for example - DSEN) and requested a wider range of books to see how a teacher's good practice transferred to different contexts.  Some requested that rather than doing this as a coffee break activity, it should have been an activity in it's own right as they didn't feel they could get stuck into the books without sacrificing the opportunity for a comfort/refreshment break.  Finally many thought it would have been beneficial to have more time than was allocated, for feedback and discussion in communities to share ideas and possible action points.  

The third and final session of the day was about looking forward to next year.  We had some teething issues with the inquiry groups this year due to timetabling and time restraints and also a sense that for some staff, the focus for the group was too open ended, people did not know what they should read or how to address their focus.  This year instead of asking people to select a  focus and then attend twilight training, we decided to incorporate inquiry sessions into INSET days so that staff had protected time.  We also decided to provide staff with a number of taster sessions so that their choice of inquiry was based on experience and entirely down to personal interest.  We also decided that we would generate relevant reading for people to review.  We sent out an options form to staff in advance of the day with abut 15 sessions that they could choose from, the sessions were mostly delivered by the three of us (purely in a  bid to reduce workload in the final weeks of term) with staff attending at least 3 sessions of their choice across an hour and fifteen minutes.  The resources from all sessions were posted on the VLE with accompanying articles or recommended blogs (a mini-reading before the academic reading in September).  The sessions were well received and staff seemed to appreciate the taster approach - although the full impact of this will best be measured through the inquiry programme next year.  I do think however, that if we were to do one thing differently, we would definitely enlist the help of other presenters - delivering 4 different tasters in 75 minutes was the most brain exhausting INSET-thing I have ever had to do! 

So... the end of an era.  @Petemona begins his new role in September, I move on to a new life in Devon in January and @dickseeboy has a new awesome team to take learning and teaching to the next level.  The overall feedback from staff was overwhelmingly positive, with some commending it as the best CPD they had ever had - high praise indeed!!  This INSET day celebrated everything the staff at school have achieved in the last two years and it made me feel proud to have been part of the journey, and part of an amazing team of staff.