It is a weekday in June and I am sitting in the garden, writing this while working from home.

I am also juggling homeschooling with two very reluctant teenage boys, fighting against the lure of their friends on Xbox.

As we come towards the last leg of the summer term, most teachers have now been out of their actual classrooms and teaching remotely from virtual ones for more than three months.

Many people found themselves feeling completely deskilled while plunged into a new way of working and desperately trying to do the best for their pupils in strange and unprecedented circumstances. 

Yet, we have adapted surprisingly quickly to new technologies and methods of delivery and have perhaps undergone some of the most rapid and intense CPD of our careers.

Lessons from lockdown

So, what has lockdown taught us about CPD? Perhaps most significantly, it has taught us not to fear change. Often we cling to the things we believe work or to materials and pedagogies that we have invested our time into, and letting go can be difficult.

In this brave new world, we have to think about things differently. We have to take the opportunity to develop new strategies and ways of working. We have to face the idea that education might not be the same for the foreseeable future. But maybe it shouldn’t be.

Conceivably the biggest training we have undertaken is the move to online and remote learning. Teachers have risen to the immediate challenge of working with new technologies in a complex and continually evolving way. 

School leaders have also had to learn and to develop CPD for their colleagues that supports them to use newly created online platforms and technologies such as Microsoft Teams or Google Classroom, among others.

We are learning to work with colleagues remotely as well as with our pupils: attending meetings, adapting new materials and setting work online. We’ve been communicating with and teaching pupils through pre-recorded presentations or live lessons; reviewing work in multiple digital forms; and providing feedback from our homes.  

In this context, we are honing our use of pedagogies and formative assessment strategies to suit new methods of delivery.

Adapting CPD

As such, our CPD provision and content has also had to adapt and evolve. Leaders of professional development have had to swiftly develop their own skills and provide training in fresh ways. 

Creating videos and audio content or live training for colleagues in a way that is effective and accessible to all is a challenge in itself - especially for those with an aversion to the sound of their own recorded voice.

However, we have become adept at accessing material online. Teachers are able to engage with such content at a time that suits them as they spin those plates of remote teaching and home learning and generally surviving in anxious and difficult times. 

Lockdown has taught us to be flexible; going forward, we can continue to offer this flexibility via remote access to live or recorded professional development. Consequently, it allows part-time workers, or any colleague, the freedom to access development they might otherwise have missed. 

This engagement is also evident in the positive uptake of attendance at myriad virtual conferences and seminars.

Clearly, collaboration and connectivity is something we yearn for and individuals are taking ownership of their own development.

External CPD providers have increased their reach through webinars; maintaining this provision in the future could provide welcome relief to school budgets as staff would not need to be released to attend. As such, CPD becomes more meaningful and more integrated into our daily working life.

Work to be done

Overall, then, we have learned many new skills and successfully adapted to the most rapid changes we will have experienced in our careers. We need to embrace these changes and use the experience to enhance our provision going forward.

However, we must be careful not to fall into the trap of allowing our CPD provision to be simply reactive and standalone, or to rely on the voluntary engagement of teachers to seek out their own CPD. Leaders must remember the evidence around effective development. 

Continual professional development is key. It needs to be carefully designed around the starting points of the participants and it should be iterative, with the duration reflecting the demands of the content and individual learning need. 

Schools need to be supportive professional learning spaces, but they also need to consider how they can offer open-access delivery models that are tailored to the individual at any stage or situation in their career. 

Central to all this must be the improvement of teaching and pupil progress. Our biggest challenge as leaders of professional development now is to find an effective way forward with this at the core of all we do in this brave new world.

Joanne Tiplady is an English teacher, research lead and literacy coordinator at Beverley High School in East Yorkshire