We were a little fed up. Time and time again, we’d be sat on our own, waiting for staff to drop in to CPD events, or we’d be in front of a mostly empty room delivering twilight good practice workshops to a handful of staff that either deemed it worthwhile or were the only ones able to attend.

Our efforts to improve professional practice seemed like a waste of time and yet we knew there was value in CPD. As such, rather than accept this situation and plod on, we set about trying to change it.

So in 2017, Havant and South Downs College (HSDC) put together a bid to the Education and Training Foundation (ETF) for a grant of around £9,000 to find new ways of exploring outstanding teaching, learning and assessment. Our bid was accepted and, with the grant in place, an idea was conceived of a website that would allow the main barriers to engaging in CPD - time and money - to be overcome by showcasing instances of good practice from three local colleges (HSDC, Fareham and Eastleigh).

This would be done by the creation of short, snappy and engaging videos on CPD-related ideas and practical suggestions that education professionals could watch whenever it suited them, free of charge.

The end result, the Teacher’s Takeaway (teacherstakeaway.co.uk) website, went live in October 2017. And it may prove very useful in colleges over the next few months for remote CPD.

The above makes the whole process sound a lot simpler than it actually was. For example, some practitioners were initially hesitant to step forward and volunteer to produce video resources as they were uncomfortable with being filmed. This was something we had not anticipated as it was assumed that, with teachers being used to standing up and talking in front of people, they would be comfortable speaking to a camera.

However, with excellent support from our creative learning specialist, the purchase of an Autocue system - and sheer perseverance - this barrier has started to erode, but is still there for some members of staff at the college.

CPD for college teachers

Even more fundamentally, staff did not view what they were doing as “good practice” ; they saw it as “doing what I normally do”. This meant that work needed to be done to unpick lessons and assist staff in identifying areas of good practice and the benefits of sharing them. These challenges lessened over time, though, and we got into a good groove of teachers stepping forward to help out.

Topics came from staff, as did the solutions. We now have 38 videos on the site discussing everything from how to get to know your students better to behaviour management strategies and classroom layouts, providing a mix of interesting, diverse content for educators to access.

One good example of a scheme was the use of “Post-it Ponders”. Students were asked to write down two or three things they have just learned, then share them around the class. The idea was to share learning through peer interaction and it also give the teacher a good idea of how much of what they teach has “gone in”. Some colleges are recording their sessions using a 360˚ camera to demonstrate the application of such practices to their colleagues.

We have shared the results of this project at various national (AoC and British Educational Research Association) and international (2018 Faculty of Education International Conference, Malta, and Eurasia Research International Conference 2018, Barcelona) events, which has resulted in the videos being viewed by users all around the world.

Feedback, overall, has been positive, with practitioners internally and also around the country using the videos.

Joint practice makes perfect

While the positive feedback has been rewarding to hear about, we were quietly confident that this would be the case, as we had based the idea of the site and its ethos in best practice around CPD and knowledge sharing - chiefly the concept of joint practice development (JPD).

This concept was developed by Fielding et al (2005): rather than CPD being developed and enforced centrally, teachers instead take ownership of their own development via the creation and fostering of links between practising professionals.

Training that is realistic, skills-based and constructive has been shown to be more valuable and received more positively by teachers. This is at the heart of the Teacher’s Takeaway mission.

Furthermore, JPD is meant to focus on the development of teachers’ practice over time rather than a simple one-off transfer that happens so much with CPD. While the latter has its merits, attendance, engagement and the overall success of these dissemination events is often very low, as our own experience has shown.

Also, as Hargreaves (2012) has argued, implementing a new practice in the classroom - one which the originator has developed and adjusted over time - is extremely difficult. In part, this is because simply listening to an account of the practices’ success in a one-off event is not that beneficial for an educator.

Instead, by providing a form of JPD via videos that can be accessed and re-accessed by teachers whenever required, it means that, rather than a simple one-off knowledge transfer, staff can dip in whenever suits them and refresh their understanding of a key idea or concept.

Another benefit of connecting people on the site is that it has become a professional forum, with more than 150 members on it, to support discussion and share best practice ideas between teaching professionals across the further education sector. It is well known there is often great value in the five-minute conversations that take place when grabbing a coffee or walking down the corridor, so Teacher’s Takeaway aims to capture the power that those five-minute conversations can have by encouraging user engagement and feedback.

And this is important, not just for moments of spontaneity or knowledge sharing but also for more fundamental engagement between practitioners working in the same field. British sociologist David Gauntlett says that the impact that small acts of everyday creativity can have in helping people connect in this way should not be overlooked.

Ultimately, by providing a space where teachers can talk about what is really happening in practice and share concepts that can connect them, it frees them from the bonds of pedagogic solitude.

This is key. We have to turn to new systems and technologies that can allow knowledge to be shared, ideas discussed and practitioners to feel they are part of a wider development of skills and concepts that inform their teaching if more traditional, time-intensive approaches are not feasible.

With this in mind, the plan for the future of Teacher’s Takeaway is for more videos to be created and uploaded from a variety of sources. We hope that more practitioners, internally and externally, would like to share their views on camera.

At HSDC, we would be more than happy to work with teachers and record videos using our digital design studio so, if you or your team are interested, please do get in touch, or film the video and send it to us - it’s about sharing first and foremost.

Dom Thompson is the higher education manager and a teaching and learning coach at Havant and South Downs College. David Galloway is project manager of Teacher’s Takeaway

This article originally appeared in the 27 March 2020 issue under the headline “Takeaway CPD that’s delivered in bitesize chunks”