I am standing at the front of the classroom, wearing a Stetson hat.

My bewildered Year 10s stare at me. They know this is a lesson on Of Mice and Men, but does that really require their teacher to dress like a cowboy?

Ten years ago, I would have said “yes” without a moment’s hesitation. For a large part of my career, I am ashamed to admit, I subscribed to the false notion that anyone could teach anything, so long as they had a decent hook and an engaging manner. I still blush when I remember how proud I was of certain lessons from my early career that involved beach balls and feather boas.

Luckily, since becoming a faculty leader, I have seen the light. Teaching, it turns out, is all about subject knowledge. You can’t do any of it without that.

Faculty-led CPD must, therefore, always prioritise subject knowledge above everything else. This was the truth that I hit upon during this recent time of school closures when I decided to reimagine my department’s CPD programme.

In lockdown, I found myself with more time than I would have been afforded in any other year during the hallowed (but brief) period after the last GCSE students have left the building. For once, I really had the thinking space to consider the changes I wanted to make within my faculty, and to examine those changes in more depth.

My small but growing English department already has an incredible diversity of knowledge - from the PhD candidate, to the history graduate with a sprinkling of media studies thrown in, to me, the classics graduate.

But do we all have the same depth and breadth of knowledge of the texts that we teach? I argue that we don’t - starting with myself. Not being a literature graduate means I have often felt that my knowledge does not match up to others’, and I have worked hard to plug this gap.

This led me to confront the idea that if I, an experienced teacher and faculty leader, felt this way, then surely others in my team felt the same - and could perhaps use some help in the form of subject CPD. Though I had worries: how could I provide this without adding to an already-heavy workload for my department members?

Here is the three-step plan I devised for reimagining CPD in the forthcoming academic year:

1. Be transparent about your approach

Knowing your rationale for making decisions around CPD is one thing, but making this transparent is another. I’ve often been guilty of leaving an idea inside my head and feeling impatient that others don’t see my vision.

Sharing my rationale in an online department meeting meant that I was able to explain how to use the golden opportunity of the time that we found ourselves with: to read around, digest and distil subject knowledge in a way we simply haven’t been able to do before, in order to collectively enhance how we approach a text.

I led with an example - although we have taught Henry V at key stage 3 for several years now, it was fairly recently that I discovered the majestic plural (otherwise known as “the royal we” ). This is a tiny nugget that could just be an interesting fact - until you see how it’s abandoned for rhetorical impact when the king declares to his troops: “I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips…”

We all agreed: this is the sort of knowledge that lifts any reading of the text.

2. Know your department’s strengths and opportunities for development

Having a clear and unambiguous understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing subject knowledge within your department is key. I spent a considerable amount of time looking again at the GCSE specification within my department and working backwards from what I considered necessary for the very highest grades and beyond. I then distilled this into a subject knowledge audit, grouping sections by topic and asking teachers to complete a simple RAG exercise to rate their existing knowledge and understanding, leaving space for comments.

It is crucial here to make it crystal clear that this is not a checking-up exercise, but one that is going to allow for a cohesive plan. I explained that this would be a confidential document, kept only by me. Nevertheless, I also sought to share my own gaps - something that I have historically struggled with, but that I knew was key in overcoming the barrier of feeling vulnerable.

When analysing the audits, I kept an open mind. Certainly, there are areas where we all feel confident, but knowing there are members of my team who are capable of delivering specific subject knowledge means that we can use our weekly meetings to really delve into topics together.

3. Plan department time to allow for feedback and discussion

Even before analysing the subject knowledge audits, I began to put together a spreadsheet of resource links, pulled from sources such as the British Library, JSTOR and books I have bought for our burgeoning department library. This spreadsheet isn’t intended to be a panacea but a starting point for development - for self-directed reading, which is then fed back to the rest of the department’s teachers.

Having modelled a short lecture-style talk to my staff on a CPD event I contributed to on Macbeth, I have now facilitated several such talks by members of my team, on topics including Dickens’ early life, aspects of the supernatural in Victorian times and a feminist reading of Macbeth.

At the time of writing, these talks are currently being delivered via Zoom, but we have the full intention that this process will continue in our weekly department meetings throughout the coming academic year, once our department can meet face to face.

In fact, I have now ring-fenced the majority of our department time for this, interleaving the talks with refresher CPD on our core pedagogical approaches.

Here, I am reminded of an article by James Ashmore and Caroline Clay in The New Middle Leader’s Handbook. The authors suggest that “department meetings should be about teaching and learning and nothing else”. I am convinced that setting our agenda in this way is the correct approach. Any extraneous stuff can go in an email.

Ultimately, this latest reimagining of our department CPD is about ensuring that we all know our subject inside out in order to strengthen, deepen and ignite the love of our subject in the young people that we teach. That will be more useful than a teacher in a Stetson any day.

Laura May Rowlands is head of faculty for English and literacy at Woodlands Community College in Southampton

This article originally appeared in the 19 June 2020 issue under the headline “Subject knowledge is power in your department CPD”