In theory, meetings should be a catalyst for action. Once the group decides - or is told - that something has to happen, it then happens. However, things rarely work out this way.

At Reigate College, we found that, far from teaching and learning objectives receiving a boost from being on a meeting agenda, the opposite was often true. So, did we hold another meeting to find a way of penalising inaction? No. Instead, we completely changed the way we conducted our meetings.

The revelation that our meetings were not as effective as we thought they were came when Sagar Patel, the director of learning, and Lianne Wilkinson, the pastoral director, began a project to pinpoint how we could adapt our pedagogy to improve outcomes for learners. They wanted to see how far putting this teaching project on the agenda of meetings would prompt change.

They found that this would mean adding teaching and learning on to a long list of items to go through, and that it would inspire little enthusiasm for the initiative. Through focusing on relevance, process and outcomes, they began to doubt the effectiveness of traditional full-faculty meetings where information was delivered to large numbers of teaching staff all at once. They decided to make a change, and the concept of “teaching and learning spaces” was born.

The core idea was to give staff a dedicated period of time in which they could focus primarily on teaching and learning. We wanted to provide opportunities for them to reflect on existing strategies, and to learn about and implement new strategies.

This aim developed into a plan to replace traditional faculty meetings with a teaching and learning time allocation. The proposal was approved by the senior leadership team in July 2018 and the plans were communicated to staff in September last year.

Variety and impact

It works like this: the college provides a variety of learning options for staff to choose from. They seek out the CPD that would most impact their own teaching.

The launch materials clearly outlined the concept, and the immediate feedback was positive: most staff appreciated the idea of choice and recognised the benefit of protected time to develop their practice. However, when we moved to implementation, the complexities became clear. Finding people to run the spaces was the first hurdle because there can be a lack of enthusiasm before an initiative is fully understood. In response, Sagar decided to develop the idea to take two main forms: projects and learning spaces.

The projects required staff to continually work on a skill or interest throughout the year. The learning spaces, on the other hand, were one-off sessions that could focus on a particular teaching and learning pedagogy. Over the course of the year, there have been 24 of these one-hour sessions. This meant staff didn’t have to commit to running a batch of sessions and it also gave attendees the freedom to choose from different options.

The research-based projects covered areas such as: developing student engagement with feedback by using a toolkit (Sutton, 2012); promoting effective revision strategies by applying psychological research about improvising strategies (Dunlosky et al, 2013); subject and academic mentoring within a department based on Lucy Crehan’s findings from her 2016 book Cleverlands; and a focus on the new BTEC syllabuses, including how to manage workload.

One example of a project in action comes from the sessions on promoting the use of effective revision strategies. We centred the project on the research of Dunlosky and his colleagues. Each member started by surveying the revision habits students were using and followed this up by helping their classes to implement highly active effective revision techniques (quizzes, retrieval, spacing or interleaving).

After the revision strategies were implemented, the students were surveyed and assessed to see if any improvements had been made.

Across the departments involved in this project, it was determined that students who had participated found the techniques more effective than previous methods. These revision techniques have now been embedded into different departments as a way of improving grades. They have also facilitated the mindset of a curious learner within these areas.

The teaching spaces offered a mixture of one-off sessions that staff could attend. They were focused on feedback, group work, developing ICT skills, behaviour management and learning support. Examples include: debating skills within the classroom; developing positive routines in lessons; how to support dyslexic students; organisation skills for students; BTEC planning; and a variety of sessions dedicated to increasing the technological skills that can make a teacher’s role easier to manage.

The impact of both the projects and the learning spaces has been substantial. The projects have led to evidence-based approaches being embedded across departments with full buy-in from staff as they have been part of the process.

Space: the final frontier of CPD

The learning spaces have given staff simple solutions that can be brought immediately into lessons. A good example is a member of the geography department who attended a group work session. They developed ideas for how they could implement more group work within the classroom and then showed these skills to colleagues. The department now uses a lot more group work.

Because of this success, we have continued to run the new approach to meetings this year. The sessions still need to cover a number of topics so that a variety of opportunities are available. This has been challenging. However, because of how well the initiative went last year, we now have many more volunteers to run sessions. As a result, we hope the concept of these spaces will continue to evolve and be beneficial for everyone at the college.

Jo Driscoll is associate pastoral director and psychology teacher at Reigate College in Surrey

This article originally appeared in the 13 December 2019 issue under the headline “Free up time and space for teacher CPD to flourish”