Time and again, teachers who join Dulwich College International attest that our professional learning is second to none.
Our approach to CPD aligns with Helen Timperley’s notion of “adaptive expertise”, which makes an important distinction when considering teacher professional learning by recognising that it is ”complex” rather than ”complicated”.
This crucial difference means that we acknowledge that both teacher and pedagogical leadership professional learning evolves in a multi-faceted set of conditions and so cannot be regarded as a simple, linear scenario of cause and effect. In other words, simply doing CPD does not lead directly to improvements in student outcomes.
Instead, changing teacher practice happens holistically by considering the complexities of a faculty’s dispositions, beliefs, experiences and prior knowledge. Furthermore, building successful professional learning that aims to change practice needs to be dynamic and constantly evolving in context.
This approach, of course, requires proactive and responsive communication between leadership and teachers throughout the learning experience. This is why our ConnectEd institute regularly works with professional learning leads and CLTs in each of our schools so that we constantly have a detailed understanding of group-wide and individual school CPD requirements.
CPD: Teacher agency and leadership
Timperley suggests that CPD should promote teacher agency and focus on student learning rather than teacher practice if it is to have both immediate impact and lasting effect. Developing teacher agency is crucial if schools wish to avoid the “being done to” effect, whereby teachers are compelled to passively participate in a leadership-led learning agenda that has not been clearly communicated.
Adopting this position has been key in the development of our group-wide professional learning strategy. Using inquiry and research to inform the purpose and focus of our CPD agenda is core to the group and this is balanced with a desire to enable teachers to understand what part their own dispositions values and beliefs play when adopting new ideas and reflecting on their own practice.
New learning is not additive - it is bound to alter practice, and this must be recognised by the learning community, not just the individual. Therefore, embedding new skills is a collaborative, shared endeavour and this must be communicated clearly and often by the leadership.
I would like now to summarise a few of our CPD projects as a way of demonstrating our commitment to evidence-informed practice and teacher agency.
Evidenced-based learning: assessment essentials
In 2019 we undertook an internal school review process which entailed interviewing over 5,000 Dulwich students to understand what was impactful in their learning experiences and what might be improved.
Students were overwhelmingly positive about most areas of school life but felt their learning would be better with more on-time, in-time formative feedback. Based on this, we searched the globe for quality assessment CPD before striking up a long-term partnership with the UK company Evidence Based Education. It agreed to bespoke its Assessment Essentials programme to meet our particular context and now it is available as a self-paced online CPD programme for all of our teachers.
Another example of us using evidence to inform what we offer our teachers happened during the Covid-19 pandemic. On having to move online, we immediately commissioned research to find out what were the biggest challenges facing our teachers in the early months of the crisis. Our teachers identified a desire to know more about what was best practice in both blended instructional design and online assessment practices.
On the back of these findings, one of our heads of college led a cross-school task force and an innovative online adult learning consultant to develop a programme of blended CPD to address concerns highlighted by our own people. Again, this programme will be available to all teachers very soon.
Accelerate programme: building diverse middle leaders
Through internal review, we realised that the jump from teacher to middle leader was often challenging, and that the nature of school life meant that professional interactions between educators and professional support staff were few and far between. As a result, we developed our enormously popular Accelerate programme.
Accelerate is a year-long middle leadership programme designed to allow participants to build greater self-awareness, drive a high-performance culture and inspire others towards excellence. The programme is in its third year and currently has over 60 participants from all our schools and offices, with equal representation from both academic and professional support staff.
Year on year, participants have said the experience delivers a hugely rewarding leadership experience by using such learning environments as virtual sessions, immersive challenges, experiential activities, research projects and opportunities to engage with senior leadership across the group.
Innovative global education: using inquiry to build teacher agency
With our early years and junior school teams, we have been using very targeted CPD to investigate how we might use concept-based inquiry in both the classroom and the curriculum to promote greater levels of teacher and student agency. The approach has involved each school linking directly with renowned educational consultants who are providing online workshops and virtual consultancy throughout this year.
To date, all schools have extended this work into the next academic year and are incorporating new approaches into their ongoing strategic planning. One of the most exciting aspects of this work is how far it accelerates the agency of teachers to make the best-informed revisions to both their curriculum and practice so as to make the student learning experience more applied and engaging.
Each of these examples shows how we build and nurture a culture of evidence-based professional reflection across our schools alongside providing opportunities for teachers to have agency in their learning and practice.
Dr Kevin House is international curriculum director at Dulwich College International
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