Sometimes it’s easier to start from how not to do things.

How familiar does a “fire and forget” model sound as a method for the training of a classroom practitioner? I was trained 20 years ago in a prestigious institution with tutors at the forefront of developing their subject. In my first fiery year in school, I was supported by a variety of colleagues, who gave me many of the principles I still use.

That was it. For the remaining 19 years of my career, my schools’ involvement in my development as a practitioner has been limited to whole-school Insets and infrequent observations. No one has checked to see if anything I learned at Insets appeared in my classroom; observations gave me feedback but frequently with several years in between them. The feedback tended to be based on the observers’ personal opinions rather than on moving me forward, and again there was never a follow-up to see if anything changed.

I am not beginning a blame game here, because I am a senior leader in my current school and responsible for exactly the kind of support that I’ve just described. I have repeatedly led those whole-school Insets that fire out a bunch of ideas and then forget to check what happens next. I’ve given many of those observations on a natty little pro forma that can put a colleague’s back up or just be forgotten in a file like the Ark of the Covenant in an Indiana Jones movie. And I get why this happens. For all the talk about the primacy of teaching and learning, or supporting our staff, the complex competing priorities of daily school life absorb our energies and our most valuable resource: our time.

There have been myriad studies and reviews over the past few years that have reiterated similar concerns about career-long professional development. The Teacher Development Trust review Developing Great Teaching, from 2014, is one: it noted the importance of a “rhythm” of follow-up, consolidation and support activities and found that where this was lacking, training had little effect.

The secret to better teacher CPD

There is a different way. We should look again at the excellent work that already happens in our schools, at how things are done in countries such as Japan, and at the opportunity cost of how we choose to spend our time.

I am convinced that some of the most rapid improvement I’ve made as a practitioner has been through the repeated mentoring and coaching that I experienced as an NQT. The weekly meetings and frequent observations enabled me to form a vision of what “good” looked like and then supported me to achieve that. I have seen this all through my career: energetic and enthusiastic mentors helping new colleagues to develop rapidly.

I’ve found the same effect when I’ve had the privilege to be coached or have had regular one-to-one meetings to support me as a school leader. The key elements are the regular, scheduled meetings; the focus on what went well and what we’re going to do next; and the collaboration in solving problems. Why, then, does such a model only apply to new staff and, sometimes, to promoted staff?

Other countries have also found solutions. The Japanese “lesson study” model is well known. Teachers work in pairs or small groups on the development of solutions to specific problems. These problems can often be very detailed. In a Craig Barton maths podcast, there is a wonderful description of the detail required of Japanese mathematics teachers in order to identify the best way of starting to teach the multiplication of fractions: 2/5 divided by 3/4 works better than most others because it allows students to concentrate on the new concept rather than getting distracted by the difficulty of manipulating other numbers.

This kind of granular, subject-specific, collaborative focus on tweaking the learning is how we are most likely to get sustained improvement in classrooms. But Japanese teachers typically have around 15 hours’ contact time a week, compared with the 22 and a half hours for Scottish teachers. Without the time to meet, observe and follow up, isn’t this approach a pipe dream?

Another way of approaching the problem is to think really carefully about how we use the time we’ve got. I think the idea of “opportunity cost” helps here. Everything we do in schools gives opportunity to improve, but it comes at a cost. For schools in straitened circumstances, the greatest cost is staff time. So, if we spend time doing things that matter less at the expense of devoting time to things that matter more, then we don’t get the improvements we’re looking for.

This was crystallised for me in Paul Bambrick-Santoyo’s book Leverage Leadership. One of his arguments is that if supporting learning and teaching really is the most important thing for leaders in a school, then that should be reflected in the amount of time they devote to that in a normal week. He then lays out a timetable for a typical secondary school in which every staff member gets both observed and has a support meeting every week all year. When I last brought up this idea of “incremental coaching” in my school, the response was a mixture of laughter and incredulity.

I admit that I can’t quite see how “everyone, every week” is possible in the context of the increasingly tight financial settlements that we’re dealing with post-Covid, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a goal worth aiming for. When everyone gets support then looking for improvement becomes normal for everyone, instead of something that’s just done to those who are seen as substandard. When coaching is “little and often”, it becomes part of the fabric of learning for colleagues just as it is for our students. It also becomes a story about the real gains teachers can make in their own subjects rather than something more abstract from a bought-in speaker on an Inset day. I think the opportunity here is big enough for it to be worth costing in a bit more detail.

My current school is a great place to try out more regular coaching for all. There is a buzz around coaching and mentoring, with large programmes up and running for students. We already have a longstanding investment in coaching for staff. We have spent significant sums over the past few years to train around a third of the staff in coaching techniques. This has created a “coaching bank” of colleagues keen to help. We also allocate valuable time for one-to-one meetings fortnightly between promoted members of staff. We rate these meetings very highly as a way to talk through problems and monitor how we develop solutions.

Making space for these in the busy school day also helps to build trust between colleagues who need to work together. We are now in the process of giving that opportunity to as many classroom practitioners as we can. All staff have been given time to develop and to present on some aspect of their pedagogical practice. We have given time on Inset days for everyone to meet with a coach at least twice in a year to talk about what they’re doing and how they might develop it.

We are also developing incremental coaching techniques. In our first six months, around nine colleagues had a four- to six-week session of coaching focused around a particular development need for their students. The coach comes to watch for 15 to 20 minutes and then follows up with a 15- to 20-minute discussion about what happens next. These meetings are scheduled and then repeated the following week. This is supported by using promoted staff for up to four hours out of their week to either coach or to free up another colleague.

This model would make it possible for all our teachers and learning assistants to have either regular one-to-ones or incremental coaching at some point over a two-year period. We even managed to pilot this again during Covid. Recording lessons has suddenly become the norm, and that frees up coaches from having to be present in the class, saving that valuable time.

Is it worth doing? School leaders have many other demands on their time: meetings, parents, policy documents, health and safety, behaviour. But if we don’t give colleagues time to support each other then I don’t believe that learning and teaching will improve for all. I’m reminded of an incident from one of last year’s pre-Covid walkthroughs. I happened to see a teacher hook in a group of normally disengaged students with a clever starter activity involving a homemade optical illusion that led straight into the lesson on the eye. The idea had come up in their scheduled coaching conversation with their principal teacher: that 15-minute chat had meant a better experience for 20 students on that day. And I would be willing to bet that the idea will live on in the teacher’s practice for far longer than the hours of Inset that I’ve organised.

I think that those small, realistic gains will build up if regularly experienced by the majority of teachers - and that is a prize worth paying for.

Damian Hayes is a depute headteacher at Earlston High School, in the Scottish Borders

This article originally appeared in the 16 April 2021 issue under the headline “CPD: hit me with your rhythm stick”