Nick Pointer

🧠 ResearchEd National this Saturday!

My session is straight after lunch in Room M07:

🎓 14.00-14.40 | Session 5: Consistency Is Killing Us: Reclaiming teacher professionalism and agency through PD at scale

Leaders, teacher educators, professional development leads and mentors - see you there!

🧠 ResearchEd National this Saturday!

My session is straight after lunch in Room M07:

🎓 14.00-14.40 | Session 5: Consistency Is Killing Us: Reclaiming teacher professionalism and agency through PD at scale

Leaders, teacher educators, professional development leads and mentors - see you there!

Am I the only one who's looked back at the title for their upcoming ResearchEd National talk and thought "oh cool, that session sounds interesting... I wonder what it's going to be about!" 😅

EdFest Session 4: Professional learning and teacher agency to improve recruitment and retention panel

NFER’s @jackworth.bsky.social:

- UK teachers rate CPD experiences as area they have lowest degree of influence over.
- PD experiences are v.closely associated with teacher retention (or lack of)…!

A great session with tons of concrete tips and important principles 💯

@valentinadevid.bsky.social @rkneyber.bsky.social

#EducationFestival

Link to curriculum design - we want to avoid an instrumentalist approach, and ensure that teachers are making high quality choices and when and how to enact formative action in their teaching.

Through: constructive alignment - linking goals to teaching activities to formative action approaches.

The final step? Checking and monitoring to see whether the action has made a difference.

This is important not just for the teacher, but for pupils to self-monitor their progress, and to feel more successful following the formative action!

This might be done using a “mirror question”.

Valentina:

- Considering our learning goals clearly in advance, and using these to anticipate misconceptions allows us to respond quickly and accurately at the action stage ☝🏽

- Less experienced teachers might benefit from collaborating w/ more experienced colleagues to draw on their knowledge too

And, there are a range of actions we might take off the back of the information gathered, but, in any case, René says we have be able to respond quickly!

How to do this? A pre-requisite first step - predicting problems.

And now back to @rkneyber.bsky.social on the active ingredients of formative action that makes a difference.

@valentinadevid.bsky.social making it clear that these formative action processes need to be top-and-tailed with a) ensuring pupils have a really clear sense of what good looks like, and b) a focus on how meaningful and useful feedback is given.

Other important differentiators:

- A focus on the difference between *learning* and *performance*.

- Increased discussion around the relevant points in lessons/curricula where teachers might best deploy these approaches.

Why reframe to ‘Formative Action’?

- Increased emphasis on teachers acting - doing something - with the information elicited, as opposed to a misplaced focus on the idea of assessment.

EdFest Session 3: Formative Action with René Kneyber @rkneyber.bsky.social and Valentina Devid @valentinadevid.bsky.social

Intro - formative action is another way of talking about formative assessment!

#EducationFestival

Phenomenal provision clearly happening at all levels of the school, with some incredible stories of the impact this has had on the young people Derby Moor work with ⭐️

#EducationFestival

Thrive - ARP largely for SEMH needs

Nurture - Y7 transition provision for pupils identified as needing support

Innovate - ARP for pupils working significantly below age and with multiple and/or profound needs

- All supported by a key multi-disciplinary/agency team:

- Discrete space in the school
- Highly experienced teachers, HLTAs, and a primary-phase teacher and SENCO.
- Ratio of 3:1 to support pupils with a range of profound needs
- Again families & pupils supported by multi-disciplinary team
- Working with local FE provider to support transition beyond

Third element: age-not-stage provision for pupils with multiple needs/working at significantly below their age.

- Thematic learning - drew on local specialist school - but also with alignment to main school curriculum where possible
- Age not stage

Other element of EP: Nurture transition for pupils with additional support needs coming in from Year 6.

- Again, re-aligning teaching with main school curriculum, to allow reintegration as a time appropriate to pupil.

- Run by assistant SENCO, decision making about gate keeping by wider SEND team.

One key impact? 0% of pupils who have attended the ARP in the last 3 years have gone on to be NEET!

- New and well resourced facilities.
- Bringing in specialist teachers from mainstream to teach subjects at both KS3 and KS4 - these teachers handpicked as the most effective and most skilled, not just those in time free on timetable.
- QA of T&L same as in mainstream part of school

Moved from having a small internal AP, to an ARP provision with intentionality at every level:

- Careful decision making about who attends ARP and why, through an internal multi-disciplinary team and panel
- Intentional plans for reintegration with mainstream from the start, for all

EdFest Session 2: Sarah McAneny-Vincent and Scott Doyle from Spencer Academies Trust on inclusion-by-design.

Starting off by setting out their aspiration - to live the slogan of “Once Derby Moor, always Derby Moor” for all children in the care of the school.

#EducationFestival

And finally @douglemov.bsky.social sharing a great starter kit for how we can use cold call in a way that’s warm, invitational and inclusive 🙌🏽
#EducationFest

Back with @bradleybusch.bsky.social, explaining how incredibly warm and inclusive use of cold calling can increase pupil volunteering of answers over time and reduce “social loafing”!

And, this benefits *teachers* too - routines reduce the complexity and decision space of the classroom for them as well.

This means that teachers can direct their limited working memory capacity onto the most important elements of the classroom (e.g. the content of a pair’s conversation).

Key idea: Routines Hack Working Memory.

A more *predictable* classroom means that more of students’ limited working memory capacities are dedicated to thinking hard about curriculum content (intrinsic load), rather than working out what they should be doing next (extraneous load).

Why is this relevant? @douglemov.bsky.social tells us that in class, teachers and students constantly have to make decisions that are a) rapid and b) complex! And the risk is that our working memories are liable to being overloaded by the cognitive load of making decisions in the classroom

EdFest Session 1: @bradleybusch.bsky.social introducing Hick’s Law, where the greater the number of options we have, the longer it takes us to make a decision.

Conclusion? Too much freedom and autonomy can be overwhelming - particularly when we need to make choices that are a) quick and b) complex

This an important read 👇 Bold yet balanced pushes to challenge government to lead this work, with a real emphasis on a) increasing the choice schools have in PD providers, but also b) emphasising the role of capacity building for schools and trusts to develop their own, well-contextualised PD offer.