Catalyst Update

Teachers love learning. We love helping others learn, we love learning ourselves. A teacher is always learning and taking part in professional learning and development to improve their practice. But not all professional learning is equal. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has recently released a guidance report titled, “Effective Professional Development”. The guidance report aims to “support schools in selecting external PD” because “PD has great potential.” It is quite clear and well accepted that an effective teacher who is able to employ high impact and quality teaching practices, can make an enormous difference to a child’s learning and their success in school. The good news is that teachers engaging with effective professional development can also continue to improve as practitioners, much like our students.

The “Effective Professional Development” guidance report has identified four key elements for effective PD: build knowledge, motivate staff, develop teaching techniques and embed practice. In my last Newsletter article, I shared with the community the staff who were currently filming lessons for the Teach Well PD course as part of the Archdiocesan Catalyst program. All the staff have filmed and submitted their lesson and have received feedback from Teach Well through their mentoring scheme. Staff have commented how valuable, affirming and specific the feedback has been. The Teach Well course is directly aligned with the EEF’s findings and mentoring and feedback sits within develop teaching techniques. The report states:

Monitoring the performance of participants and offering feedback to support their improvement may also support better professional development outcomes and subsequent pupil performance. Supportive observations, with formative feedback, should be clearly differentiated from notions of high-stakes lesson observations linked to appraisal targets.

Carroll College has now had 16 staff undertake this mentoring and feedback process. We are committed to increasing this practice and providing not only opportunities for more staff to take part in the Teach Well course in 2023, but also observing and providing constructive, supportive feedback to each other on a more regular basis.  I feel we are on a very strong pathway of effective professional learning that will have the ultimate result of improved learning for our students as well as our staff.

Erica Drewsen

Assistant Principal, Learning and Innovation