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What Is Teacher CPD

Teacher CPD refers to the process of continuously developing and improving teaching skills and knowledge through formal and informal learning experiences over the course of a teaching career. Effective CPD is focused on improving student outcomes, based on robust evidence, includes collaboration, is sustained over time, and prioritized by school leadership. Additionally, effective CPD provides teachers opportunities to learn new strategies, see demonstrations of strategies, and practice strategies in their own classrooms.

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Sherwin Gipit
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215 views3 pages

What Is Teacher CPD

Teacher CPD refers to the process of continuously developing and improving teaching skills and knowledge through formal and informal learning experiences over the course of a teaching career. Effective CPD is focused on improving student outcomes, based on robust evidence, includes collaboration, is sustained over time, and prioritized by school leadership. Additionally, effective CPD provides teachers opportunities to learn new strategies, see demonstrations of strategies, and practice strategies in their own classrooms.

Uploaded by

Sherwin Gipit
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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What is teacher CPD?

CPD is a process of recording and reflecting on learning and development; the action of tracking
and documenting the skills, knowledge and experience that teachers gain both formally and
informally as they teach, beyond any initial training. It's a record of what they experience, learn
and then apply.

According to the standards for teachers’ professional development, teacher CPD needs to be:

1. Focused on improving and evaluating pupil outcomes


2. Underpinned by robust evidence and expertise
3. Include collaboration and expert challenge
4. Sustained over time
5. Prioritised by leadership

In addition, by reviewing decades of research, Joyce and Showers (2002) found that CPD must
provide teachers with the theory underlying the new instructional strategies they’re learning,
demonstrations, and opportunities to practice the strategies in their own classrooms.

Why is CPD important?

The CPD process helps teachers to manage their own development on an ongoing basis. It's not a
tick-box document recording the training they have completed. It's broader than that. Here’s
what CPD helps teachers to do:

 Ensures they keep pace with the current standards of others working in education.
 Keeps their knowledge and skills current so they can deliver high-quality teaching and
impact positively on pupil outcomes.
 Makes sure that they become more effective in the workplace. This helps them to
advance in their career and move into new positions where they can lead, manage,
influence, coach and mentor others.
 Opens them up to new possibilities, new knowledge and new skills.
 Leads to increased confidence in themselves, others and the profession as a whole.

Teacher CPD is also very useful at:

 Reminding them of their achievements and how far they’ve progressed.


 Directs their career and helps them keep an eye on their goals.
 Uncovers gaps in their skills and capabilities.
 Opens up further development needs.
How teachers record their CPD is up to them, but you might want to think about offering an
electronic method or a framework to help guide your teachers. Format is not important, what
matters is that it’s meaningful for teachers.

I often hear that teachers and educators don't have time for their own CPD. Or they believe that
it's SLT's responsibility to guide their professional development. More often than not CPD is
thought of as ‘providing training to develop a skill’, but effective professional development is
so much more than something that is delivered to teachers.

Instead of identifying professional learning as a process of acquisition based on the SLT passing
on their knowledge, learning should be more commonly conceptualised as a course of action
whereby teachers actively and collaboratively construct their own understanding and skills.

hy teachers should be responsible for their own CPD

Delivering CPD suggests a 'top down' approach, which won’t be empowering to teachers. It’s
also the opposite of what is recommended in the government standard for teachers’ professional
development from 2016. The standard promotes the need for teachers and other educational
staff to take control of their own professional learning.   

This key issue was discussed at a seminar hosted by CUREE with the members of the Expert
Panel who authored the 2016 standard. It was clear at this event that what is different about the
standard is that teachers also have a set of responsibilities.

As the article acknowledges, it’s very true that telling staff that CPD needs to be done for Ofsted
or for SLT won’t be at all motivating. Key for gaining teacher buy in is understanding how
exactly the learner experience will be improved.

Most teachers choose their profession for a reason, even if sometimes that initial motivation
might fade a bit to the background as the years progress. Appealing to that core motivation when
it comes to CPD, promoting it as a tool to help them be the best teacher they can be, can go a
long way towards reaching your schools’ CPD goals.

When working with trainee teachers and NQTs, it can be hugely beneficial to establish CPD as
an offer that’s available to them to become even better, rather than just something they’re
obligated to do.

Top Tip:  Effective video-based CPD  is a fantastic tool to support your teachers’ development
through all the stages of their career, starting with initial teacher training all the way to
becoming an experienced teacher and mentor to others.

The importance of personalised CPD


In the past, Philippa Cordingley (Chief Executive of CUREE) has spoken about how SLT need
to view staff like they would a class. This is echoed in the article with the suggestion that CPD
Leads need to plan and structure training in the same way they would a lesson.

The difference is that unlike the article, Philippa is not concerned with viewing staff like a class
in order for the CPD Lead to feel confident in delivering a training session. Instead, her message
is that CPD Leads need to consider what it is that every individual member of staff needs,
just as a teacher uses differentiation in the classroom. In the best classrooms, we see children as
active contributors to the learning process and the same should be true of professional learning.

Philippa echoes part 1 of the standard, which highlights the importance of personalised CPD. It
recommends that professional development activities should:

 Be designed around individual teachers’ existing experience, knowledge and needs


 Be relevant to the context and day-to-day experiences of teachers and their schools

The staff in a school are like a class; each teacher has different levels of experience, different
priorities they want to focus on and different ways they like to learn. It can’t be presumed that
one style of professional learning will fit all.

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