Colleagues,
I came across a short CPD resource recently that I've found useful for getting departments to talk about classroom practice without turning the session into a presentation.
The basic idea is to take one familiar classroom routine and ask three questions:
What are we currently doing?
What do we want pupils to be doing instead?
What small change could we make tomorrow?
We've used it with a couple of teams and the simplicity seems to help. People tend to move quite quickly from talking about the theory to discussing what they'd actually change in a lesson.
Thought it was worth sharing in case anyone is looking for a straightforward structure for a department or phase meeting.
Tom
I like the simplicity of this.
We tried something similar with questioning in English and found that asking staff to bring an actual example from a lesson made the discussion much more useful.
It stopped us drifting into a general conversation about "good questioning".
I've used a similar structure when looking at technology.
The "what could we change tomorrow?" question is particularly useful because it stops the discussion becoming a wish list of new tools.
Sometimes the answer is actually to stop using something!
This is useful.
I'd probably add one final question for some teams: "What are we already doing well that we don't need to change?"
There's a tendency with CPD to assume every discussion needs to produce an action, when sometimes confirming that an existing approach is working is useful too.