My professional development has been at the forefront of my mind this past year and I can honestly say I don't think I have ever been so enthusiastic, engaged and inspired as I have at this time. Twitter was definitely the first thing that gave me the motivation to make various changes in my teaching and the vast amount of resources and ideas I have came across through reading tweets from some excellent professionals have been so inspiring. Most of the people on twitter I have never met but yet I quite regularly ask them for advice or pick up on many of their brilliant ideas. There are too many twitter colleagues to name, but a few that come to mind are @TeacherToolkit, @LeadingLearner, @LearningSpy, @aknill, @andyphilipday, @gripweed, @davidfawcett27, @ictevangelist, and many many more. These have also led me to read some thought provoking and interesting blogs such as http://teachertoolkit.me, http://johntomsett.wordpress.com, http://headguruteacher.com, http://reflectionsofmyteaching.blogspot.co.uk/, http://leadinglearner.me, http://www.learningspy.co.uk. I first came across most of these whilst trying to find and read as much information as I could on Solo taxonomy but this led me to much more. Even writing my own blog! ( Which by the way I can never find the time to do as much as would like to)
Many of the new strategies, skills, knowledge and ideas I have came across are now being shared across school and this has gave me the confidence and motivation to trial all sorts of new things that I have never done before in my classroom. I have even delivered a couple of Inset sessions to staff on SOLO and this is now embedding itself within the school and across most departments.
Another great CPD idea I came across from @TeacherToolkit "No doors" and another blog I read (but can't remember which one) was to trial "open classroom" in school. St. Aidan's Catholic Academy is on a journey from good to outstanding and the head teacher Stephen Hammond, @stevie_scouse agreed this was a great idea to share good practice across departments and utilise the good things we do in school for all staff to benefit. As we all know a lot of staff don't like change and are often wary of observations mainly because of the way we view Ofsted as the devil when they arrive to observe. With this in mind I didn't think many staff would agree to open the classroom door when I asked for volunteers but I was pleasantly surprised. Some were very unsure about the process but I believe we had 15 staff agree to open the classroom door for various lessons over a period of 1 week. This worked out to be be approximately 4 lessons every period where someone could observe a teacher deliver a lesson. I asked staff to decide which lessons they would like to open the door and if they had a particular focus e.g. solo, behaviour, questioning skills etc. The benefits of this in school has been immense, such as:
- Free CPD for staff
- Sharing good practice
- Delivering outstanding lessons
- Sharing observation feedback
- Confidence to be observed without repercussions
- Open conversations about teaching and learning
- General feedback
The week turned out to be a great success :) and staff were really pleased when other staff voluntarily walked in to observe their lessons and chat about teaching and learning. Various members of staff were talking about the Open Classroom through out the week and there was a general buzz in the air.
Feedback from the week included:
"I found open classroom week really useful. I really wanted to see how Solo worked so I found this observation very helpful, I also got lots of other ideas for classroom routines and the use of ICT Captains etc. I am looking forward to trying these ideas out in my own classroom. It was really nice to get out and about in school and see what ids going on. Thanks again for letting me observe your lesson"
"Excellent opportunity to observe the teaching and learning in other classrooms"
"I found the open door lesson really useful. It was inspirational and i really got the feel for SOLO. The support was great and the whole atmosphere was supportive.
Seeing SOLO in action inspired me to create a SOLO wall and I tried out some of the techniques I had observed."
The only negative feedback received was that some staff were disappointed if nobody turned up to observe and other staff wanted to go to certain lessons but were teaching at the time.
We will be running Open Classroom again this term and hopefully more staff will open doors or try to get out and observe other lessons, I think we should also encourage support staff to observe lessons. I have also heard of a department open day where staff can observe lessons in that particular department - this maybe worth a try also. After a conversation with @TeacherToolkit we will maybe offer incentives for staff who do the most visits e.g.
- a bottle of wine/champagne
- Share photographs of staff in lessons and guess the caption
- protected time
I will maybe blog about our next "Open Classroom" and hopefully there will be more and more doors open and plenty of staff sharing what we do best "Teach". @St_Aidan's_Academy are rolling out IPads on a 1:1 this term so it will be a great way to share what apps are being used in lessons and have the most impact on the students. Would love to hear from any other schools who have tried this or anyone who can think of any other incentives.
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