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Hunter's Bar Junior School

Our CPD curriculum

CPD mission statement - “At Hunter’s Bar Junior School, our teachers strive to be responsive and evaluative teachers who use evidence-based strategies and collaboration with others to improve outcomes for all pupils.”

 

The Hunter’s Bar Junior School CPD model promises to deliver on several of the findings outlined in the report from the Teacher Development Trust report  Developing Great Teaching (Based on research conducted by TDT, CUREE, the IoE and Durham University , 2014);  the Professional Standard for CPD (DfE, 2016), and the publications of David Weston, Bridget Clay, Timperley, Robert Coe  and Dylan William.

 

We believe that effective Professional Development is a partnership between:

• Head teachers and other members of the leadership team; 

• Teachers; and

• Providers of professional development expertise, training or consultancy.

 

 

In order for this partnership to be successful at HBJS we ensure that:

 

1. Professional development focuses on improving and evaluating pupil outcomes.

2. Professional development is underpinned by robust evidence and expertise.

3. Professional development involves  collaboration and expert challenge.

4. Professional development programmes is sustained and revisited strategically over time.

5. Professional development is prioritised by school leadership.

 

 

Through our our longstanding involvement with the Teacher Development Trust and the SSAT, together with our own research inquiries over the past 15 years, we feel we are able to offer an outstanding professional development package to our staff. We currently hold a gold award for CPD as benchmarked by the TDT.

 

We feel confident that we offer high-quality professional development that has a transformative impact on our teachers' and TA' skills and practices, leading to better student outcomes. We advocate that effective PD is not a one-off event but a sustained, structured process that involves active learning, coaching, and collaboration among teachers.

We carefully design our CPD so that it is evidence-based, with a tight focus on helping teachers understand and apply new teaching methods to address specific learning challenges. To ensure impact, we regular assessment of CPD's impact on both teaching and learning through the use of Thomas Guskey's professional development evaluation tools.

 

CPD is strategically planned using CPD cycles. This ensures that learning for staff is always revisited and retrieved to help embed practices and increase the chances of long term habit changes.

 

This is a model that helps schools to plan, deliver and evaluate key professional learning programmes. It is reinforced by checks, balances and support to make sure that any implemented approaches are given the best chance of improving pupil outcomes.

The cycle (see diagram, below) is not ground-breaking, or even particularly original. However, it is consistent, it is robust and it is built on sound research.

 

 

 A key tool that we use to help implement professional development and any other strategy in school is the Education Endowment Foundation’s implementation framework (2019).

 

Imp1

 
Teaching and Learning Communities
Embedding formative assessment 
 
 

Through Teacher Learning Communities (TLCs), groups of teachers and teaching assistants meet together regularly to support each other in making habit forming changes in their teaching practice in the area of formative assessment.

Professional Inquiry Programme (PIP)
 
Inspired by the work of Mark and Zoe Enser (2021), David Weston and Bridget Clay (2018), and Dr Gary Jones (see further information) the PIP is a form of inquiry-led CPD. The programme, rolled over the full academic year, involves 17 teachers and is designed to meet the precise learning needs of the children in each classroom.
 
It aims to address the question: How do we support teachers to engage deeply with evidence-informed practices that disrupt their current mental models of thinking and help narrow the achievement gap in their classrooms?
 
Informed and inspired by Kolb’s experiential learning model, we devised a model for each stage of the process as illustrated below. 
 
 
 
Published articles by the HBJS Lead Practitioner