Catherine Taylor, School Improvement Partner, Advance Learning Partnership
At Advance Learning Partnership – a trust of 18 primary and secondary schools across County Durham and Darlington – we of course want the best outcomes for every child.
Quality-first teaching is key, helping to create a learning environment which supports pupils to know more, do more and remember more, and fostering curiosity and engagement for both pupils and teachers.
Giving our colleagues the high-quality professional development they need to deliver this kind of education is central.
Every leader and teacher and support colleague across the trust can build their own professional development portfolio through the BlueSky online platform, which allows us to link appraisal, professional development, and quality assurance processes with school strategy.
This platform ensures that leaders and every member of staff are supported in their development, and they can see clearly how their development is informed by and supports their schools and the trust’s overall mission. It also promotes consistency across our schools while empowering colleagues to fulfil our philosophy of guided professional autonomy.
We believe there are no limits to learning for our students and we want to instil the same philosophy in our staff. We want to really engage and motivate our teachers because that is how we will get the best teaching and learning in our classrooms.
Genius Time is part of that philosophy. Google came up with the idea to give employees time to spend on projects and topics that mattered to them. Some of the best ideas used across the company have emerged from that approach.
Genius Time has been used with pupils in the classroom and it is a similar approach when it comes to staff development. We took that approach and thought about how this would work from a staff point of view.
We are still trialling the approach, but the general idea is that each staff member will be allocated time (five or six hours each year) to explore their own passions and interests, with the proviso that it could be used to improve teaching and learning within our trust. This might be around trialling different approaches to formative assessment in the classroom or investigating new novels to teach to a class.
The starting point is a one-to-one coaching conversation with a member of staff to scope out the staff member’s interest, guided by a series of open questions, such as ‘What is on your mind?’, ‘What is the challenge here for you?’, ‘What do you want?’, and ‘How can I help?’ Then the enquiry question is established, and an ‘intent’ section completed, followed by a discussion of ideas and strategies for implementation and impact.
Once that inquiry is complete our digital platform will play a big role in ensuring that the learning we gain from Genius Time is shared across the trust.
I was fortunate enough to be involved in some of those starting point conversations and it was quite an experience. Every staff member involved was so enthusiastic. It proved to me that it is incredibly important that we give colleagues time and space to explore their passions because they will come across innovative ideas that might otherwise be missed.
The trust benefits from the development of innovative practice and it improves the motivation and engagement of our colleagues, which feeds back into teaching and learning and helps strengthen retention. There is also a strong message in all this about our educational values. If we want our philosophy of no limits to learning to resonate with our students, then it also must apply to our colleagues. And it shows that they are trusted as professionals.
Some of our best ideas in the past have resulted from this professional autonomy, when a colleague has gone away and explored an idea and then shared their findings in a staff briefing. Genius Time is a next step on from that, giving every colleague the opportunity and support. I for one cannot wait to see the results.
Catherine Taylor is School Improvement Partner at Advance Learning Partnership in County Durham. BlueSky Education has published a range of informative guides for schools looking to build CPD and appraisal programmes. They are available to download at https://blueskyeducation.co.uk/how-to-build-a-cpd-programme-with-impact-a-bluesky-guide/ and https://blueskyeducation.co.uk/how-bluesky-supports-appraisal/
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