Effective staff training

Ineffective CPD

Ineffective for you

Too often this is what happens:

• You go an a training day (INSET), or attend an in-house training session.
• You hear about a new teaching technique and try it out in the session.
• You then come back to work but do not try any new ideas, or try them and, because they don’t work well first time, you abandon them.

Repeated research shows that the effect on your student’s learning a few months later is too small to measure. It was a waste of your time and the college’s money.

Ineffective for the school/college

Too often we see well-meaning and hard-working CPD teams put on training which costs £10,000s which will have very little effect on improving learning.
Much higher effects can be achieved at much lower costs.

The classic ‘high-spend, low-effect’ CPD day

• The CPD team have employed a wide range of trainers for workshops.
• Each presenter offers short sessions to a small group of staff.
• The speakers all offer interesting subjects in the field of education, but there is no link or plan for the material.
• Staff are given options and may attend several workshops in the day.

Why this has so little effect.

You wouldn’t teach this way: you would not offer our students bite-size talks with no follow-up or practice.
Staff training is a form of learning, so the same rules apply as for general teaching. The main difference is that while students require at least 3 repeats to learn something new, teachers require many more because they have to replace old habits with new ones. Unless the new methods are practised over an extended period, teachers lapse to their old ways.