Teacher development
ACS Cobham has created an annual professional development ‘series’ that is designed to offer more choice and scope
When educators talk about student learning, a consistent emphasis over the past few years has been on student ‘voice and choice’ to promote engagement, ownership, and personalisation – but why should this not apply to adult learners too?
What’s more, educators also know that students need multiple opportunities to explore, refine, reflect, and extend their learning – we would never teach something once and walk away confident that the student had embedded that knowledge or skill for life.
Yet with single INSET days, webinars, or time-limited professional development workshops, this is often the situation for teacher CPD – something that serves no-one well.
Since 2021, ACS Cobham has created an annual professional development ‘series’ that is designed to offer more choice and scope, and we believe it is having a real impact. The programme works by allowing teachers to focus on a specific theme of CPD, based on our long-term education strategy, across a school year.
This year, for example, our theme is ‘There is No Mountaintop in Teaching’, a phrase coined by our partner and leading educational strategist, Steve Barkley, because there is always potential for growth as educators. Previous themes have included ‘WELLcome Everyone’ around inclusion and wellbeing, and ‘Authentically ACS’ exploring authentic learning.
With the theme chosen, we then invite seven different educational specialists from around the world to talk to our educators at a virtual event held in mid-August. Previous experts include Jennifer Abrams, Ben Kingston-Hughes, and Loui Lord Nelson. Each thought leader runs two hour-long virtual sessions on a particular speciality area relevant to the theme. Staff choose which two of these sessions to attend and then afterwards pick one to carry forward into their teaching that year. All choices are also logged so that leaders know what is of interest within the school community.
Once term gets underway, our educators begin implementing these new strategies into their teaching. For example, one teacher might begin to increase the frequency or type of Opportunities to Respond (OTRs), while another might build a choice board for the next unit of study.
By focusing these sessions on practical, impactful approaches for daily classroom use rather than educational theory, the aim is for all staff to take away actionable ideas they can quickly embed in their practice and build on for student impact.
We have chosen to approach professional development in this way because we want to provide autonomy and personal choice for our teachers and leaders, which is also ‘practising what we preach’ for student learning.
Feedback from staff has been positive and it has been great to see people adding and enhancing their teaching practices with new ideas and evidence-based strategies.
This is, of course, vital if we are to retain our excellent teachers, who have the most important task of developing well-rounded global citizens with the academic and emotional intelligence to empathise and engage with tomorrow’s big issues.
Brianna Gray, Head of Professional Learning and Growth at ACS International Schools
