Victoria Foster is the Director of Teacher Training and Professional Development at Charterhouse Lagos. As a new school, the team have developed their teaching principles around the Model for Great Teaching. Choosing the Great Teaching Toolkit is their next step in developing an effective culture of professional development based around these principles.
We spoke to Victoria to find out more about her priorities during the first term and her plans for the future.
A shared language
For the first eight weeks, this has been our biggest focus. It is absolutely at the heart of what we’ve been doing. Even before we hired the teachers, our interview questions were linked to the dimensions of the Model for Great Teaching. We wanted teachers who could talk around these particular topics. We made sure that the language was embedded into our learning principles and policies, and this fed into our induction process and curriculum design. By the third week of the foundation course, we had teachers confidently discussing working memory, novices and experts, and retrieval practice. You could really see the difference.
Prioritising professional development
I have talked a lot about the fact that the Great Teaching Toolkit really is focused on a change of beliefs or motivations. We have made sure to prioritise our professional development time and ensure that this is both protected and outside of staff meetings. As leaders, we have tried to show we value the work teachers are putting in and support this by setting up meetings, groups and tasks. It has been a huge shift in mindset for some teachers, and we’ve really had to press the fact that spending this hour on yourself will be invaluable. I think we’ve started to raise awareness of this idea of professional learning and the impact it has.
Reflection, reflection, reflection
We decided early on that we would not force reflection, but value it. I have planned in opportunities for lots of collective reflection during the foundation course, bringing everyone together and setting aside time for them to think deeply about the areas they felt they wanted to work on. I have set teachers the task of selecting one item from the resources section linked to an area they identified, and simply taking time to read and reflect. This has been incredibly powerful. For me, the most important outcome of the work we are doing now is a culture of reflection.
Going forward
Next, we are encouraging teachers to try surveys with their classes. Some of our specialist teachers, such as Art and Nigerian & African Studies, have already started this. We have spoken about this at length, and I have had very little push-back. The attitude is that teachers want to receive meaningful feedback from the children they teach, and it is not intimidating because we’re not doing this for accountability or appraisal. It’s for them.
Every department is slightly different, so we are not forcing everyone to take the same path. For example, some of our staff in pastoral roles are working together on The Behaviour and Culture programme.
By the end of this term, I have also asked all teaching staff to try uploading a video onto the platform. We are not sure what this is going to look like yet but I’m excited to find out how powerful this tool could be. I’ve uploaded and shared a video of myself as I believe you should never ask the team to do something you would not also be willing to do.
As a school, we are beginning to understand that we must think, learn something and then change our behaviour or our attitude over time; this is a long process. We know it’s not a quick fix and we’re not going to move on to something else. We are taking it slowly and made a conscious decision to do that, so that we could embed good habits.
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