Glen Cahill is Assistant Headteacher at Cardinal Langley Roman Catholic High School in Rochdale. He and his colleagues began using the Great Teaching Toolkit in September 2021 as part of a group of schools across Rochdale. Here we catch up with him about how staff at Cardinal Langley have been using the GTT and the impact Glen has seen so far.
How does the Great Teaching Toolkit help you as a school leader?
The Great Teaching Toolkit has been really effective in putting staff CPD back in their own hands, giving them ownership of their own training and building enthusiasm for teacher pedagogy. It’s helped staff to think about what the best available research evidence tells us is most likely to have an impact on student progress and improve outcomes.
It has also helped us move away from CPD involving long, onerous INSET days (where sometimes staff feel cognitively overloaded by the end) to a more ‘little and often’ model. We told staff we thought it was important that they put themselves first so we’ve protected an hour a fortnight in teachers’ timetables for them to work on whatever CPD they want. Some are doing NPQs but the majority are using the GTT. It’s really helped us create that shared language and that shared understanding, putting CPD at the forefront of everyone’s minds.
How have you been using the Great Teaching Toolkit?
Initially, everyone did the Foundation Course – we gave everyone an hour a fortnight to complete that over a term. Then staff moved on to one of the element courses, depending on their area of interest, and worked through this over a term.
Over the following half term, teachers used that time to meet with departments and year teams and feed back the key information they’d learned. That sharing of best practice, sharing what the latest research is telling us is most likely to have the biggest impact on our students, is really important. Instead of people going away on a one-day course and then coming back and just improving their own practice, we have them really feed back into the department and wider staff body, to improve teaching across the school.
Groups of teachers working on the same element also meet once per half-term and discuss what they’ve worked on. What are the issues? Misconceptions? What are the challenges? There’s a shared enthusiasm, a shared commitment and everyone’s on it! We also have paired observations, dropping into other’s lessons to share practices – I’ve been working on Questioning with a Textiles teacher, a Tech teacher and an IT teacher and we’ve taken it in turns to go and look at each other’s teaching, and share best practice in that Element. Over lockdown, the opportunity to really share best practice like that was lost, because we were teaching in bubbles and increasingly isolated as a profession. It’s been difficult to crack that and become more social and open to sharing, having people in your classroom again, so it’s been good that the GTT has encouraged us to do that.
What impact have you seen since starting to use the Great Teaching Toolkit?
The first thing I recognised was that shared language – people started talking about the science of learning, about retrieval practice and cognitive overload – and then that shared understanding of what good practice is – what are the best ways to aid learning or apply the science of how learning happens? How can we avoid cognitive overload? Teachers from all the different faculties have been having these informed professional conversations (so PE teachers meeting with Art teachers, meeting with Science teachers). We’ve got teachers from those who have been teaching 2 or 3 years, through to those who are really experienced now, close to retirement, and it’s invigorated their practice and made them think about what they’re doing in terms of the impact it’s having on students.
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