Our CPD bundle is a vehicle for whole-staff development in areas of effective practice that are grounded in research evidence. These FAQs answer the most common questions we receive from schools before they book their bundle.
1. How do I enrol staff on the courses in the CPD bundle?
It’s really easy. Immediately after you buy your bundle you will receive an enrolment link by email. That link provides you with access to the courses for the number of staff accounts you purchase. All you need to do is share that link with staff for them to create their own account and start a course.
Why not sign up to our sample courses to see how easy enrolment is? You just need an email address and to choose a password.
2. How can I get staff working together?
Our courses are delivered online, but each one incorporates structured collaboration with colleagues, and activities to practise and apply pedagogical approaches in your context. There are a total of 19 meetings in the Assessment Lead Programme, 18 meetings in the Science of Learning Programme, and 9 collaborative conversations within Assessment Essentials. These points of collaboration are all structured – we have set the questions and activities for these meetings. You and your colleagues just need to arrange a place and time to meet (physically or virtually).
This regular collaboration creates a rhythm of follow-up, consolidation and support activities – reinforcing key messages to help impact on practice. It also helps create a shared sense of purpose among colleagues and will enable you to build professional learning communities around key areas of teaching practice. You can read about the collaborative element of our Assessment Essentials course here.
You and your colleagues can also exchange ideas with educators from around the world with our in-course discussion forum.
3. How should I run the CPD bundle?
The bundle is flexible enough for each school to make it work in their own context. There is no ‘one-size fits all’ approach but here are some useful pointers.
The Programmes (Assessment Lead and Science of Learning) are for those staff in, or working towards, middle and senior leader positions. Assessment Essentials is for classroom teachers.
The Programmes typically take two-to-three terms to complete, so they should be started soon after purchase. Assessment Essentials can be completed in 10 weeks. When it comes to your timelines, we suggest building in a few weeks flexibility for the inevitable school emergencies.
When it comes to the collaborative elements of the courses, colleagues can work in pairs or groups. A group should probably be no more than six people. The makeup of groups or pairs is entirely your choice. It can be useful to have people from the same department/phase work together to build ideas and resources they can share. Conversely, we’ve heard of mixed subject and phase groups working well as they see from each other how strategies can be applied in different ways, and that can feed ideas. Mixed groups should work fine so long as the people in those groups are of a mind that seeing things from different perspectives can be interesting and useful – they’re ok working outside their comfort zone.
Finally, those completing the Assessment Lead Programme need not do Assessment Essentials.
4. What are the outcomes from the courses?
Each course has been designed with implementation in mind. As well as developing an understanding of key evidence-informed principles, you and your colleagues will be guided through the process of applying these principles in your own context. Therefore, the outputs from the courses are the implementation plans that you make. We provide the template for these plans but you and your colleagues will decide what to work on, with whom and how.
Implementation plans are a great opportunity to get people together to share ideas but also a great opportunity to come together as a group to celebrate completing a course. You can also revisit the plans as part of evaluative and reflective practice to discuss what went well as part of your implementation plan.
5. What do you get for completing the courses?
Pride, love and respect! Also, everyone who completes a course (right up to the last lesson!) will receive a personalised downloadable certificate of completion.
If you have any questions in addition to these, please get in touch.
