At Huntingdon Academy, we value professional development for all our colleagues. Our vision is individual growth and empowerment for all. Quality professional development creates an environment for colleagues to think and reflect on their practice and collaborate. As an academy, we have invested in a professional space for our colleagues to meet when working on their own development. We take professional development seriously, as investment in our team means investment in our children and the community.
The Five Pillars of Effective Professional Development
All our CPD is underpinned by the five pillars of effective development. We ensure that all CPD is evidenced based and is personalised to our context and our academy. We facilitate most of our CPD in house and all colleagues that lead development are specialists in their field.
| Robust Leadership and Strategy | Culture/ Resource and Environment | Impact and Needs Based | Research Driven Robust Evidence and Expertise | Collaboration and Expert Challenge |
| EFFECTIVE CPD SHOULD: | ||||
| Be vision-centred and prioritised by leaders Be purposeful Be multi- faceted Have alignment with priorities Be sustained and embedded Involve risk taking Be underpinned by coaching/ mentoring/ reflection Have clear performance indicators and high expectations Be timely and needs based Be evaluative | Be regarded as a priority and an integral part of school culture Have dedicated time and resources Develop a culture and commitment to continuous learning Ensure that the environment is conducive to professional development Ensure that behaviours are positive and supportive in relation to CPD | Focus on improving outcomes Be tailored to need in relation to starting point Be personalised, i.e. built on identified needs and requirements rather than a ‘one size fits all’ approach alone Demonstrate value for money with educational impact analysed Focus upon need related to career development and professional challenge | Be underpinned by robust evidence and expertise Use evidence based approaches | Include collaboration and expert challenge from within and externally Involve collective participation in CPD Ensure that time is allocated for staff to work collaboratively Allow collaboration to discuss theory, new ideas and innovative approaches Include expert challenge which is closely linked to the need being focussed upon. |
For further information regarding our ethos on continuous professional development, please find a link to our CPD policy We keep up to date with research regarding effective leadership of CPD. Our CPD system for teaching colleagues follows a three week cycle:
Session 1: Faciliation of topic from an expert
Session 2: Coaching sessions in groups
Session 3: Feedback to the team
This cycle enables colleagues to consider how this part of acadamy improvement can be tailored to their area of school. Coaching groups in session 2 provides space and time for colleagues to discuss further the thinking they have had since session 1 and push their thinking further with colleagues in a smaller group. Session 3 allows colleagues to feedback to the team how they have interpreted and implemented the content delivered in session 1. This allows the leader of this piece of academy improvement to see how the piece of work is being implemented so far and allows colleagues to learn from one another.
” I really like the 3 week coaching cycle, teaching can be busy and having protected time to discuss the way I am implementing academy improvement is really helpful to improving my practice.’ (Chloe Kent ECT)
Characteristics of Effective Teacher Professional Development (EEF)
Colleague Meetings
We provide professional development opportunities for people at all stages of their career. We provide bespoke training for Early Career Teachers to enable them to be successful. We facilitate time for our teaching assistants to come together and reflect on their practice in line with the acadamy improvement plan and we ensure that every colleague meeting is professional and purposeful.
Sample of our Colleague Meetings
Sample of our Early Career Teacher Development Sessions
Sample our Teaching Assistant Enrichment
Sample of our SEND development sessions
The Sendco’s led a cycle of CPD which focused on adaptive teaching and how to employ this within the classroom environment to support children with SEND.
Adaptive teaching is an evolution of differentiation that focuses on the entire class while still responding to individual children’s needs. It involves knowing your pupils’ prior levels of attainment and providing targeted support.
Adaptive teaching involves scaffolding learning so that all children can access this. Scaffolding can be a term used to describe:
- A visual scaffold, such as a task planner, images to support learning new vocabulary, model examples of work etc .
- A verbal scaffold, such as a teacher correcting a misconception at a pupil’s desk. (live marking), specific questioning, pre teach etc.
- A written scaffold, such as a writing frame, word bank, sentence stem etc.
Colleagues undertook a coaching session to support them in the development of a case study which focused on a specific child with SEND. Colleagues shared how they had employed adaptive teaching strategies within the classroom and the impact this had in supporting a child with SEND.
Here are some examples of the case studies colleagues shared:
https://huntingdonacademy.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Adaptive-teaching-case-study-F2.pdf
https://huntingdonacademy.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Adaptive-teaching-case-study-yr1.pdf
https://huntingdonacademy.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Adaptive-teaching-case-study-yr4.pdf
https://huntingdonacademy.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Adaptive-teaching-case-study-yr-5.pdf
Teaching School
We have many colleagues in our organisation who work with https://leadequatetsa.co.uk// and https://www.leadtshublincs.co.uk/. We have Leaders of Excellence who lead CPD for schools in our Trust within their field of expertise. We are an ambitious team of people who believe in life long learning.