Why Don’t Teachers Like CPD?
Why does CPD have such an image problem? Possibly, suggests Dougald Tidswell, because teachers aren’t necessarily model students
Every industry is awash with its own set of Three Letter Initialisations, and teaching is no exception: SLT, SRE, SEN… they just keep coming, but the one that always seems to provoke the least enthusiasm in anyone must surely be CPD.
Presumably we all sign up to the idea that developing skills and knowledge is a good thing; I also presume that few of us are so egotistical that we cannot acknowledge room for improvement – so why does CPD suffer from such an image problem?
For me, there are two moments that shed some light on the issue.
The first was hearing this statement: “If you bring one thing back, it was a useful day”. When heading out to a conference, this is not the ringing endorsement that you expect from your line manager, and yet I’ve found myself repeating this mantra to others.
Would we be happy if our students took one thing back after a whole day at school?
The second was towards the start of my training year, when I was earnestly told how little students would remember if you just lectured at them.
You can probably see the punchline coming a mile off. Of course, this was part of a lecture – and indeed I think the only thing I remember from that particular session was the jarring incongruity of the statement and its delivery.
Maybe this is the problem with CPD: for professional educators, we are often remarkably bad at following good educational practice when we’re delivering content to our peers.
Shock to the system
Granted, there are practical issues. It’s tough enough to differentiate for a class of 30, never mind to a whole school team, or worse a conference hall filled with delegates from across the country; but the one size fits all model is intrinsically flawed – so couldn’t we make more use of themed breakout threads to follow at conferences, and smaller, more focused sessions instead of whole school INSET?
The other issue is that we’re simply not used to being students. I hesitate to reveal exactly how many years there were between my graduation and return to the classroom, but it was a shock becoming a student again.
My road to Damascus moment was in realising I am that disaffected kid in your class. Oh, don’t get me wrong, if I’m interested in your subject, I’ll be attentive, engaged, resistant to any and all distractions and extremely compliant.
Vivos (other rewards systems are available), merits, house points will all flow my way and the letterbox will regularly clatter with the sound of congratulatory postcards home.
Joint responsibility
However, there is a different side. If I’ve prejudged your subject, or you’ve damaged your credibility in some way, my inner Kevin the Teenager does sneak into view.
If you’re mathsphobic you may want to skip this sentence, but to illustrate my point, during my NQT year at a gathering of maths NQTs from across the county the statement was made that (when looking at proportional change) it was important to have students describe the process as ‘multiplying by one quarter’ rather than ‘dividing by four’.
I asked why one description was better than the other, since they were equivalent operations, and was told that someone clever had said so, so we just had to accept it.
With that abdication of responsibility to back up statements, I instantly became ‘that’ boy. Capable of so much more but disengaged, not crossing the line into active disruption, but minimally compliant, and definitely coasting.
We wouldn’t tolerate it in our classrooms, but sometimes we sure as hell bring it to other people’s.
As deliverers of CPD we have to ensure our content is directly relevant to its selected audience, and presented engagingly. The more difficult side of the partnership is that we as CPD consumers also need to take responsibility for our engagement.
At the very least, we need to recognise our reactions to our instructors and decide what sort of student we are going to be.
For me, that means not sulking if there’s a seating plan, and being more open to the occasional role play… although I’m probably still going to insist that you can back up your statements decently.
Dougald Tidswell is subject leader for mathematics at a Buckinghamshire Upper School.
