CPD for Teachers
Literacy Across the Curriculum CPD – This popular course, which is best run as a full day for all staff, but can be run as a half day or as a keynote, takes teachers on a journey through many of the barriers that an educational institution serious about improving outcomes in literacy might want to address. It covers the most important and difficult issue to confront: that of teachers’ own literacy skills and seeks to ensure that teachers address this in a ‘non-shaming’ manner. Teachers who experience this day course leave it with all the rules their students need to help them to write as fluently as they might. It also covers why teachers must be the models of Standard English themselves; the relationships between the three literacies; techniques for improving oracy, marking and extended writing; along with spelling strategies, grammar and techniques for reluctant writers.
Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling CPD – This has been specifically designed to aid teachers having to prepare students for the new KS2 test. It covers the KS2 curriculum in detail and ‘up-skills’ teachers in the knotty bits of grammar and punctuation that few of us know about in sufficient detail. It covers subjects and predicates; simple, compound and complex sentences; rules for comma usage including an answer to the vexed question of whether they are used to separate adjectives; exclamations, possessive apostrophes and semi colons; the naked noun; sentence kernels; the distinction between conjunctions and connectives; how to punctuate conjunctive adverbs and whether you can ever have a comma before ‘and’. (You can). It provides resources and teaching ideas and is hugely useful to KS2 teachers, but also to anyone teaching in KS3 who will be greeted from September 2016 with seas of fresh faces who know more about this stuff than their teachers.
Why are You Shouting At Us?: the Dos and Don’ts of Positive Behaviour Management CPD – This full day course, which is formed on the principles outlined in the book of the same name by Phil and John Murphy, looks at the three key tenets of positive behaviour management: (“Your belief in what is possible control the outcomes you get”, “It isn’t about you; it isn’t about them; it’s about the learning” and “Humour is the best de-escalation technique”) and the seven areas in which you can get things right: ‘Be who you should be internally’, ‘Manage your own challenging behaviour’, ‘Be who you should be externally’, ‘Understand the behaviour’, ‘Use de-escalation techniques’, ‘Understand manipulative anger’ and ‘Use humour’. It provides tools and strategies that teachers can use to great effect in any environment and combines this with being a profound, humorous and life changing day.
Metacognition CPD – Many teachers were surprised when Professor Hattie’s tables of effect size concluded that metacognitive approaches were, in fact, both extremely effective and cheaply implemented. But what are these? And what is Metacognition? Phil has written the only serious work by a British teacher on this area, has read vast reams of research on Metacognition and has examined and assessed the efficacy of the strategies that Hattie recommends. The issue with work on Metacognition is that it has always been the province of glib learning-to-learn programmes when, in fact, it is a rather more complex academic field. This twilight course gives teachers deeper understanding and access to strategies that will improve the ability of their pupils to self regulate and, therefore, perform better at school and in life.
Addressing the Barriers to White Working-Class Achievement CPD - This course, which runs best over a half day, examines 15 barriers that white working-class students bring to the school gates and asks schools and teachers in those schools to examine each one of these and to come up with strategies that might reach out to those students, and to respect and understand their culture at the same time as having the highest of expectations. It is a challenging day and schools or academies booking this training need to be aware that it causes heated debate in staffrooms.
Dancing About Architecture: The Secrets of Truly Creative Teaching – This course comes from Phil’s controversial, worst selling book of the same name. It examines an approach to teaching and learning that throws out the rulebook and attempts to create the kind of classroom environment that any child might want to inhabit. It looks at using the arts as methods of pedagogy and utilizing tenets from surrealism to create exciting learning experiences. This course is a distance away from current orthodoxies and is the ideal palette cleanser for teachers or teams who feel that research based and ‘traditional’ methods are actually adding very little to the students’ experience of school.
How to Differentiate like a Pro CPD – This half-day course takes teachers through the principles of differentiation: when you should use it, how to record it and how to manage the burden. At the end of this course management teams will have a whole staff recording and implementing differentiated strategies in the same professional and evidence informed way.
