L. I. T

In a previous role as a Key Stage Leader, I was responsible for leading Year One and Two. As a team, we quickly built a rapport with each other and key stage meetings were always productive, involving a mixture of sharing good practice and thinking ahead to what we would like to do better. After working with the existing curriculum for a year, I was very keen in my second year to make some changes. The existing curriculum was loosely based on the old national curriculum but was mainly generated from past planning documents. There was no continuity between Year One and Year Two and it appeared that the design was based on what previous teachers enjoyed teaching or found easy to teach. There was a lack of progression in skills for the children to develop, which made it difficult to consolidate previous learning and build on it. Review I began by scrutinising the current curriculum in more depth. I informally interviewed children, teachers and some parents and looked at various c...

Learning and development is critical if teachers and leaders are to adjust to rapid changes and movements of a modern world. Kydd  et al.  (2003) point out that the pace of social, economic and technological change is the reason why all of us must become lifelong learners and why professionals must engage in professional development. However, ensuring that training has a long term impact is not straightforward. In this section, I will discuss some of the issues related to CPD and then offer some solutions and alternatives to the traditional format of delivering training. There is evidence to suggest that after teachers have been teaching for two or three years they begin to plateau in terms of their classroom performance (Allison, 2014). In order to improve practice, teachers need to improve their skills to become an expert. Allison ’s solution to this problem is to provide teachers with a range of CPD opportunities. However Ryan (2008) believes that schools have not y...