⏰ It's almost here - ResearchEd Cork this Saturday! My session explores how in-house TPL can drive school improvement. Leaders, teacher educators & mentors - come along for practical tips on designing great CPD! See you in West Cork - last few tickets: eventbrite.com/e/researched-…

🧠 @researchED1 National this weekend! I'm on straight after lunch in M07: 🎓 14.00-14.40: Consistency Is Killing Us: Reclaiming teacher professionalism and agency through PD at scale Leaders, teacher educators, professional development leads and mentors- see you there! #rED25

"Government should... provide a core backbone of qualifications... and then focus on building a flourishing ecosystem of high-quality PD, from which schools and teachers can choose freely." Bold yet balanced pushes from @hamer_marie and @LoicMnzs in this really important report!

“Teaching is a contact sport” says Dr Neil Gilbride @nmgilbride. @researchED1 #ResearchEdOutOfContext

👋🏽 I’ll be speaking twice at @researchED1 National today: - Session 4 in K10 - Session 6 in M20 My talk: "Why your PD offer is your school improvement plan, and how to maximise its impact" Does your role involve in CPD, leadership or school improvement? This is for you! #rED24

📣ResearchEd tomorrow! Due to a small printing error I'm not on the main timetable, but I *will* be speaking at: - M20 - Session 6 I'll be giving my brand new talk "Why your PD offer is your school improvement plan, and how to maximise its impact" Come and say hello! 👋 #rED24

Love a bit of intra-conference cross pollination! @adamjames317 getting a shout out for his knowledge organiser work during @KateJones_teach keynote 🙌🏽 #REdChesh

Such a pleasure to listen to @lamb_heart_tea and @MrsBallAP dropping some serious knowledge - writing frames risk creating “writing by numbers” tasks that fail to develop deep, disciplinary literacy 👌🏾 Great way to end the day at @EducationFest 🌞

Secondly, strongly agree on the dangers of coaches focusing on 'easy to spot' & 'easy to coach' techniques. To me, the risk here is that these actually backwash into and distort our definition of effective teaching and learning, as I wrote about here: nickpointer.com/are-we-even-…

E.g. we can give teachers something to help direct their attention while they consider a model (for instance, a set of success criteria). This leverages the Managing Cognitive Load mechanism, since it reduces the number of things they need to pay attention to and notice 🔍

However, this misses out on one of the biggest benefits of a mechanism-first approach to PD. For any given part/component/activity in a PD session, more than one mechanism can be leveraged simultaneously. I'd argue that we should aim to do this whenever possible, in fact!

Given the highly finite time available for PD to take place, particularly for in-service teachers in schools, many leaders of T&L may already be maxing out the number of 'bits' they can squeeze into a PD session. In other words, there's no time to add another activity in!

Something I've noticed is these can sometimes be interpreted as having a one-to-one correlation to the components of our teacher development work. From this perspective, the finding that 'more mechanisms = more impactful PD' can feel like an unhelpful suggestion.

Firstly, a brief recap on mechanisms. These are the 'active ingredients' of professional development (PD). The EEF's report on effective PD found these have a causal impact on the improvements to pupil learning as a result of teacher development. More mechanisms? More impact 🙌