CPD at TAL: Striving for Excellence

At TAL we expect a lot from our staff but we give a lot in return. A TAL teacher believes that all teachers should be world class practitioners and our expert teacher programme supports staff at all levels to continually improve their practice. This programme consists of instructional coaching and deliberate practice, as every teacher has a coach and every teacher is a coach. Coaching pairs are updated each term to ensure opportunities to observe as many practitioners as possible. Each teacher completes a 10 minute drop in on their partner every week and writes up short scripted feedback onto Steplab. This feedback drives the deliberate practice covered in our twice weekly, breakfast coaching sessions. Lead coaches also complete termly drops in and deliver more detailed feedback, responding to individual needs. As admirers of Lemov, we TAL like a champion and our teachers are trained to look for the granular steps that can improve an explanation, a questioning technique or feedback. Our open-door culture ensures all staff feel valued and supported, never judged.

As well as this collaborative process, we also hold weekly CPD sessions, separated into Culture Build and Curriculum Build, ensuring all teachers are mission aligned to obliterate disadvantage and making all students successful. These sessions are evidence informed and contextualised for our needs. We regularly invite experts in their field, Doug Lemov, Mary Myatt etc, to speak to our staff and share their wisdom.

We believe in genuine improvement and a collaborative approach to ensuring a word class quality experience for the students we serve. We do not believe in box ticking or spurious judgements. To this end, Curriculum Leaders enjoy Curriculum Conversations with subject experts from across the country.

The aim of curriculum conversations is for teachers and leaders at all levels to gain a strong understanding of the quality of our provision across each department and for this to enable and inform our next steps in ensuring the highest quality education for our students.  These are collaborative – not done to staff, but with staff, and directed initially by subject teams’ own lines of enquiry. They are also developmental – opportunities for colleagues to learn about quality assurance processes, use of data and strategic planning. Colleagues will also benefit from working closely with external experts.

 

At TAL, we are passionate about the teaching profession and its ability to transform lives. We invest heavily in staff and support all our teachers to gain chartered status, a professional accreditation that recognises the knowledge, skills and behaviours of highly accomplished teachers and school leaders.