Professional Development at TAL
Expert teachers and support staff can add a year’s worth of learning to a child’s education (Sutton Trust 2011). High quality teaching is therefore the best and most important resource we can provide to our students. Our vision is simple: world-class teachers, teaching world-class lessons, to students taught how to be world-class learners. We ensure this through the provision of a world class professional development offer that supports and empowers our staff to become Expert Teachers and Expert Support Staff.
Our professional development 
offer is underpinned by research and contextualixed to what makes us TAL. Culture 20 runs through everything we do, and we live out our academy values of Honesty, Empathy, Respect and Responsibility. We invest heavily in our staff to ensure they feel supported to thrive in their respective roles. We offer a range of professional development programmes and regular training sessions to support staff across all experience levels, many of which feature key elements of deliberate practice and personalised coaching. These include a range of powerful insets, our Expert Teacher Programme (open to all teaching staff), Expert ECT Programme (open to ECTs and ITTs), our New Starter Induction programme, ENHANCE (open to all staff), Expert Support (for all support staff). We have fostered a culture of positive, low stakes feedback which drives our collective professional development as a team, through regular drop ins in line with our ‘Egos at the Door’ policy.
Teaching at TAL is underpinned by 5 key pedagogical approaches which we call the Elements; subject passion and expertise, focus and purpose, pitch and challenge, talk and questioning and reflect and respond. These elements support the expert delivery of ‘The Learning Process at TAL’. The learning process is adapted from and inspired by Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction. Together, these create a purposeful learning environment that is dynamic, supportive and inspiring, where students are encouraged to think hard, deepen their learning and respond to feedback.
Our CPD and coaching offer ensures that every member of staff is supported and challenged to reach their potential, whilst feeling confident in delivering world class lessons underpinned by the Learning process and the Elements. Our context and vision drive our whole-school priorities: routines (culture 20), literacy and VOICE. These priorities feed into CPD and deliberate practice sessions throughout the school year, ensuring that each teacher feels confident in addressing these priorities, whilst also developing their subject-specific practice through curriculum builds, subject passions and 1-1 personalised coaching sessions. Four TAL Toolkits have been created by experts to provide staff with teaching and learning strategies they can use to improve teaching and learning for all students. They include, the Golden Toolkit, Questioning Toolkit, Multilingual Toolkit and Literacy Toolkit. Deliberate practice sessions will support staff in their delivery of these.
Lastly, our robust quality assurance processes ensure that we deliver what our vision states: world class teachers delivering world-class lessons, to students taught how to be world-class learners.