Why does your school need a Developing Teaching Excellence Project?

Mark’s learning from working with hundreds of schools across the UK throughout the Covid era has been that it isn’t enough to go back to teaching as we did pre-pandemic. Our learners need more skilled practitioners given the disruption to their education that they’ve experienced. However we also need to ensure that the development of teaching is sustainable, given the challenges that teams in schools have been facing.

This project will give leaders valuable time to step back from the busy, operational treadmill, to focus on strategies to ensure there is a high quality, consistent diet of learning across all classrooms for children.

Project Outcomes

Leaders will have clarity on the key foundations that underpin sustainable teaching development in teams and strategies to overcome them
A framework for teaching to support deep dialogue and feedback

Project Structure

The project will start with a keynote delivery from Mark Burns at our conference on Friday 4 November 2022.

This will be followed by four interactive and practical online sessions led by Mark across the academic year.

Session 1

Learning and Forgetting

Understanding how learners process new information and why they forget is the focus of this first session. We’ll explore:

The research about working memory, and the key implications for how we plan, teach and lead.
Examine thinking frameworks and practical teaching strategies and tools to create shared clarity with our teams about these implications
Evaluate how working memory characteristics influence the strategies we use to manage processing load of the staff we lead during this Covid era, as well as the growth within the curriculum area we lead. This includes one-to-one conversations, team meetings and CPD we lead.

Session 2

Building and Utilising Schema

Long-term memory is key to learning. After all, a human can’t have learnt something they’ve forgotten. In this session we’ll examine:

The research about long-term memory and the key implications for how we plan and teach.
Examine thinking frameworks and practical leadership and teaching strategies to create shared clarity with our teams about how we can teach so learners remember
Evaluate how we can build shared schema amongst staff within the curriculum areas we lead to lead growth.

Session 3

Dialogic Leadership

Schools operate at a fast pace, and therefore at times, monologue, assumptions and fast-thinking can predominate. This session will explore:

The risks that come with monologue-led leadership and how to avoid them
Strategies to develop deep dialogue in teams to maximise shared understanding about the ‘why? what? and how to?’ to ensure coherence and consistency of the teaching of curriculum
Leadership approaches that avoid incorrect inferences to be made.

Session 4

Leveraging the power of feedback

It’s common for schools to have a feedback policy for children, but rare for there to be clear feedback protocols amongst staff. This session will explore:

The importance of feedback in iterative development of the impact of the taught curriculum
The key foundations that underpin effective feedback within teams
Key leadership actions to influence accurate feedback within teams.

Join the Developing Teaching Excellence Project!

Developing Teaching Excellence Project

VNET members can access projects using 6 of their membership credits or for £600+VAT
Non-members can access projects at £1000+VAT
We recommend that two delegates attend the project including a senior leader - the second delegate is free!
Access to the project includes access to an area on VNETCIC.com with all resources

Mark Burns

Mark spent 12 years as a full-time teacher. Over the last fourteen years, he’s co-written three best-selling books including Teaching Backwards and the award winning The Learning Imperative. Mark has a proven track record of supporting teaching and leadership development in schools across the UK and abroad through the learning programmes he designs and facilitates. His work was recognised as Gold Award winner at Learning Performance Institute Awards 2021 for People Development Programme of the Year.

VNET EDUCATION CIC

Developing Teaching Excellence Project 22/23

This project will equip leaders with a framework to deepen dialogue, strategies to ensure feedback is impactful, and a shared language for teaching excellence.