Okay, so now we're at our third session on looking at teaching and learning, continuous professional development, the role that it has in education. Why should you think it should be offered to teachers? And what can happen if it's not available? What are its pros and cons. So I'd like you to consider your own experiences of CPD good and bad. I'll share one or two thoughts of my own.

I think there shouldn't be a CPD budget in any school. And that CPD should be available to all teachers. And I think things like promotion and advancement of any description within the school should have a CPD component in it. The pros and cons Well, the cons tend to be, you tend to find in my experience as a school principal Anyway, you tend to find that the Same people, the enthusiastic people are always volunteering for it and the people that you really want to do CPD, the teachers who need it are not necessarily the ones that apply for it. So you need to find a way of motivating those people. That's the biggest con.

And then I think another con is that unless the teacher can clearly see that there's there's a benefit to him or her from doing CPD that there's career development, there's promotion prospects, then you sometimes get people saying, oh, what's the point? Why should I bother? They can't see that CPD is good for them, just for its own sake. It doesn't have to have a reward attached to it or anything. It should just make you you should never be satisfied with your teaching. You should always be looking at ways of improving it.

And that is a cultural change that some schools have a job to inculcate, shall we say in some of them or conservative or reluctant teachers, but CPD is hugely important and it needs to be considered. for it as well. External ones are very popular because it means you, you get an internationally recognised qualification. You might get a peripatetic specialist someone who comes round from that, say University awarding bodies or government bodies to come and do the training. Internal CPD when it's done peer to peer, peer to peer or management load can also be very valuable. It tends to be less popular.

Teachers often don't like to be taught by their colleagues, although anyone with an open mind should see that it's actually beneficial. And then, obviously, these days with online and self directed Learning there's possibility for teachers to act on their own initiative and do action research. And then there's community based CPD, working with parent teacher associations working with local businesses for sponsorship, that kind of thing. So there are all kinds of varieties of CPD, it depends on your school. It depends on the vision of your management team, and whether or not you can stimulate them into doing something if they're not doing so. Here's a little task.

I want you to consider your own school environment as a starting point or if you're not currently teaching a school environment that you're familiar with. I'd like you to outline three CPD activities to be conducted over several months. There should be for teachers, they should be for middle managers, and there should be for senior managers to three different activities over a period of several months. And you need to finance it and you need to allocate resources for it. example, if you sent teachers away, who's going to cover their classes? Well, they're not there.

So what are the learning outcomes? What are people going to gain from doing this? And how will it not just benefit them but benefit the school. And I'd like you to share your thoughts with me via email if you want to, if you don't want to just use this as an exercise. You might even try it with a colleague or two, or actually have it running in your school if you feel like now, a major part of teaching and learning is assessment and evaluation. So we're now going to look at methods of assessing students.

Then we'll look at assessing teachers and their work. We'll look at self peer, and 360 degree evaluation. And we look about look at how we set realistic goals and objectives are all these various things. And perhaps the most difficult one for senior managers is how you retain How you lose and very rarely, I hope, dismiss teaching or other staff. So assessing students, Student Assessment is either summative or normative. For those of you who don't know the difference, summative is, well, the clue is in the first three letters, it's a sum, it's at the end of a course.

So it's something like an examination. So you test what people have learned, what people know, at the end, it's a it's a summary. It's a it's an end product test of what they know, normative assessment is that you are testing students as they go through a program. So it's continuous assessment. Standardized tests Well, in a big school, let's say it's a secondary school, and you have to do some internal examinations and you have different departments, like science or arts or around it. So whatever the tests that students do must be standardized.

You can't have one teacher setting one English test, and another teacher with a parallel class setting a totally different English test. How does that show fairness across the system, so test should be standardized. And of course, the ultimate standardized test is when it is external Freitas from awarding body from outside your school that we call an external benchmark. So that for example, in English language testing, when you have foreign students, there's isles there's TOEFL as a Pearson test of English. In the UK, you've got things like GCSE and a levels in the US, you've got CTS. These are external benchmark tests for student progress.

And of course, the main reason for having testing is in to ensure a consistent quality across the curriculum, that we're not favoring some students over others and everybody is making the progress He or she deserves. I have a favorite Maxim on this, that it is our job as teachers to ensure that each student maximizes his or her potential. They can't all be brilliant. They can't all go off to Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton University's, but they, we should encourage them to be the best that they can be and we should assist them in becoming the best that they should be. Now, we have to assess teachers. As managers, we certainly have to assess teachers.

I can't think of a profession that doesn't assess itself, whether it's medicine or law or engineering or whatever. all professions have means and methods of assessing their members. We can do this with teaching by observing formal lessons. We have interviews with hazard department or senior management. We have a allow encourage insist even teachers to a set to set a range of personal goals and objectives for the year and then check to see that they're achieving those goals. We can have student feedback forms, these are pretty useful.

Students can fill in forms about the teaching that they've received. Some teachers are very reluctant to do this. But in my experience, it's very rare for students to be anything other than kind on their student feedback forms, unless there is a real personality conflict between the teacher and the given student, in which case, it'll just be one negative comment and the rest should be okay. The issue for me as a manager of teachers is if I get student feedback forms and the vast majority of them are negative, then I think we have a problem. It's very rare that that happens. And when it does happen, there's usually something that needs investigating.

We look at department performances within departments or were intra departmental. So for example, if you work in a department of science as a sort of global umbrella organization, but within that department, you have sub departments of chemistry, physics, biology, you might want to use the benchmark tests for school leaving exams. To see how people go from year to year you need to keep longitudinal data for that you need because it's no good just just looking at one year. If a student does well in 2000 out, a group of students do well in 2019. That doesn't really show very much unless we can compare it with 2018 1716 going back, maybe as much as 10 years. So we do need to keep data data is very important, I think in assessing teachers performance parents Well, yes, parents can often provide you with good feedback.

They can often provide you with very unrealistic feedback, we have to be objective about this. Parents often have a very unrealistic expectation of what their sons and daughters can achieve. And when they don't achieve the live up to those expectations, they may blame the teacher very unfairly, so that one needs to be carefully monitored. Obviously, external exam results are important. So now let's look at this difficult students. What do I mean by difficult students?

Well, the obvious. First one is discipline. If a student is misbehaving in class, or which is more likely not attending or becoming late, there has to be a system in place to deal with it. We've long I hope left behind the days of corporal punishment, but there are methods of discipline which Sometimes need to be enforced. In my last job as headmaster, we had a system that we for lateness and absence, we called a red card system. Taking was an analogy from football, that if a student had three unexplained absences, explained absence was fine.

If you've got a genuine reason for not being there, you're sick, you've got a doctor's note, no problem. But if you just have not turned up for classes, and there is no explanation, or it's a fraudulent explanation, it's been a forged letter from a parent or something. If we had three of those, and then the student was given a red card. Now the red card meant that he or she had to carry that card with them at all times, and get the each subject teacher to sign it at the end of every lesson to say yes, this student was present in my class. Yes, this Student arrived on time. If the student was very senior and had some free time because he she was working towards a levels International Baccalaureate, something like that and had some free lessons.

Then during those three lessons, that student had to go to the resource center the library and have the librarian sign that he she was there at the end of two weeks. The student then reported back to one of the senior management team and in the school, and if the red card was signed off, with no problems for the two weeks, and that was fine. He would teach she'd be taken off the red card. If there were still problems or if after one offense with red card and then it happens again. Then we would take it to another level and we might consider suspension because it 10 attendance in school is vital particularly in examination classes. For other methods of disciplinary All kinds of internal methods that you can use again, one of the ones that I used to use as headmaster was we used to finish early on a Friday afternoon or rather students did, and teaching staff did I didn't.

I was there till five o'clock every day. So we had what we call the headmaster's detention. And that was every Friday afternoon now that was weeks went by when we didn't hold any but if a student had been misbehaving or whatever, he or she would be placed in the room next to mine, which was a conference room and given work to do and would have to stay there for however long we decided beforehand that I would periodically poke my head around the door and make sure they're actually getting on with some work they usually did because they knew I was only next door. So internal discipline is something we need to consider. And obviously later lateness and absenteeism is tied up with that. When you involve the parents and local authorities is When it gets a bit more serious, I, again, from personal experience, had to deal with a suit with a bad case of stealing some years ago.

And the student concerned was caught red handed. We had to involve the parents. And we had to actually say if this continues, it's actually breaking the law and we'd have to involve the police. It didn't have far as I know, never happened again. suspension is when there's something that is, in my opinion, anyways, a repeat offense, we've not been able to do anything about it. It's a student who's persistently offending.

Well, suspension is involving the parents as well because they need to know why you're suspending the student for how long could be a week could be two weeks. That work maybe give them for them to do during that time. Ultimately, the the ultimate disciplinary measure is of course expulsion. Now, again, I can, I can, quote, personal experience, I've had to expel students from a school because of drug taking. drugs were are considered one of the most serious crimes and in fact, the country where I was working at the time actually had the death penalty for drug taking. So that was hugely serious.

And, in fact, parents were, I think, glad that we had only expelled the student. We haven't informed the teachers firsthand from the police. Because if the authorities have got involved, then it would have been a court case there would have been a criminal record, there would have been all sorts of things is extreme, but it does happen. And you need to be as educators you need to be very familiar with your with your rights and the restrictions. According to the law, and do bear in mind that the law does change. The law changes from time to time to cover new crimes coming.

For example, when I was a young teacher was not such a young teacher. There was no such thing as cyber bullying. Now, it's widespread now because of the ubiquitous mobile phones and the internet. All sorts of pretty serious things that going on between students that may be that may involve downloading unpleasant material, it may involve, as I say, bullying of other other students. You need to know where you stand legally. And if past experiences anything to go by, the law tends to catch up with what's happening in society.

It does. It's not proactive, it's reactive. But once it has reacted, you need to know what your rights and responsibilities Okay, these are contentious issues, but we have to deal with them. We talked about difficult students, discipline students Now what about teachers? This is a managerial thing. First of all, it depends very much on the nature of teachers jobs with your school, are they on contract?

Or are they permanent staff? For obvious reasons contractual stuff tend to be easier to discipline than permanent ones because you simply if their behavior performance is not up to standard, you just don't renew their contract. So renewal of contracts is is you know, again, from from personal experience, the number of times I have not renewed a teacher's contract, have been phenomenally rare. And it's usually because this the teacher, him or herself, has chosen not to renew because he or she wants to move on. It's usually because working abroad they want to go and see another country or, or whatever. But contract renewal is, is relatively straightforward.

Again, As far as personal experience is concerned, I used to do it. The contract was up for renewal in June, I would have a conversation with the teachers probably before Christmas, and just say, what what are your plans? Do you intend to renew with us next year? Or have you got if the teacher was, had been a forward planner was being proactive? He or she might say, Oh, no, I'm, I'm definitely staying I'd like another contract, please. If they were a good teacher, they were doing work.

Their work was going well. No question. The contract would just roll over. If they weren't sure. Well, I may be staying. I may be looking around for other things next semester.

Okay, fair enough. But please keep me informed and there is a deadline, and our deadline, I think, was March 31. You must let us know by March 31 if you intend to leave because you know, we may have to replace you. So that's contracts, terminating staff. Now. This is a difficult one, if you have to get rid of a teacher and I can think of a number of reasons why you might, there has to be a very clear procedure for so doing.

And usually, again, from personal experience, it takes the form of a series of warnings as a verbal warning, first of all, so the date and the time of the warning is noted in the teachers file. Then there may be a first written warning and probably a second written warning and then either a final warning or termination. But it's has to be a lengthy procedure and it has to cover areas of grievance, whatever now why might you do it? You might do it purely and solely because a teacher has become ill and is taking a lot of time off. Now there's no follow the teacher that he or she is ill but Equally, it's no follow the students who are not getting taught or being getting taught by a relief teacher who may not be a subject specialist. So you have to consider that we had a situation again in when I was in the role of principal, where one of our members of staff have stroke and was unable to teach for three, four months, and then have made a lot of progress because initially, that teacher was quite badly affected by the stroke in terms of speech and memory loss.

And so, eventually the teacher was able to return but was not the same as that teacher had been beforehand, there had been a personality change. And I was not confident that that person would be able to do as good a job as had been done previously. So we had to make an offer of a shoe A contract just to ensure that everything was was going to be okay. So there you go verbal warning, first written warning, second, or maybe final written warning, and then maybe dismissal. That's the usual procedure in many places. Bear in mind, of course, you may get legal and other challenges you've got may get challenged for wrongful dismissal, and then it's very messy, then there's a court case maybe where you have met and ideally, you can settle out of court, but you can see I have been on the receiving end of that.

So finally, to end this, there's my email down the bottom. But I'd like you now to consider these scenarios, dealing with a conflict between two colleagues, student bullying, unreasonable parental expectations, problems with middle management. So, those four scenarios, how do you think you might respond to these? Have you experienced anything similar to them? Feel free to email your thoughts to me about them if you want to discuss them, etc, etc. This is useful or discuss with colleagues you might want to you know, as I said earlier, this is quite useful to, to work with someone in your own school to think about these things.

But that's the end of what we're going to be doing as far as teaching and learning is concerned. Next part of this course we'll be looking at Educational Leadership and Management. Thank you very much.