East Midlands Centre for Excellence in Teacher Training (emCETT), has a strong message for managers and team leaders about their role in planning and managing CPD. This is how emCETT sees things.
- High-performing organisations are the product of high performing teams, not high-performing individuals.
- Team-based (or 'situated learning'*) professional development leads to communities of practice that have greater, and more sustainable impact on organisational performance than individual excellence alone.'
- Senior managers can drive team-based improvement by making explicit their expectation of collaborative development in key documents and processes such as job descriptions, person specifications, professional development reviews and performance appraisals.
Whether you are a manager or team leader, download emCETT's article Sustainable high performance (what’s the secret?) using the link on the right and read more about the ideas summarised above. You might then:
- reflect on the value of collaborative, team-based professional development and how you can promote it; and
- assess your organisation's current position by completing the short questionnaire that you'll find towards the end of the article.
If you are a senior manager, click here to continue exploring the link between CPD and high-performing organisations.
If you are a team leader, click here for some helpful suggestions that will support you in promoting collaborative CPD.
Whatever your role, you might like to check out the issues that emerged from a study of CPD in science. Many of the issues will be common to other STEM subjects as well as to non-STEM curriculum areas.
*Situated learning is learning that:
- takes place in the same context in which it is applied; and
- emerges out of the interaction and collaboration between practitioners.
Related resources
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