Adaptive Teaching

Led by the East London Research School, this programme is designed to empower educators with the knowledge and skills to enhance their teaching practices and create dynamic learning environments. This comprehensive training comprises two in-person training days and four webinars, offering a flexible and accessible approach to professional development.

The training curriculum places a strong emphasis on understanding the evidence that supports adaptive teaching. Participants will explore the latest research and theories in education, gaining insights into effective instructional strategies and pedagogical approaches. Through engaging with evidence, educators will develop a deeper understanding of the impact of adaptive teaching on student learning outcomes.

The programme will be tailored to spend time on aspects of adaptive teaching most relevant to school priorities for the cohort.

Key areas of the programme include;

Metacognition  - Metacognition and self-regulation approaches to teaching support pupils to think about their own learning more explicitly, often by teaching them specific strategies for planning, monitoring, and evaluating their learning.

Interventions are usually designed to give pupils a repertoire of strategies to choose from and the skills to select the most suitable strategy for a given learning task.

Self-regulated learning can be broken into three essential components:

• cognition – the mental process involved in knowing, understanding, and learning

• metacognition – often defined as ‘learning to learn’; and

• motivation – willingness to engage our metacognitive and cognitive skills.

By incorporating metacognitive strategies into their teaching, educators can empower students to have and use a range of strategies to overcome learning challenges and therefore develop lifelong learning skills.

Language and literacy guidance - Educators will gain valuable insights and recommendations for supporting language development and literacy skills across various subject areas. With this knowledge, they can design inclusive lessons that meet the diverse needs of their students and foster language and literacy growth.

Making best use of Teaching Assistants - educators will look at evidence based guidance to make the best use of Teaching Assistants. Recommendations are based on the latest research examining the use of TAs in the classroom. 

Special Educational Needs in mainstream - educators will explore the five evidence based recommendations to support children with SEND, providing school leaders with a starting point to review current approaches and practical ideas for implementation. 

Effective professional development and implementation - educators will explore the evidence base for lasting professional growth and learn how to create meaningful and impactful development opportunities for themselves and their colleagues. Participants will look at the stages of effective implementation planning and be supported to create a plan to enable sustained improvements in teacher practice.  

This course will teach senior leaders the necessary tools and knowledge to implement adaptive teaching strategies effectively understanding the evidence, leveraging metacognition, engaging in effective professional development, providing language and literacy support, and sustaining change, educators will be well-prepared to create engaging and dynamic learning experiences for their students.

Online sessions will be recorded and all resources shared via Padlet for Senior Leaders to use in school if desired.  

• Target audience:
• Primary
• Secondary

• Included in package:
• Primary

Headteachers' Conference

Educational Leadership in Hackney: Adapting and Thriving

Venue: The Glasshouse, Springfield Park, E5 9EF

Price: £199.00 + VAT

Catering by Fat Macy's - a social enterprise that supports people to move on from temporary accommodation through culinary and hospitality training, 1:1 support and access to a rental deposit.

This annual conference gives Headteachers the opportunity to hear from national speakers on themes related to leadership and learning. It will offer the space to learn from, be inspired by, challenge and discuss current approaches with other education professionals.

Keynotes from: 

• Karen Blackett, OBE - Adapt to Thrive: Dynamic Leadership in a Shifting Landscape
• Sarah Horrocks - Adapting and Thriving in a Digital Age
• Professor Lee Elliott Major - Thriving through Education : Adapting to social Equity

The day also includes: 

• Structured Networking and roundtable discussions about key issues in schools currently.
• A panel titled How can all children thrive in education?

Agenda

Speaker Biographies:

Karen Blackett, OBE 

Renowned and Proven Business Leader with a Track Record in Creating Vibrant Cultures

Karen Blackett is a proven business leader with a track record in creating vibrant cultures, energising teams, and consistently delivering business growth and success. She is currently UK President for WPP, the world’s largest marketing services group, and responsible for driving growth in WPP’s second largest market of 13,000 people. Former GroupM UK CEO, Karen was selected to turnaround the business over 2.5 years at a critical time, during the COVID global pandemic and the subsequent impact of the killing of George Floyd. In June 2014, Karen Blackett received an OBE in the Queen's Birthday honours and topped the Power List, being the first businesswoman to come in at number 1. In November 2022, Karen received Power List’s Outstanding Contribution Award in recognition of her continued exceptional achievements. In June 2023, Karen was appointed a NED for Diageo (a FTSE Top 10 company), and was a former NED of The Cabinet Office. In October 2023, Karen was honoured by INvolve – The Inclusion People’s List and came in at #1 for the Top 100 Women Executives.

Sarah Horrocks

Sarah has significant experience of leading powerful professional development for teachers, supporting schools in using digital technologies and working with school and other education leaders to develop their digital strategies. 

She has a proven track record of delivering successful and impactful large-scale education projects, including the Learning Bridges remote learning technology solution for UNICEF in Jordan, TechPathways London for the London Mayor's Digital Talent programme, BlendEd, a blended learning pedagogy professional development programme commissioned by IBM, and leading the Connected Learning Centre as its director for 16 years. She has worked with municipalities across Northern Europe devising and delivering a range of digital learning-themed EU award winning Erasmus projects including AI and personalised learning, computational thinking and blended learning pedagogy. She has led the delivery of multi-award-winning curriculum and technical services for schools. She is an experienced public speaker on digital learning and presents regularly at the BETT show.

Sarah has authored several research papers including educational blogs and their effects on pupils' writing and technology-supported professional development for teachers: lessons from developing countries.  Sarah is also a guest lecturer at UCL, Institute of Education.

Professor Lee Elliott Major

• Target audience:
• Primary
• Secondary
• Early Years

Incremental Coaching: Developing teachers

Incremental coaching is a form of teacher development based on a regular, frequent and ongoing cycle of short observations and focused follow-up coaching conversations.  The coaching conversations focus on one aspect of teaching that help teachers improve their practice. The aspect of practice is selected based on what the teacher needs to improve, and time is devoted to improving it before moving on to other areas of practice.

This course is aimed at leaders of teaching and learning who focus on teacher development. We will examine the following specific areas:

The lesson observation – technique and analysis 
The follow-up coaching conversation
Determining effective action steps
Coaching and practice

This course will draw on the work of Paul Bambrick-Santoyo.

Participants will learn the steps to effective incremental coaching drawing on real examples including those from Hackney schools.

• Target audience:
• Primary
• Secondary

• Included in package:
• Primary
• Secondary

KS1 writing moderation for leaders training

Course overview

This training session will use the standardisation materials to enhance current practice in moderating writing.

Course objectives

• To strengthen our understanding of the differences between each of the 3 national standards for English writing for Year 2.

Who should attend?

Year 2 teachers, assessment leads, Deputy Heads and Head teachers. Trained KS1 moderators do not need to attend.

• Target audience:
• Primary

• Included in package:
• Primary

Leadership Insights: Selling your subject - what do you need to know to speak to an Ofsted Inspector?

A briefing session designed specifically to support Middle Leaders to prepare for Ofsted.

Course Objectives:

• Explore changes in the Ofsted framework and recent guidance.
• Understand the components of a good or better Quality of Education.
• Define curriculum intent, implementation, and impact.
• Familiarise yourself with the inspection process, particularly the 'deep dive' line of inquiry, and develop strategies for effective self-evaluation and confident engagement with inspections.

• Target audience:
• Primary
• Secondary

• Included in package:
• Primary
• Secondary

Stop talking about wellbeing: Practical resilience strategies to support teacher workload

In an effort to get schools to think about how to care for their employees, wellbeing has been pushed to the top of the national agenda as the statistical rate of teachers leaving the profession reaches worrying levels and teachers' mental health becomes a major concern.

Although staff members are required to participate in wellbeing-related activities, they have little effect on their workload or capacity to perform what they were hired to do: teach children and young people. As a result, wellbeing has become a tokenistic characteristic within the education sector. Kat Howard looks to fundamentally rewrite this narrative through these 2 sessions.

Session 1 - 23rd Jan 2024, 8.30-10.00: Senior Leadership and workload

In this session, senior leaders will consider both their own workload and the related challenges, as well as the areas of review possible within current school practice that may mitigate against high teacher workload. With an exploration of the leading research in this area, the session will explore policy review and adaptation, logistical processes in-house including feedback loops and curriculum mechanisms that will not only benefit the workforce’s workload on a pragmatic level, but will likely lead to increased professional fulfilment and teacher retention. Leaders should expect to leave the session with clearly identified areas of enquiry which will form an action plan to identify their own priorities for their school setting.

The first session will include documents to act as a template for a gap task.

Ahead of Session 2, it would be helpful for those attending to submit your areas of focus.

Session 2 - 19th Mar 2024, 8.30-10.00: Senior and Middle Leadership and workload: sharing effective practice

In this session, senior leaders and invited subject leaders will have the opportunity to hear from the network in regards to how colleagues identified key priorities, gathered and triangulated evidence and data and enable discussion and challenge in regards to their next steps. Some school settings may have pilot studies or trials at this stage that they wish to share, but all attendees will leave the session with a theory of change formed around the identified priorities for their setting, and a cohesive timeline for the work to be undertaken to attend to that priority. An example theory of change model and template for implementation will be provided at the session. 

About the trainer

After an extended period in Senior Leadership within the financial sector, followed by a role working for one of the UK's largest public unions, Kat is Head of Professional Learning at a large Multi Academy Trust. Previously, she was a Senior Leader at an all-through school in the Midlands. Kat is also Founder of Litdrive, a charity that supports English teachers with subject knowledge and professional development. She is East Midlands Representative for MTPTProject, a charity that supports parent teachers with ongoing CPD.

• Target audience:
• Primary
• Secondary
• Early Years

• Included in package:
• Primary

The Education Inspection Framework: Ofsted Briefings For Schools (Leadership and Management: Impact and Implementation)

This 60 minute session will explore the Ofsted framework in relation to the Leadership and Management judgement.

The way that Ofsted inspects schools significantly changed in 2019 with the publication of a  new Education Inspection Framework. There were 24 Ofsted inspections in Hackney last year. Common trends learned from these inspections will be shared. The sessions have been updated to reflect the current changes to inspection and what inspectors are looking for. 

These three short sessions senior school leaders will explore Ofsted inspection practice in Primary and Secondary settings. Led by Jason Marantz with up to date, practical experience of inspecting schools across both Primary and Secondary sectors, these sessions will support school leaders to: 

• Understand how Ofsted will evaluate the quality of education and know the different  approach to a Section 5 and a Section 8 inspection. 
• Consider the judgements for Leadership & Management, Behaviour & Attitudes,  Personal Development, 6th Form/ EYFS. 
• Prepare for a successful interview with the inspector, including the initial telephone  conversation. 
• Consider how to refine practices and prepare staff for a positive inspection outcome.
• Ensure that school self-evaluation supports the inspection process.

Additional sessions in this series:

Quality of education: the curriculum
Behaviour and attitudes / personal development 

• Target audience:
• Primary
• Secondary

• Included in package:
• Primary

The Research Cycle

Please note that if you have already booked the Primary Assessment Network you will not need to book these sessions.

The Research Cycle

With experience as a published educational researcher, Graham Chisnell will lead your school leaders through the Research Cycle he has devised as a tool for strengthening the approach to building a culture of research in your school. The training will help your school leaders to understand the theoretical approach to research and provide them with practical tools to engage in the research process.

Irresistible Learning – embedding a culture of research in schools.

On 16th October 2023, Graham will cover the key theories that underpin research and how the Research Cycle provides a structure to make research simple and meaningful, ultimately, making learning irresistible through research-informed practice.

Bespoke coaching session

Graham will meet with school leaders online and coach them in their research journey, this will take place on 23rd November 2023 to support leaders in defining their research question, seeking relevant sources and thinking through research methodology. Please note that this is voluntary. 

Analysis of findings and presentations

On 18th June 2024, participants will explore a range of ways the researcher can analyse their findings. It will help them to make sure their findings are presented in a way that others will take note.

• Target audience:
• Primary
• Secondary

• Included in package:
• Primary