A fab guest post by our friends at Creative Education

Whether it’s an internal session, a Teachmeet or an external training course, face to face training can be a vital source of new and fresh ideas to help you improve your teaching practice.

Whatever method you choose though, it’s a big investment of time and sometimes money too so it’s important – both for you and your school – to get the most out of it.

Pick Your Training Opportunity Carefully

Making your training have a big impact on your practice all starts with planning and selecting the event itself. Ask yourself – what specifically do you want to achieve and how will you know when the training has been successful?

Also ask where the experience lies about these issues? If you want to understand more about gifted and talented and a department in school or a local school is known to be strong on it then an internal session may be the answer. For knowledge that doesn’t exist within your school an external training course may be a better fit.

Whichever you choose, establishing success criteria in advance is essential in working out whether the training was essential and met your needs.

Plan Before the Course

Before the course is the time to brainstorm. Write down everything you want to know and understand about the topic, then boil it down to a list of key questions. This is your personal agenda for the day – don’t leave until you’ve answered all of the questions on your list!

If you’re feeling adventurous why not speak to your line manager and get their take on it as well? What are their views about that issue in the school and what are their priorities for improvement? Getting a few different perspectives will allow you to get a more rounded view both of what you need to learn and key areas the school still needs to address.

Create a Personal Learning Network

During the session, try to make time to swap details with your fellow participants and create your own Personal Learning Network around the topic. This doesn’t have to be complicated – email addresses are fine for this. Then agree to share your experiences after the training of how you’ve got on implementing what you’ve learnt, barriers you’ve faced and successful things you’ve tried. Quality follow up is one the keys to successful training and together you can support each other as you try to embed new practice in your school.

Develop an Action Plan

As soon as you can after the course, whilst it’s all still fresh in your mind, create an action plan with clear timescales. It’s all too easy, when faced with the rush of school life, for the impetus that you’ve gained to be lost. A clear action plan will help you sustain that pace, and make concrete steps to putting into practice what you’ve learnt.

Cascade Your Learning Back at School

One of the challenges of any training session that shifts your perspective is that you’re returning to an environment who haven’t experienced it. This can make it harder to achieve meaningful change – particularly on a whole school topic. So find a way to feed back what you’ve learnt to the wider staff group – whether it be via email, at a staff meeting or whatever method suits you best. Enthuse your colleagues, and you’ll find yourself pushing on an open door when you want to make changes.

Implement and Evaluate

This bit often gets forgotten. The day after the course diarize a time when you can revisit what you’ve learnt on the course, revisit your action plan and see if the training ultimately met your goals. Hopefully, you’ll find that it has done many times over. You’re now in a strong position to plan your next training topic in the knowledge that it will have a clear impact on your practice.

Tom Hesmondhalgh is a Director of Creative Education – a company that provides a wide range of tailored seminars for school staff across the UK. They also offer inhouse training and a range of training DVDs. You can follow them on Twitter @creativeedu .