On Professional Development for Teachers in Irish Schools

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This feels like the right time to put down some thoughts on the professional development available to teachers in Ireland, as we come to the end of the post-primary year (this piece will focus on that level, since I know little about primary other than as a parent). This is also prompted by the fact that a couple of days ago researchED Dublin 2022, at my school on September 24th, sold the final of 315 tickets, almost four months before the event, after 3 weeks on sale. Like the first event in 2019 it is a spectacular opportunity for teachers here. 

In many other professions, development is built into the job, with coherently-designed and regular training expected and provided.  For teachers here however, essentially the only formal mandated training is given after the introduction of a new course (such as the Junior Cycle Programme). This is usually delivered (the right word) by seconded teachers to their colleagues in the profession, providing uncustomisable pre-designed material based on changes with sometimes dubious intellectual underpinnings. Notoriously, too often they face hostility since the curriculum change is resented, and the recipients do not see this as improving their practice: there is a lot of shooting of the messenger, however admirably professional the messenger is. The Junior Cycle was (and is - it still rumbles on) an example of this, and reports from ‘Cluster Days’ range from appreciation to dismay.

Otherwise, it is largely up to schools to devise their own Continuing Professional Development: on one level this is of course how it should be, but too often this lacks support in terms of resources or expertise, and too often it comes under the much-resented term ‘Croke Park hours’. There is no national model of how such CPD might work effectively long-term in schools rather than in shallow one-off sessions. The PDST do good work, but again this is not stitched into the school experience. One of the best people to read on this issue is Tom Sherrington, who has massive experience in observing schools (he is writing from the English perspective - more on that below):

In the absence of a well-designed official programme of development in schools for teachers at all stages of their careers, most of us have to search for our own. But bear in mind that what follows is quite shallow: most teachers are not on Twitter, do not engage deeply with their subject associations and do not read educational books. All teachers are under massive time-pressure and have lives outside school to organise. However, there is a real hunger out there for high-quality experiences. When in 2018 I had a phone conversation with Tom Bennett and we decided to bring researchED to Ireland (for October 2019) it was a punt in the dark, with no idea if more than a small number of enthusiasts would turn up to attend talks on pedagogy for seven hours on a Saturday. I sent out posters for staff room noticeboards, emails to all sorts of bodies, and asked others to spread the word electronically. Then tickets went on sale: Boom! Gone!

This time, little publicity was needed: 315 tickets for September 24th, the pandemic-delayed second rED event in Ireland, went on sale in mid-May and now they’ve all been snapped up. As those who attended in 2019 know, there is nothing like this in Ireland for ‘ordinary’ teachers, with such an array of invigorating and stimulating experiences. Last time, listening to an expert like Alex Quigley on vocabulary or Victoria Simms on primary maths were extraordinary opportunities. In 2022, attendees will be able to learn from one of the world’s great educators, Barbara Oakley, and the brilliant educational designer Oliver Caviglioli (all for €40 including lunch: I hope schools are covering their teachers’ expenses). A side-comment: there is a similar hunger in Northern Ireland, given how many teachers there have bought tickets. On a much more modest level, last month I organised an English Meet for teachers of Leaving Certificate: no cost, far fewer people, but again it was exhilarating to learn from each other in person in such a supportive and friendly spirit.

Fine work is done here by the various subject associations. Run by teachers for teachers, with modest financial support, they have plenty of expertise and enthusiasm but are time-poor. English teachers are represented excellently by INOTE, which maintained its presence online in 2020 and 2021, and returns to Portlaoise in October 2022. However, there is another disconnect here: in March the Minister for Education announced proposed changes to the Senior Cycle, including the move of English Paper 1 to Fifth Year, butchering the experience of pupils and teachers by stopping all language learning half-way through the course. INOTE was not consulted at all. Here is their response to the Minister. In the analogy I used in Kate Barry’s podcast ‘Beyond the Classroom’, this is like professing a desire to improve the systems in a hospital for the benefit of its patients while not consulting the nurses. There is no connecting thread between classroom teachers, subject associations, curriculum development and the expectations of the Inspectorate.

A rare silver lining of the pandemic in education was the opening up by necessity of so much online support, some of which will continue into the future. Online training of course provides much easier access, even if the richness of experience of face-to-face events isn’t quite there, and one presenter who contacted me found the experience quite ‘exposing’ and cold. In English, you could tap into the expertise of people like Aoife O’Driscoll, Claire Madden and Conor Murphy, otherwise only seen at annual INOTE conferences. The work Joe Rolston has done with the English Community of Practice at Wexford Education Centre is a model of online CPD; he comments that such sessions show

teachers sharing and developing agency among colleagues, we are our own best resource in that sense. These sessions are professional, without agenda and practical.

And the CPD online world is now our oyster: we can tune in to Jennifer Webb and Bennie Kara in England, and in 2020 researchED Home opened up the chance of listening live to Professor Daniel Willingham from the US, along with an impressive line of speakers who followed him.

One advantage we do have is being a neighbour of, and sharing the same language as, perhaps the world’s most active pedagogical community. Sometimes educational debate in England can be brutally divisive, but on the other hand there is nowhere in the English-speaking world (not America, not Australia, certainly not here) which has such an impressive ecosystem into which teachers can tap. researchED was born there in 2014, but look also at the huge number of other non-official movements, which continued online for two years, and are now returning to ‘real life’ events:

Alongside all this has been an explosion of educational publishing which we can all easily access (you’d hope that all Irish staffrooms now have teaching and learning libraries): for instance, the three Walkthru books from Tom Sherrington and Oliver Caviglioli provide outstanding practical advice about classroom strategy. More examples: the three ‘Closing Gap’ books by Alex Quigley about vocabulary, reading and writing; Tom Bennett’s Running the Room: the teacher’s guide to behaviour; recently, Zoe Enser’s: Bringing Forth the Bard: a guide to teaching Shakespeare in the English classroom.

Much of this is very helpful for Irish teachers beyond the particular English curriculum. But a similar ecosystem has not developed here: we are of course a much smaller country, but have not developed a healthy level of educational debate beyond a sliver of Twitter. How many provocative thinkers are there about education in Ireland right now? Simon Lewis in his If I Were the Minister of Education podcast stands out (mainly on primary education, and you can hear from him too at rED 2022), but who else? For instance, assumptions made in reports from the Inspectorate are rarely challenged. Here are two small examples from a subject report a couple of years ago (I know nothing about the school concerned):

  • ‘The arrangement of desks was conducive to a collaborative approach to learning and assessment’.

  • ‘An attractive print environment was created in most classrooms’. 

You would not know from those two apparently-unexceptional statements that these are not givens or truisms about teaching. There is plenty of lively debate elsewhere about how attention, the most precious element of the classroom, can be protected in the classroom environment, but the Inspectorate has decided that a particular layout of desks, and nice displays of posters, work best (if you are interested in ‘attention’, a superb guide is Mike Hobbiss, who can be followed on Twitter & via his blog).

What is the way forward? Wonderful though events like researchED, the English Meet and Teachmeets in individual schools are, they cannot be the long-term sustainable answer, depending as they do on pockets of enthusiastic volunteers working hard in the evening and at weekends. CPD should be built into the teacher experience in all schools - a big reach, considering negativity towards Croke Park hours and the lack of expertise in this area in the Department of Education. This post does not propose any neat solution, but is just to provoke some discussion: follow it on Twitter, including lots of interesting ideas about Droichead, mentoring, Teachmeets, professional credits, summer schools and more. Do put your ideas in the Comments.

Finally, a semi-flippant suggestion: perhaps the DES could just spend €30 buying three copies of Daniel Willingham’s book Why Don’t Students Like School? for every staff-room in the country. A small number of teachers would be interested, open the cover and start, and a grass-roots provocation might be fired up. Acorns and all that.