Designing Training That Lasts: Coaching, Courses and the CPD That Changes Practice (Advice from the Frontline of Education)

Designing Training That Lasts

Coaching, Courses and the CPD That Changes Practice

Somewhere in every school there is a graveyard, and it is full of good intentions.

It is the folder of INSET no one has opened since the day it was handed out; the strategy launched with real energy in September and quietly abandoned by October; the expensive speaker who moved everyone in the hall and changed nothing on Monday. Professional development consumes an enormous amount of the sector's time, money and hope - and a dismaying proportion of it changes nothing at all.

Designing Training That Lasts is about the difference between the development that lands and the development that dies, and about how to design far more of the first kind. Its central claim is bracing and freeing: lasting change is not a matter of charisma, or content, or how good the day felt. Change is designed, not hoped for - and design can be learned.

Drawing on more than two decades in and around schools, and on the best current evidence about how adults actually learn and change, Laura Masson sets out a complete, practical model for professional development that finally sticks:

- The three strands. Development that adds up runs on three levels at once - one at whole-school or trust level, one at team level (grouped flexibly, not just by department), and one at the level of the individual. Weave the three together and development compounds; pull on only one and it frays.

- The coaching turn. Why sustained, expert coaching - built on small, precise, 'incremental' steps rather than grand transformations - is the most powerful tool we have, and how to make it responsive rather than robotic.

- Coaching and mentoring. The real difference between them, and how to give each person the kind of support their situation actually calls for.

- The craft of training that lasts. Inside-out sequencing, using participants' own settings as the material, cadence and spaced repetition, the artefacts that carry a change beyond the room, and treating people as the serious professionals they are.

- The outward-looking school. Using evidence without worshipping it, learning from and with other schools, and resisting the slow calcification of only ever talking to yourself.

- Making it stick. The follow-through, accountability and protected time that hold a well-designed change in place.

Fully current - grounded in the Education Endowment Foundation's mechanisms of effective professional development and the modern evidence on instructional and incremental coaching - every chapter closes with 'Questions for Your School', ready to take straight into a leadership meeting.

Written for anyone who designs or leads the development of others - CPD leads, directors of professional learning, heads, middle leaders, coaches and trainers, in any phase - this is a short, practical, quietly ambitious book for people who are done filling the graveyard and ready to build professional development that actually changes what teachers do.

Designing Training That Lasts is the seventh book in Laura Masson's series Advice from the Frontline of Education.

Laura Masson (BA, MSc, Chartered Teacher (Leadership), FCCT, FCMI) has spent more than twenty-two years in British education as a classroom teacher, two-time primary headteacher, Chair of Governors, Principal of an early years group and Director of Education for a multi-academy trust. A Chartered Manager and executive coach, she speaks at researchED, BrewEd and TDaPE, and writes the series Advice from the Frontline of Education.