In this paper we describe the first year of a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programme for a secondary school in the North East of England. In this deprived area the teachers wanted to consider changing from the existing Computing curriculum to Digital Media. The reasons for this was the lack of popularity of the Computing curriculum with the students and the problems of staffing this new course as so few teachers had experience of rthe Computing curriculum and more specifically of Computer Science.
The CPD programme took careful account of the principles of the DfE Standard for Teachers’ Professional Development (2016) in which effective teacher professional development is seen as a partnership between head teachers and the leadership team, teachers; and providers of professional development expertise, training or consultancy.
In this project a fourth partner was added to the core team: the resources, support and guidance of a company that was developing multimedia and 3-D assets for schools and researching their value in teaching and learning.
This practice based programme required the CPD consultant to work with teachers as co-researchers to define, measure and report on the impact of innovation on learning. In this process the teachers, working with all key stakeholders, identify what they want to gain from their investment in digital technologies in terms of evidence of learning. Crucial to success is the methodology of collecting of evidence of learning in the classroom and the ability to measure the impact of implementation. To be really effective the programme should last three years
Download the paper here: Inspiring Tomorrow’s Leaders: moving from a Computing to a Digital Media Curriculum