Create a fully resourced PD session in minutes: introducing our new Group PD Builder

Often, attempts to improve teaching aren’t as successful as we’d like. In particular, training teachers in large groups is often disappointing. Many of the PD leads we work with report the following four challenges with running effective whole-group PD: 

1. 1.
   Mechanisms. It's difficult to figure out how to pack all of the mechanisms for effective PD into a single session. Rehearsal is particularly challenging to both plan for and deliver. How can we ensure that all of these mechanisms are built in? How do we ensure rehearsal is purposeful?
2. 2.
   Follow-up. One-shot PD sessions are often a waste of time. How do we ensure that our sessions are built with follow-up in mind? How can we monitor implementation quickly and efficiently? 
3. 3.
   Workload. Great PD sessions can take hours to plan and resource. This time could better be spent elsewhere. How can we get the sessions we need, when we need them, without spending hours reinventing the wheel?
4. 4.
   Cognitive Load. Leading group PD sessions is cognitively demanding. As well as running the session, we’ve got to worry about the administrative aspect like groupings, sharing necessary materials, and tedious yet necessary issues such as taking attendance. How can we make these administrative tasks super simple? 

Despite these challenges, PD leaders argue that group training done right is a critical part of their PD programme: it helps set culture, creates aligned mental models of effective practice and lays the foundations for other forms of PD to be effective. 

Over the past year, we’ve worked with school leaders to develop a new tool to support the planning and delivery of effective group PD, aiming to solve each of the challenges listed above. 

Our aim?  To make it as quick and easy as possible for leaders to design, deliver and administer group PD sessions that really work.

Our Group PD Builder, available as part of a Steplab subscription, enables you to build and run effective group PD sessions that are designed around the mechanisms of PD that we know lead to impact.

At the core of each session is Steplab’s world-leading library of teaching techniques (our "steps"), supported by success criteria, video models, rehearsal tasks and study modules. Simply select the step you want your group PD session to examine and let the builder do the rest. And, once you’ve designed and led your session - it connects seamlessly to our drop-ins and coaching tools, enabling leaders to run effective follow-up and easily gather data on impact.  

How does our tool support leaders to solve the four common challenges?

At Steplab, our team of PD experts have over a century of collective experience at leading school PD programmes that actually support teachers to improve. And, we now support many of the best schools and multi-academy trusts in the UK to train their teachers.

When we set out to build a tool that makes group PD work, we applied all the  knowledge and expertise of our team and drew on our wider community of PD leads in schools from around the world. 

Over the last year, we have tested our thinking in real schools and collected feedback from hundreds of school leaders. This has enabled us to arrive at a simple, effective PD session structure containing all the key PD mechanisms (like modelling, rehearsal, and implementation planning) that effectively change what teachers know and do in the classroom.

Our Group PD Builder does four things: 

1. 1.
   Plan PD. We solve the challenge of workload by enabling leaders to create a fully resourced session in less than five minutes. The session content is customisable, but built within a structure we know works. You can base the session on any of Steplab’s content, or on your school’s own bespoke PD curriculum. You can rely on our extensive library of video models, or use your own. 
2. 2.
   Deliver PD. Once you’ve finished planning, Steplab builds your custom PD session, which includes all of the key PD mechanisms.  Each session provides a set of (around 15) beautiful slides (like an online Powerpoint) along with clear and editable facilitator notes. The session itself guides attendees through the research, allows time for sharing experiences to gain motivation and provides highly effective rehearsal tasks for you to lead. 
3. 3.
   Administer PD. The builder makes administrative aspects of delivering PD as easy as possible, reducing cognitive load and allowing you to focus on the important things; clear explanations and expert facilitation. Study materials can be shared with one click (and accessed via QR code), registers can be created and taken in seconds, alongside pre-allocating groups for rehearsal and more! Each of these solutions is based on the feedback of real PD leads, who have found the administrative parts of leading PD to be harder than it needed to be. 
4. 4.
   Follow-up. Post-session, the Group PD Builder works seamlessly with Steplab’s drop-in, coaching and data tools: you can finish sessions by setting teachers up to conduct peer drop-ins to see the implementation of the session content in your classrooms. This builds a culture where teachers hold each other accountable to improve. Our data tools enable you to carefully analyse the impact of each session on the quality of teaching across the school. 

At the start of this article, we listed four common challenges to leading impactful group PD. Designing group PD that’s packed with the mechanisms we know lead to teacher learning; ensuring that single PD episodes are planned with follow-up in mind; avoiding reinventing the wheel and reducing workload by making sessions quick to plan; and, avoiding leaders’ cognitive load by making the administrative elements of PD easy and efficient.  

Steplab’s new Group PD Builder helps you to solve these problems, delivering group PD that really works.  We’d love you to have a go at creating a session. You can find the Group PD Builder on the Manage page of your Steplab account.

Join me on Tuesday 23 September at 4:00 pm for a webinar where you can see the Group PD Builder in action and learn how it can transform your PD sessions.