How Alice Smith School supports teachers’ professional development

At Alice Smith School we value the professional growth and development of our staff highly, as we know our teachers have a lasting impact on our students. This is why we are always looking for opportunities to help our teachers progress their professional skills, because we know learning never truly stops.

Here are   in which we support our teachers’ professional development.

The first international school with award-winning professional development support

Developed by professional development leaders and specialists at the London Centre for Leadership in Learning, the PDQM is designed to encourage and improve professional development practice in schools and educational settings across London, and around the world.

Alice Smith School has the great honour of being the first international school to gain this quality mark and is now working towards platinum level recognition.

The PDQM enables schools to:

• Improve the quality of their strategic leadership of professional development.
• Develop professional development provision and opportunities for their staff leading to improved progress measures and outcomes for students.
• Enable greater retention and recruitment of key staff.
• Complete a self-evaluation framework to enable them to reflect on their PD practice and highlight strengths and areas for development.
• Be verified against the PDQM criteria to achieve Bronze (developing), Silver (enhancing), Gold (embedded) or Platinum (Innovative) standard.

Encouraging personal growth

Alice Smith School nurtures a culture of professional learning, which encourages personal growth and helps build staff capacity. Trust, collaboration and inquisitivity are the building blocks of this culture, and you will see teachers learning from each other in a variety of different ways, in a supportive environment.

This includes learning for leadership; in  we hosted participants from schools in Malaysia, Brunei, Hong Kong, China, Japan and India for a COBIS Aspiring Heads Course (Council of British International Schools). The course was held in our Professional Learning Centre at the Secondary Campus and ran over a period of 8 to 10 months. It combined face-to-face sessions with a choice of in-school projects and optional school placements.

We also hosted aspiring school leaders working towards their National Professional Qualifications for Senior and Middle Leaders (NPQSL and NPQML), in partnership with Garden International School and Tanglin Trust School.

Encouraging collaboration and lifelong learning

Personal reflection and awareness are fundamental to professional growth. Being able to identify areas of strength and areas for development is a key skill. Teachers at Alice Smith School can learn sharing professional readings and discussions based upon research. They participate in peer observations and collaboratively plan, teach, and reflect upon lessons together. This whole professional growth model is then underpinned by coaching.

Our professional growth programme has breathed a new lease of life into our approach to lifelong learning and valuing the importance of quality staff development.  innovative and progressive coaching and training   our staff.

We also believe in the importance of sharing knowledge and learning together as a community, which is why we offer workshops for parents on a wide range of educational topics. It is a thriving aspect of school culture that also extends more widely regionally and internationally.

Overall, this helps keep Alice Smith School a vibrant, thriving, engaged and forward-thinking learning community.

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Alice Smith School is very proud to have been awarded the Professional Development Quality Mark (PDQM) at Gold Level by the University College London (UCL) Institute of Education in December 2018.

Alice smith – please confirm if this type of course is/will be held regularly here at your school. If yes, I would like to rephrase this section to accommodate that.

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I read a blog that mentioned:

In the near future, in collaboration with Culture at Work and the Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) in the UK, Alice Smith is delivering the first accredited coaching training programme in South East Asia.

Did this happen? If so what year?

Yes happened! It was once-off. Here’s the link to the article: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h2DhmSu0IPeYoFI3UGhrQ0ICnmbIACzkdiIcaI9WbFk/edit

training opportunities for our staff. Remove in please