Personal and Professional Development - Staff
We are proud of our extensive programme of personal and professional development (PPD) for staff at Harris Academy Rainham.
Our approach to professional development is individual and personal. We draw on the experience of our staff and develop their leadership skills through a range of programmes.
The aims of our personal and professional development programme are to:
- promote subject-specific knowledge amongst our staff, as the primary and purest form of professional development
- develop our teachers' core teaching skills, with a focus on research-informed pedagogy
- develop the skills and knowledge of leadership within all teaching staff at the academy
- develop working relationships with secondary schools both inside and outside the Federation, including locally
- build relationships with communities of experts in different subjects outside of the academy.
How we deliver personal and professional development
The different stages of our personal and professional development (see below) use a wide range of research-based practices and opportunities.
- Middle leaders at the academy run fortnightly professional development sessions for their department following half-termly schedules.
- Each fortnight there is departmental training focusing on curriculum development.
- Departments coordinate and learn from each other about the curriculum and its implementation in weekly directed time sessions and through fortnightly middle leaders' meetings.
- We use cognitive and other forms of research to enhance teachers' implementation of their subject-specific expertise.
- We empower our teachers to explore the best knowledge and pedagogy used in their subject area and promote conversation and practice, including with external providers.
What this means for our staff
As a result of our personal and professional development programmes, our staff have a mastery of the subject knowledge related to the curriculum. This means that our students become knowledge-rich too – gaining a wide range of core and related knowledge in subject areas.
We encourage the use of effective pedagogy, using the latest research and approaches in cognitive science, to enable students of all groups to make good or better progress.
Find out more about our personal and professional development programmes.
