Developing David Kolb’s experiential learning cycle

Zoe Enser, English Advisor, The Education People, UK During the first 12 years of my teaching, I became very disconnected from my own development – at least, disconnected from my development in relation to the CPD on offer. I had attended numerous sessions from exam boards, sat through hours of courses on AFL and APP and pretty much every other acronym you could think of. However, when I had first entered the world of education as a teaching assistant (TA), I was keen to learn and had taken modules with the Open University on diversity in education, happily devoting Saturday mornings to learning more about dyslexia so that I could better support students with whom I was working. So, what had changed? CPD had become one-off events, where we piled into the hall, were bombarded with information on data or safeguarding or others’ plans for our teaching. This felt removed from the reality of my classroom and left me feeling despondent, withdrawing further and further from oppor