Leveraging change: The importance of practice

Kate Edwards, MEA Central, Manchester, UK In this reflection article, I explore the benefits of incorporating practice into professional development. In my experience, it can be an impactful way of making granular changes that directly and positively improve classroom experiences for teachers and students. For practice to work effectively, the school’s culture of professional development must be non-judgmental and non-hierarchical. What is practice? Practise (verb): to do or play something regularly or repeatedly in order to become skilled at it In Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better, Lemov et al. (2012, pp. 7-8) explain that: ‘Teachers “go live” four or five times a day. And yet unlike other performance professionals, they don’t call what they do to prepare “practice”; they call it “professional development”. If we asked a room full of teachers how often they practiced for what they did in their “game” – how often they rehears