Collaboration as key to effective staff development during distance learning

Context Chace Community School is a Community Secondary School in Enfield, north London. It has approximately 1250 students on roll including 225 doing post-16 studies. Thirty-five per cent of our students are in receipt of pupil premium funding, with 279 eligible for free school meals, 18.5 per cent are students with SEND. About 450 of our students speak more than one language at home – mainly Turkish, Polish, Greek and Albanian. Challenge Once we had managed to equip as many students as possible with the hardware needed to access online learning, our main challenge was to ensure that students could engage effectively with live distance and hybrid learning. Going back to our recent PD theme of utilising Rosenshine's principles in action, we wanted staff to consider how the very same practices (providing high quality explanations; modelling difficult concepts; scaffolding to ensure access; achieving a high success rate before moving on) could be achieved in online lessons. Innova