Mark Martin (@urban_teacher) has taught ICT for over 10 years and supports teachers in using technology to improve teaching and learning. Here Mark shares ideas on how schools can deliver impactful CPD for both new and experienced teachers.

What would you like to see more of in CPD for teachers today?

I would like to see more of a focus on design thinking and co-creation. We need to change the type of CPD sessions where presenters just talk at passive observers. I’m not a fan of the top-down model of training where more ‘experienced’ staff talk about generic teaching resources and one-size-fits all answers. What you’ll find is when people are more actively involved in the learning process, they are more motivated to take ownership of their professional development. We need to work with new teachers and support them with coming up with tangible solutions for specific teaching challenges. Schools could also provide opportunities for key stakeholders in education such as trainee teachers, experienced teachers, the senior leadership team and edtech companies, to get together to discuss current issues in education and collaboratively design real strategies to overcome these challenges.

Can you remember a particularly impactful school CPD session?
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There was one where groups of teachers had created market stalls. They shared good practice on the new strategies they had trialled in their lessons. Everyone walked around the school and saw the amazing things that were being done within particular subjects. It provided a great opportunity for teachers to discover and experiment with something they might not have tried with their students. It also opens up opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching.

How can schools avoid delivering CPD sessions on content that teachers already know?
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It’s a shame when teachers go to a CPD session and they hear about something that they’ve already learned previously. Schools need to strive to keep CPD sessions new and fresh. Before you deliver the CPD session, skill check your team. Create a short survey to find out exactly what they would like to develop. Carefully word the questions and allow teachers to self-assess their strengths and areas for development. Using this information, teachers can be grouped according to their interests then targeted CPD sessions can be delivered to these groups. You’ll find that there will be less resistance and more openness from most teachers when their opinions are used to design the sessions.

When I transitioned from teaching in a local comprehensive to a special school, the clarity and directness of the visual explanations used in the special school became immediately apparent. Throughout my childhood, my architect father would deliver daily sermons on the principles of design and demonstrated how sketching could play a powerful role in problem-solving. It was at the special school where I applied this knowledge and began experimenting with visual designs to engage my pupils. Later, in the 1990s, I discovered that I had actually been putting Allan Paivio’s theory of dual coding to practice all along.

What is dual coding?
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Dual coding can be traced back to two stories. The most well-known dual coding story dates back to Allan Paivio’s research from the early 1970s. This involves combining a word and an image to form a single unit of meaning. As images and words are processed separately in their distinct channels, this makes for what Professor Paul Kirschner calls double-barrelled learning. The double encoding that happens through this tethering of word and image, leaves a double memory trace and, consequently, offers double the chance of being retrieved. What is less well known is that Paivio’s experimental subjects were dealing with very simple words, with no conceptual challenge at all. So, for the encoding and memorisation of simple content, this story of dual coding is useful but hardly has great significance when dealing with the cognitive challenge that represents teachers’ everyday work in classrooms.

The second less well-known dual coding story with far more educational significance is related to his later work — particularly Mental Representations, 1990 — he writes about the differences in structure and consequent processing of verbal and visual information. While he did not do any research into this in the same way as in his earlier work, he considered it significant. Its significance was explored a few years before by Larkin and Simon in 1987. They established what they termed The Visual Argument based on their findings that well-formed diagrams were more cognitively efficient than text alone. In their experiments, subjects given such a diagram were more rapid and accurate in finding answers to comprehension questions than those presented only with text.

​The lessons to be drawn from both stories is that the earlier story is about the visual capacity, while the second story is about the visuospatial capacity. Processing text, with its linear structure, places more challenge than the non-linear arrangements of diagrams on the subjects’ cognitive resources. As philosopher, Bertrand Russell, pointed out in the 1930s, a diagram, its elements and their relationships are immediately and explicitly available to the viewer. In the parallel situation of the same information being articulated in text alone, the necessary complexity of the syntax involved inevitably increases the difficulty of comprehension. Thus, the findings a half century later of Larkin and Simon in 1987 as mentioned above.

Why do teachers need to know about dual coding?

Even if teachers never use dual coding in their classrooms, they can benefit enormously from learning about it because through the theory they can better understand the significance of the role of schema in teaching and learning. As the term schema is currently being revived in teachers’ lexicon, it seems crucial that we start to investigate its structure and processes. Studying dual coding — in the sense of story number 2 — does this very effectively.

Teachers can use dual coding initially in revealing their schema of the topic under question when introducing and explaining it to their students. That way, students have the fleeting and vanishing words of their teacher (the transient information effect, in the context of cognitive load theory). Then through a process I have termed Recount and Recall, students can study and reproduce the graphic organiser in such a way that results in perfect or near-perfect recall. For details of this process, see my forthcoming book with Tom Sherrington, Teaching WalkThrus: five-step guides to Instructional Coaching.
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Equally, at a later stage, teachers can give their students a partially completed graphic organiser, in which the missing parts can be filled in with a multiple choice style format with an array of plausible options below the visual.
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Free dual coding resources

My website — www.olicav.com — has 16 sections that cover topics such as posters, powerpoint, graphic organisers, diagrams, course modules, walkthrus, sketch notes, portraits, quotes, icons, illustrations, videos and podcasts. Most of the resources are freely available to download, subject to a Creative Commons agreement.

I currently present on different aspects of dual coding at international, national and regional researchED events. I lead training sessions in schools and colleges, and have recently collaborated with Tom Sherrington to produce Teaching WalkThrus: five-step guides to instructional coaching, a practical guide on 50 teaching techniques that convert Rosenshine’s principles of instruction into daily practice. The publication will be released next month.
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Enrol Yourself gives participants the opportunity to collaborate in a multidisciplinary peer group. In formal education, students studying on the same programme often come from similar professional and educational backgrounds. Zahra and Jacob believe homogenous learning groups are of much less value in terms of learning than more diverse ones. Diversity of skills, backgrounds and perspectives only enrich the learning experiences of Learning Marathon participants. The peer-to-peer learning gives participants the chance to share and construct new knowledge.

The Learning Marathon curriculum is always evolving to meet the specific needs of each cohort. It is co-created with participants at the beginning of every Learning Marathon. Everyone maps their skills and goals. The group then discusses and votes on which workshops will be of most value to them. From this, a personalised programme of learning that spans 6 months is designed.
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The Learning Marathon provides participants with a safe space to experiment. Participants decide on what ‘good enough’ looks like to them. The role of an expert tutor doesn’t exist in a Learning Marathon. The co-founders stress that the roles of all participants are of equal importance to the Learning Marathon. This environment enables participants to feel safe enough to take risks; try out new ideas; express themselves; tackle challenges; and be vulnerable.

Learning with a purpose

Each participant comes to the Learning Marathon with a specific learning question. This question frames their exploration and learning — and it’s essential that the question is of great importance to the individual. For example ‘how might I create a boardgame that communicates important messages about the climate crisis?’ or ‘how can I use movement and dance to overcome limiting thinking habits?’. Each Learning Marathon enables participants to get to know a group of new people through the lens of their most burning question. New relationships are formed around the things that matter most to them.

Addressing local needs

A large amount of funding is available for programmes that provide learning opportunities for young people up to the age of 25. The co-founders noticed how this provision drops off a cliff for similar programmes for over 25s. “In the 21st Century we are facing huge challenges, not least widening inequality and the climate crisis. These challenges will not impact everyone equally. Those who typically have fewer opportunities will be impacted the most. There will be huge changes to society including loss and creation of jobs due to automation and accelerating technological development,” says Zahra. She believes adults are going to need to learn like never before if they’re to continue to thrive — or even stay afloat. “If people need to rely on our traditional models of learning for this, the majority will be screwed. We need models of learning that devolve power and opportunity to communities to do it for themselves, to reduce costs and redistribute agency.”
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Enrol Yourself addresses this challenge by placing peer-to-peer approaches at the heart of everything they do. They train all local hosts who initiate and run the Learning Marathon in their local area. Everything they do is designed to be distributive, locally-led and empowering at the grassroots level. The programme encourages people to take their learning into their own hands, alongside their peers.

The impact of Enrol Yourself
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More than 130 people have now participated in the Learning Marathon in London, Birmingham and Bristol to date. Enrol Yourself measures the impact that each Learning Marathon has on learner wellbeing, resilience and 21st Century skillset. Their alumni tell them they are 38% more professionally effective, 27% happier and 23% more entrepreneurial after participating in the programme. They also report that the process has improved their mental health, helped them set up side hustles and businesses, helped them change careers, find new jobs, allowed them to make new friends, helped them feel more purposeful, less lonely… the list goes on.