Facilitation Matters – Autumn 24

Welcome to the latest issue of Facilitation Matters, Arthur Terry TSH’s newsletter dedicated to our team of facilitators. For the first time, this issue is being shared with colleagues from our ECF Facilitation team along with our NPQ Visiting Fellows, who have received these letters previously.

As the Teaching School Hub for North Birmingham, we value and depend on the work of our visiting fellows and facilitators. We are determined to ensure you receive development and support as part of the deal. We will aim to keep Facilitation Matters to a 5 minute read.

What’s going well?

It’s difficult to know where to start! There are so many successes and examples of excellent practice across the various courses that we offer in the hub that we could easily forget to celebrate our successes. Here are some highlights of what we’ve seen and done since the Summer term.

Facilitator recruitment: as you know, ATTSH North Birmingham is committed to inclusivity and passionate about diversity and representation. In the latter part of last academic year, we invested a lot of energy into recruiting into our delivery teams for both the ECF and NPQ. As a result we have strengthened our team, which is increasingly diverse and representative of the city we work in. We have colleagues that represent a real cross-section of the education sectors, areas of the city and communities that we serve in the team.

“Be you – never be afraid to be yourself and show your personality or culture – you might be the only positive representation that a child sees.” Amjad Ali, Year 2 ECF Keynote Address.

Quality of provision and high engagement: our internal quality monitoring consistently shows that our facilitation team do an excellent job, and respond really well to both our feedback and the needs of their participants. However, it’s heartening to consider external feedback and data too:

• 159 (75%) schools in North Birmingham received training from us last year – NPQ and ECF are integral to this engagement.
• At the time of writing, 1026 ECTs and mentors were enrolled on our training programmes, with nearly 500 joining this September.
• Every single funded NPQ place has been filled for the new cohort starting this autumn, with nearly 100 colleagues on the waiting list for the next round. Many schools have chosen to fund additional places because they know they will get a great experience on our courses.
• Feedback and evaluations: our most recent round of NPQ feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with 97.4% of respondents rating Assessment Clinics as good or very good while an amazing 100% of respondents gave the same rating for their launch conference.
• School leader satisfaction: every year, the government surveys every school in the region to rate their satisfaction with the Hub. 95% of respondents stated they were satisfied, while 97% would recommend our training to another school.

These figures are wonderful, and a reflection of all our facilitators’ hard work and contributions. Thank you for your work to make these courses possible and to give colleagues across the city such powerful experiences and learning opportunities.

Facilitation Focus – monitoring engagement in person and online

We would like to thank Suzie Norton, Head Teacher at William MacGregor Primary School, and NPQ facilitator for inspiring the focus for this letter. After an earlier issue, Suzie shared a strategy she had used that supported her to keep track of participation in her sessions that helped to manage her own cognitive load. In a nutshell, Suzie explained that she:

 ‘recorded a tally next to participant names when they had contributed or I had asked them a direct question. This helped me to know that all had played an active role in the session.’

We often talk about monitoring, sometimes accompanied by the descriptive terms like ‘aggressive’ or ‘intentional’. It has increasingly become a key strategy for teaching and facilitation, characterised by the teacher lapping the classroom to assess engagement and understanding. We encourage you to incorporate this approach when delivering in-person or online. You can learn more and see examples from the EEF and the Uncommon Schools Group here:

EEF Feedback and Monitoring Guidance Report

Get Better Faster | Monitoring in the Classroom Video (3:20)

Monitoring intentionally when delivering online can be more challenging and less intuitive than when we lead learning in-person. Setting aside the obvious challenge of getting participants engaged in the first place, the additional cognitive load of simultaneously running a video call and controlling a presentation mean that our working memory is easily overrun. When this happens, we forget who we’ve spoken to and why.

An example of a setup for monitoring online

It helps to plan ahead and anticipate which parts of the session you want to monitor. The above is an example used by one of our facilitators which takes Suzie’s tally strategy to the next level – you can see the facilitator has several tallies on the tablet they are using for monitoring – it helps to think about each tally as a ‘lap’ of the virtual classroom. The first tally might track participants simply speaking or answering a question, the second could track strong responses from breakout rooms that might be highlighted in a later discussion through warm calling, the third is to ensure everyone’s voice has been heard in group discussions.

Many of our colleagues won’t use or have access to so many screens or devices, so consider keeping your tally with a pen and paper instead, if you aren’t able to match the setup shown in the image.

This newsletter is not just about sharing our feedback and findings with you. We have been gathering feedback from facilitators, and we’re working hard to respond. If you have recently delivered an ECF session and want to feedback, contact angela.whitehouse@atlp.org.uk

If you recently led an NPQ clinic or conference, and haven’t had the chance to share your feedback, please use this link to get in touch: Facilitator Survey

Thank you for reading Facilitation Matters, and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need support, or if you have suggestions for how we can continue to improve the experience for facilitators.