Connect your teachers wherever they are; review and refine teaching however it’s delivered; provide effective CPD, whenever your teachers need it. 

In the last couple of months, it’s become evident that we are experiencing educational disruption likely to last for the foreseeable future. With schools largely closed to most learners, teachers have been forced to think quickly on their feet, and adapt to new ways of communicating with colleagues and students alike. With some teachers remaining in open schools and others exploring their options online, schools are facing unprecedented times.

Moving to a new school or year group can be a huge challenge; you have to learn new systems, structures and pedagogical styles whilst getting to know your class and the rest of the staff. So, having a central system with banks of resources, lesson clips and templates can be incredibly useful as you settle in school-life and get to know how things work. 

With this in mind, we decided to create a number of curriculum groups in IRIS Connect with a view to creating a school pedagogy and curriculum model for our teachers. We’ve gone from recording lessons and running internal film clubs (these were incredibly useful starting points) to now building banks of lessons that help to quality assure the teaching that’s happening in our classrooms. Our teachers can now refer to the platform with approved resources and teaching clips whenever they need it.

An interesting debate has started: return to school with a strong emphasis on ‘catching up’, or a return that has a greater focus on emotional readjustment?

Whatever the outcome of this debate, when pupils return to school they will be changed.

As teachers, protecting your wellbeing at the best of times can be hard. It’s especially important that during this challenging time, our mental and physical health stays in the forefront of our minds.

However you are teaching right now, whether that’s still face-to-face, delivering some classes online, or sharing resources with your students remotely, here are 5 tips to protect your wellbeing whilst remote teaching.

With the news that UK schools will be closing due to coronavirus, we’ve put together a list of 10 resources that provide great tips on how to teach remotely.

We know there’s no quick fix and one size certainly doesn’t fit all, but these tools to teach online could be a great place to start. Keep up to date with all the resources we're sharing over on our Twitter account @IRIS_Connect

Please share any resources you’ve found to be useful in the comments section below so that your fellow readers can benefit. 

Written by Graham Newell  @Graham_IRISC

I have been talking about professional autonomy for years as I believe it is an integral part of professionalism: autonomy is not the easy option, in fact it’s just the opposite. It demands a rigorous understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses and the willingness to objectively enquire about what actually works.

The recent research by the NFER in partnership with the Teacher Development Trust, ‘Teacher Autonomy: how does it relate to job satisfaction and retention?’ (January, 2020), provides a significant and important contribution to the debates about both what constitutes effective CPD and the importance of developing professionalism at the front line.