A Personal Journey

IRIS Connect – A Personal Journey from Matt McDonald

Educational Reformer John Dewy once said “We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience”.

I believe that the best way to improve as a teacher is to watch yourself in action, it is like holding up a mirror to your practice. I think the best way to learn as a teacher is to watch other staff teach.

This type of CPD can be difficult given the pressures that we are under and the vast amount of work we have to do as teachers. But in my experience using IRIS Connect makes this possible, allowing us to reflect on our experiences and share practice more easily.

Using IRIS Connect for myself and with colleagues

As a trainee all those years ago, writing reflections on my lessons was an arduous component of my training year and I had to rely on memory alone to remember events. Not always easy.

When I first recorded a lesson, using IRIS Connect, it allowed me to reflect without having to try and recall everything and without the pressure of someone judging me. Using it to capture moments of brilliance in the classroom to watch back was, and is, enormously empowering and each time I made a subsequent recordings I could see the improvements in my practice.

When I felt ready, I had the ability to share my lessons with other members of staff in my school. For me, this meant that I could access the right support from the right person without placing constraints on their time. That colleague could watch the video I’d privately shared into their online account at a time that suited them, be it in school or at home.

Watching back the organisation of a task, students responses and how it could be tweaked to execute it just that little bit more effectively has been invaluable for improving my general classroom practice throughout the last 8 years.

Using IRIS Connect within a trust

As a Director of Teaching and Learning for a Trust of Schools (12 Academies and 800+ members of teaching staff) I now have large numbers of staff with diverse and sometimes extensive needs. Our main focus for Teaching and Learning support is providing timely and accurate examples of best practice. With the recently updated IRIS Connect platform we can create groups of staff by subjects or by career stage, generating a culture of sharing within and between our schools.

For instance, I recently heard from a school in Scarborough, who needed some specific support, asking for some lessons to help their staff see what good teaching looks like. So I sent a request to the rest of our schools and they now have 13 lessons that have been shared with them modelling what good teaching looks like, amazing.

A short time ago I went to a CPD session based around progress in lessons at one of our Trust schools, a member of staff presented a really simple way to make student progress more visible using 3 different coloured pens on a mind map. It sounded very effective and I could see a lot of staff interested in the concept but, like me, they were all wondering how it would work in practice. Would students really engage with it? How effectively could it be engineered?

The teacher logged on to IRIS Connect and showed an example of her class completing the task. It illustrated perfectly how the task worked and the added bonus was that it could be shared with each one of the staff to their own IRIS Connect library within seconds. To me, that is perfect supportive CPD and the exciting part is that it not only supports the staff at that school but it could support the 800+ teachers within our trust at the click of a button…now that is CPD innovation.

Extending the Teaching and Learning Community

Through IRIS Connect I have had a beautiful Art lessons shared with me by @KenBrechin from the outstanding Cramlington Learning Village and some amazing Y6 lessons taught by @W342 all the way from the Isle of Wight which is over 233 miles away from Wakefield. This amazes me. IRIS Connect technology gives us the ability to create a huge network of support not just for the Academy Trust that I work for but for teachers up and down the country. I myself have shared lessons with @Shaun_Allison, @VicGoddard and @Teachertoolkit, and the ease in which it can be done is outstanding. I hope some day that IRIS Connect users can ask for lessons to support their staff and that they will be able to get them from similar schools with amazing practice.

Written by Matt McDonald, Director of Teaching and Learning for Wakefield City Academies Trust