An Introduction to Preparing to Teach | Professional Development for Teachers

Good morning and welcome to our webinar. I'm Laura Rogers and I will be your host this morning. I'm from Cambridge University Press and Assessment and I'll be hosting this webinar for our speaker Victoria Renfro. Thank you very much for joining us today. I'm just going to give attendees a little bit of time to join the webinar. So before we get started with the session today, if you'd like to chat to one another please do use the chat box. It would be great to know which countries you're joining us from today. Thank you so much for joining us for this session. We've got lots of people joining us now. So while we wait for more attendees to join, just let me explain how we're going to run the session today. We'll be recording the session to share with you afterwards so don't worry if your internet drops out or if you have any technical problems during the session, just rejoin us as quickly as you can and you can catch up on anything that you missed in the recording afterwards. If you're having trouble with your speakers, we suggest using headphones or checking that your speaker isn't muted and all your microphones will remain muted throughout the session. If you have any technical issues or questions about the session, please can you put these in the chat box and my colleague Timmer is on hand to help you and answer any questions that you might have. Please can you put any questions you have for our speaker Victoria into the Q&A box and we will answer as many of these as we can at the end of the webinar. Seven days after the webinar we will send you an email with a link to the webinar recording and information on where you can find the webinar slides. If we don't have time to get to your question in the live Q&A at the end, we will be providing responses to frequently asked questions on our Brighter Thinking blog for which we will share the link with you as well. Unfortunately we cannot provide certificates for this session, however you can use your confirmation email as proof of your attendance. Thank you so much to everybody who's now joining us for our webinar today, an introduction to preparing to teach. As I've said I'm Laura Rogers from Cambridge University Press and Assessment and I'll be hosting the webinar for our speaker Victoria Renfro who is Head of Professional Development here at Cambridge. That's the end of our introduction, thank you very much for joining the webinar. I'd now like to hand over to Victoria to take you through the session today. Thank you so much Laura and welcome to all of you. I can see that we had for today's session 497 registrants. You'll see on the first slide that I put global webinar and it truly is. We had registrants from six continents. I'm assuming that the people from North and South America were registering for access to the video, but if you are here from North or South America this morning, considering how very late at night or early in the morning it is for you, do let us know in the chat. That would be very impressive. Just taking a look in the chat I can see this morning that we have people from Azerbaijan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Ghana, Nigeria, we have Armenia, Cambodia, China, Mongolia, so many countries represented. It's absolutely wonderful to see you all here this morning. Thank you so much, I'm so pleased you could attend. As Laura said, my name is Victoria Renfro and I'm currently the Head of Professional Development for Cambridge Learning for Schools. I'm a former Cambridge teacher. I was a Cambridge teacher for a good few years. I was also a Cambridge examiner, a Cambridge teacher trainer, and now I am here in the Cambridge office. So today I'm going to talk to you about our new professional development. This is the first of a series of three webinars that will introduce our different professional development products. Today I'm just going to start with one, although I'll briefly introduce the other two so you know what's coming later in the week. Before I start, I would like to get to know some things about you. For the moment I'd just like you to read and listen to these statements and I'd like to think about which one applies to you. More than one might apply to you and that's fine, but just have a think right now. So for you, is it the case that your teacher turnover in your school is quite high and every year you have to run a lot of orientation training for new joiners? Is it true for you that you can't afford the cost or the times of school to send all the teachers on high quality training days? Is it the case that the timetable at your school is very tight and you don't have the capacity to hold external training events frequently? Is it the case that you need Cambridge training that is also relevant to your context? I just want you to have a moment to read and think about which ones apply to you and when you've done that I would like you to pop along to the chat. I can see that many of you, over 100 people have already found the chat this morning and introduced yourselves which is wonderful. Now could you pop in the letters that represent the statement that resonates with you. Again, if there's more than one that's fine and what I can do is I can do a quick sweep down the chat and I can start to see which letters are appearing most frequently. Thank you so much, there's so many people in here already. I'm seeing a slight move towards statement D is maybe the most common, maybe followed by A after that. Still people coming in the chat, please do have a read, have a think, come into the chat. Still got time to get your statement letters in there. Great, thank you. Okay, thank you everyone for taking time to think about that, to read those statements and think about which one applies to you. I think starting off this webinar by thinking about some of the challenges that you face for professional development is going to help you get the most out of this webinar. Now I'm definitely seeing a preference for D which is interesting. Okay, so that we need training that is also relevant to our context. Absolutely hear that you want training that is based around the Cambridge resources, the Cambridge syllabus, Cambridge curriculum, but you need it to be relevant to the particular challenges of your context, whether that is English language level, whether that's needing to meet state requirements as well as Cambridge requirements. Every context is unique and I think that a lot of what we've developed in our professional development absolutely meets that need. Our professional development covers all of these needs. It's very interesting to see so many of you this morning looking at D there as one that is particularly relevant to you, but I can see that every single letter there is represented, every statement is represented. Right, thank you. So one of the problems that we often encounter when we're working with schools and professional development is a bit of a vicious professional development circle. I'd like you to just have a think with this one. You don't have to respond in the chat, but if you do want to respond to this in the chat, please do. We love reading those messages, but you can just sit and think about this one if you'd like. So I'm sure that you'd all agree that teachers need training to use resources well. Sometimes schools are reluctant to invest in training because teacher training, teacher turnover is high. Without training, the teachers aren't using the resources effectively. They're working hard. I know teachers are incredibly hard working. I was a teacher for 14 years. You know how hard teachers work. Teachers are working hard, but not necessarily smart because they haven't been trained on how to use these resources effectively and get the most out of them. Then the resources aren't necessarily making their lives easier, which they ought to be. Teachers feel stressed and they feel overworked. So after a while, teachers leave. They're too stressed, they're overworked, and new teachers come in, which takes us right back to the fact that these new teachers need training to use the resources well. Quite a few of you, on the previous activity, you mentioned A was a statement that resonated with you, that every year you have new teachers coming in and you need to run training, orientation training, for those teachers. I think very often this circle is in place in some schools, in some contexts, and you do need the training every year because teachers are really burning out. Okay, right. So resolving issues, like the ones we looked at in statement A, B, C and D, resulted in us having a good, long, hard think about professional development and what we and how we offered it. As many of you will know, we produced a wonderful suite of new publishing for the new Cambridge Primary Lower Secondary Framework, and we published our Cambridge Primary Lower Secondary resources. This gave us the opportunity to have a think about what schools' challenges are, the ones you identified in the last activity, and how we can better support schools through these challenges. So we explored what worked, we designed three types of professional development to give you ongoing support and upskilling. In 2020, we launched our publishing, gave us the opportunity to reimagine professional development, we provide a range of professional development services, and we give sustained support. So we're moving away from dropping in with short training, short webinars, and to support that is going to be with you all year round. So these are the three main products that we have at the moment for teacher training. So preparing to teach a course, we have the Cambridge Teaching Skills Roadmap, and the Teacher Support Service. Again, this is just going to be one for you to sit and think, if you've got a piece of paper with you this morning, you can jot down some ideas, but if you just want to think about this one, you can, or you can let us know in the chat what you think. What do you imagine that each of these services might involve? What would a preparing to teach course do? What would a Teaching Skills Roadmap do? What would the Cambridge Teacher Support Service do? What do those names mean to you? What do you imagine them to be? So the preparing to teach course, I'm not sure what you got there, what you thought, but that is a set of trainer programmes designed to upskill heads of department, senior leaders with the skills and tools they need to cascade Cambridge training workshops to their team independently. And that's going to be the focus of today. I'm just going to very quickly show you what's coming up later this week, by revealing a little bit of the other two products to you. So the Cambridge Teaching Skills Roadmap, I wonder what you thought that might entail. The Cambridge Teaching Skills Roadmap is a set of detailed, easy to access teaching standards, complete with how-to videos for each of the skills. It contains five levels for teachers to measure their own teaching practice against the use of self-assessment tools. We're going to talk about that later in the week. One of the keys to this product is you have those how-to videos. That was designed to meet the need that teachers very often want to see what something might look like in practice. And finally, we have the Cambridge Teacher Support Service. It's an online teacher community hosted by subject matter experts, where teachers can ask unlimited questions. They can join discussions. They get webinars that they can request on topics they've requested. It's a year-round service. You can go on every week. You can ask any questions. I'm going to leave further details of those in the webinars later in the week, because we're going to focus on this about teaching. Right, okay, we're going to have a raise hands activity here. So if you can, can you all go to the raise hand? I want everybody to raise their hand. We've got 170 people in here. I'm looking to see 170 raise hands. I've got 13. Come on, find that one. Let's find that. Raise hands one. Fantastic. I've got nearly 30. Still quite a lot of people to go. Keep raising your hands. Keep finding that icon. I'm going to stop when I get to about 100. We'll let 70 people have technical issues, but the rest of you find that raise hand icon. We're going to get to 100. We've got 60. Oh, no, people are still working like that. I think some people are going up and down. Some people are playing. Okay, I think I'm going to leave it there. I've got about 60 people who found that. That's fine. If you find that icon, I'm sure many of you are super familiar with Zoom at this point, but I understand that technical issues happen. Fantastic. You've all got those hands up. You've raised your hand. Keep your hand raised if you have delivered training or presentation to your colleagues. You can lower it if you haven't had that opportunity yet, but keep your hand up if this is an experience you've had. Okay, I've still got 45 about. It's going up and down between 45 and 50 people have had this experience before. Okay, again, keep your hand raised if you've ever trained new teachers or new joiners on the ways of your school, and that might be quite formal in terms of being their body to help support them as they settle in, but it could be quite informal. Maybe you've done informal talks and sessions and given informal support. Fantastic. Okay, still got about 40 people. Lovely. And again, keep your hand raised if the sound of becoming a Cambridge leader sounds interesting to you. If you've already done those first two activities, you're probably in a good place to be able to do this, and if you haven't had the opportunity to do those first two activities yet, then I'm sure if they come your way and you take those opportunities, you'll be in a great position to support new teachers to Cambridge. And we've got almost as many people as put their hands up in the first instance. That's gone right back up again. A lot of people very keen to be a Cambridge leader for their subject. Wonderful. Thank you so much. You can all lower your hands now. Thank you. Thank you for being super interactive with me this morning. This makes my morning when you know there are people out there, people joining in. You can all lower your hands now. Thank you so much. Okay, so preparing to teach then. What it does is preparing to teach will train you with skills, tools to deliver Cambridge training. So in this case, sorry, it says English second language leader. We need to change that because as you'll see in a minute, you can be a leader for lots of different subjects. So professional, it's personal professional development opportunities for senior teachers, heads of department. I want to stress that it doesn't have to be that rigid. Some schools that we work with say, well, we don't have technically a head of department or a second in department. We're looking for the most confident, capable teachers in a department. One or two from each school that would be confident and capable of giving training to the teachers in their department. And that might be you now. Whether or not you have an official title to say that, you might know that you are confident, you understand Cambridge, you're confident enough to lead training, or it might be you shortly in the near future. So preparing to teach equips you with the tools and skills to run in-school Cambridge workshops, editable PowerPoint presentations, lesson plans, activity ideas. It provides you with a digital certificate of completion for participants of online face-to-face workshops, and it allows you to confidently support your wider teaching team independently throughout the year. Again, this is embedded, sustained professional development, the kind that will work, the kind that will lead to changes in your department. At the moment, we offer preparing to teach for these eight subjects. Coming very soon, we're very excited, we also have preparing to teach coming for English as a second language at IGCSE and IGCSE Success. Now there's three different delivery modes, and I'm just going to go over these very quickly because I'm going to go in-depth a little bit more to the second two. We have self-study. If you purchase the self-study option, you get access to multiple packs, and you get access to pre-recorded videos, so a session from a trainer to talk to you, again, as that subject leader, about how you are going to deliver your training to your school. The self-study option doesn't come with a certificate, it's maybe if you don't think you'd be able to attend any of the others, or you feel quite confident already, and you just want the information. As you can see here, when you purchase the online version, the self-study version, you get access to all of the materials via Cambridge Go, and you get access to all of the pre-recorded videos, again, via Cambridge Go. Today, I'm going to focus on these two modes of delivery, the online masterclass version and the face-to-face workshops. Now, obviously, because of the past two years, we haven't been able to deliver the face-to-face workshops, but we're very excited to say that in certain regions, they will be coming, we hope, in the near future, so do keep an eye out for that. At the moment, most of our delivery is via the online masterclass, and that's what I'm going to talk you through today. Before we do, to make sure I tailor the next section properly, I'd like to hear from you. This is going to be a poll. We're not going to launch it just yet, though. I just want to take a moment for you to think before we launch the poll, and I'd like to know if you teach Cambridge courses and use current Cambridge resources. It's the new 2020 publishing. You teach Cambridge courses, but you use the previous resources. You teach a non-Cambridge curriculum framework syllabus, maybe a regional one, but you use Cambridge resources, or whether you teach a non-Cambridge curriculum and you use other resources, non-Cambridge resources. Just have to think about that for a moment, think about which one is relevant to you, and then, Timo or Laura, could I ask you to launch the poll, please? Oh, fantastic. It is launched, and I can see all the results coming in. Wonderful. It's interesting for me to see that I've got lots more respondents to the polls than the raising hands. People like polls more than raising hands. Noted. Fabulous. Good. We've got the majority of respondents there, so I just... Five more seconds to get your vote, and if you haven't already, and then we'll end and share. Lovely. Thank you. Could we end the poll and share the results, please? Great. Okay, so you should all now be able to see the results there. So, we've got the majority of people here today who teach Cambridge courses and use current Cambridge resources, but we do have some of each of the groups represented today, and that's really helpful for me to know for the next section, because I can make sure that I cover aspects that are relevant to you. Thank you so much. Wonderful. It's great to see the variety of people we've got here today in terms of experience of training, in terms of challenges in their school, in terms of what they're teaching in framework and resources. Super. Thank you so much. We can stop sharing those results, and we will move on. Oh, will we? Right, okay. So, back then to the Online Masterclass. I'm going to talk about the Online Masterclass version, as I said. So, for the Online Masterclass, one of the two key differences over the self-study is that you come to two live, synchronous sessions. One of those is the Masterclass, where an experienced Cambridge trainer for your subject will train you in training your teachers for these resources. That trainer will be available to answer all of your questions, and they'll talk you through some different ways of delivering that material. As you can see, we've got a sample of them here. Last year, we worked with 22 trainers to deliver Online Masterclasses, so you can see this is really just a small sample. You also get to come to a reflection webinar, where you tell us how your online sessions went, and we discuss maybe any further challenges you've got and help out there, and you receive a certificate to say that you're the Cambridge leader for whichever Masterclass you attended and a subject you led training on. So, primary maths, primary science, lower secondary English. So, what steps are involved in preparing to teach? Well, first of all, you would register. You download all the materials from Cambridge Go and our new online platform. You'll have about 100 and roughly, depending on the subject, about 120 PowerPoint slides for you to lead training for your teachers, including when you also have lesson plans, you get really detailed guidance on how to use everything. Then you come along to an online or in-person Masterclass and engage with the trainer. You've looked through the materials in advance, you've had to think about how you might deliver them, you're familiar with them, and this is the time for the Masterclass leader to talk to you about how they could be delivered and to answer all of your questions. Then you use the materials and information to deliver your own bespoke in-school workshop, and then finally, you submit your reflections in a final webinar and receive your certificate. Many of you today, in the earlier session, are going to skip back to delivering your own bespoke in-school workshop. So, I'll pause here for a moment because many of you selected Challenge D, that you need it contextualised. The wonderful thing about these materials is that you deliver them in your school and you get to choose how you deliver them, tailored to your teachers, and if you need to stop at any point and talk about how you are going to integrate Cambridge with your state requirements or stop and do an additional session on a particular challenge for your school in your context, you can. You can make this completely relevant to your teachers. Professional development needs to be relevant, needs to be contextually specific, and you get the opportunity to use Cambridge resources to make this relevant for your teachers. All right, let's have a look then at what you get. As I said before, you get a vast pack of slides, a PowerPoint presentation for you to deliver your training. Those PowerPoint sessions, those PowerPoint slides break down into four sessions that you can deliver to your teachers. You might decide to deliver this to your teachers as a whole in set day, if you have that opportunity. You may decide to do it as four sessions, maybe as four twilight sessions. You may decide to deliver this online, whatever is going to work in your context. Again, that's the wonderful thing about this. It can really fit in with where and when you have the availability. You see the four sessions. The first one there is introducing Cambridge. This is the primary English example, but if you have the lower secondary science, it will say lower secondary science. Introducing the subject. We go over the curriculum framework. This is why it's interesting that I had your response from the last poll. I'm just going to look at those again. Obviously, if you're teaching a current Cambridge course, you're probably quite familiar with the framework already, but if it's new to you, if you've just taken that on, you'll need to know what the changes are. If you've never taught Cambridge before, you don't need to know what changes are, but if you've taught Cambridge previously, you need to know what the framework changes are and therefore how that impacts in the resources. There are slides in the deck that have a slightly different colour that you can use or not, depending on your context. If you need to cover the changes because you are moving from the old framework and the old resources to the new framework and the new resources, you would use those slides. But if like some people, again, you've not taught Cambridge yet, you wouldn't necessarily need to know those slides because the changes wouldn't be relevant, so you could just skip those out. Again, it's another way of making this training really relevant to the people you've got in the room. You can see session two there, setting up for success. We go through all the wonderful active learning, classroom setup, daily routines, schemes of work, speaking to parents. I know that's something that is really appreciated by the teachers that we've worked with and that we support in communicating with parents about the Cambridge resources they're using and how they'll be using them, because we know sometimes the expectations of parents are different to the expectations in the resources, so we give you some information to support that. Session three on lesson planning and demonstrations. There are example lesson plans, there are example face-to-face lesson plans, there are example online lesson plans, depending again on how you're teaching, and you can tailor that. Then in session four, you work collaboratively as a department to plan your first few lessons. Again, you can really support your teachers who are new to Cambridge in that way. Here's an example of one of the slides. You'll notice in the top right corner, there's a little icon with multiple faces. When you receive the vast PowerPoint deck for your subject, you'll notice that some slides have this icon, and that means that's a place for you to pause with your teachers because it's an activity for you to try together. Again, it's designed to be very interactive. There's all different kinds of activities. This is just one of the early ones. This is an actual slide from a preparing-to-teach PowerPoint deck where you as a trainer can help your teachers understand how the resources work and how to use them. We use full page spreads for all of the resources. Again, we make it all very relevant, very practical. We've seen this before, but now I'm going to stop at, let's see what the teachers have shared when they reach this point. This is the bit that we absolutely love. The teachers, the lead teachers or the future Cambridge leaders, they've come to the online masterclass. We've talked to them about the resources, how to use them. They've asked us questions and we've responded. Then they go away and they deliver their workshops in school. They send us evidence that they've done this. Look at this. This makes us so happy. You can see that we've already done this. We've been running this programme for a couple of years now. You can see here participants from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. You can see some are in person, but some are online. Again, depending on how you're teaching or again maybe just depending on the practicality of it, if you want to do it out of school time, online is absolutely an example. You can see the leader on the right there with his camera on and he's talking his participants through lesson planning. We've got some great feedback. We're sharing feedback all the way through this because again, that's the bit that gets us really excited when we hear how appreciated this programme has been. You can see here that the teachers have started implementing new ideas. They got lots of benefit from the training. Some more colleagues globally. You've got Nigeria, Ethiopia, India, Pakistan. Again, an example of how in Pakistan they used the online version of delivery. You can see here that we have a feedback quote that says, it's equipped us to train our teachers who are new to the profession and showed us how we can help them. Of course, in some contexts, this will be used for established teachers who are maybe just new to Cambridge or new to these resources or new to your school, even if they're established teachers or established teachers that just need a refresher, want a refresher, but it can also be a very valuable tool if you've got new teachers, newly trained teachers in your school. You can see here, we've got a fantastic example of how one of the leaders ran this programme in person in Tanzania. Again, another quote there, teachers feel like they are finally being given permission to have active learning in their classrooms. I really like this quote. I like this quote so much because active learning can be a different way of running a classroom. Active learning does not always have to be noisy. It doesn't always have to involve talking, but very often it does because dialogue is often crucial in forming new understandings. Active learning can mean a classroom looks different. Maybe the students are now sitting together in groups. Maybe there is always that productive chatter as students share dialogue to further their learning. In some contexts, this is very acceptable, and in others, this is a gradual process. The support parents and teachers give in this school has meant that they have felt that they are validated in their approach and that they have permission, they can do it, they can change the way they teach. Something else that we absolutely love to see is when schools connect with us on social media as they are doing this programme. Of course, the heads department or the senior teachers, whoever it is in the school that has signed up for this programme to lead the training in their school is getting some really valuable professional development themselves. Of course, they are training everybody in their department, so everybody is getting professional development, but they are getting professional development as a leader. Of course, school individuals and schools are really excited about this. We do very much encourage people to tag us on social media, share your photo, share your journey, let us know what is happening in your school, and share the word, spread the word. Right, okay. Before we continue on to a Q&A session, I am just going to share with you a video from one of our teachers, one of our Cambridge leaders, preparing to teach leaders. Jimmy from Nigeria completed the course last year and we interviewed him to get some more information about how the course had worked for his teachers. I would love to share this video with you now. Would you recommend preparing to teach to other teachers or other schools? Oh, gladly, gladly. Let me just say this, by the time my teachers went through all this, I had usual last session was that before they give me the plans and everything they need, it takes a while. But this, within minutes, within a few days, I got all I needed from them. So it's like this made the beginning for them easy. It actually gave them a platform to run and to be able to plan. So it was easy. So it's just a wonderful thing they were able to, it aided their lesson delivery now. Just sometimes I go around to see what all teachers are doing and I'm satisfied. Great, good. I'm sorry, I can see, thank you so much for the people who alerted me in the chat to the fact that that paused halfway through. I think we just had a slight maybe internet glitch, but hopefully you all got to see that. I've actually lost the chat box now, so Laura and Tim, if you need to feed anything back to me, it will have to be live. I'm so glad, I'm so happy to be able to share that video. Just one thing I'd like to cover, we go on to Q&A, is that Jimmy talks about how his colleagues in his department that he's trained were able to much more effectively plan and deliver lessons because he had the opportunity of delivering this course to them. He said that, I'm sure you all saw, that previously getting teachers to the right place in terms of lesson planning for Cambridge and lesson delivery for Cambridge had been quite challenging and this really accelerated the rate at which they were comfortable to deliver Cambridge lessons using Cambridge resources. I love that he said that when he was walking around his school now and he was looking at his department and looking at how teachers were working, that he was satisfied with how they were delivering Cambridge lessons with Cambridge resources. It's a really positive way to end because, of course, I can tell you that this programme is wonderful as much as I like, but the real value comes from you hearing from people like Jimmy, from reading those quotes earlier, of seeing those images of Cambridge leaders all over the world effectively delivering, preparing to teach and showing that their teachers have gained real benefits from attending this training in your school. Right, I do have a couple of things I thought I might like to touch on, but before that I thought that I would answer some questions. Laura and Timmer, I will look to get the chat box back, but in the interim, what can I address first of all with the remaining 10 or so minutes? Yes, okay, so first of all, thank you very much for a very fantastic presentation. Let's take a look in the Q&A box and see if we've got any questions. I think Timmer has been responding to a lot of them, so thank you very much, Timmer, for doing that. That's really helpful. So, from Joanna Chong, I thought this was a really interesting question. Can the Cambridge leader in one school train teachers of another school? Oh, that is very interesting. I think that would be a school-specific question. As far as we're concerned, that's not a problem for us. Of course, we wouldn't want necessarily you to be charging for that, but please do contact us and we can talk about it. But if your school was happy for you to support another school by leading some Cambridge training in their school, especially maybe if you're linked schools, part of a federation, sister schools, something along those lines, I think that would be entirely appropriate, depending on your context. If your school leaders are happy about that, then we're happy about that. So, what else have we got? Okay, so what would you recommend for those who perhaps don't feel as confident with the idea of delivering a workshop to their teachers? What would be the approach for preparing to teach for them? That's a good question. If you're not feeling as confident at the moment to deliver your own training in school, I'd really strongly suggest you look at our other professional development products. Come along to the webinars later in this week and watch the videos if you're unable to attend live and look at those other ways of gaining some support to build your confidence. In particular, I don't want to cover any content on Thursday, really, but you might want to take a look at the teaching skills roadmap and video library because that's very much a tool designed for an individual's personal teaching development. Again, watching videos to see what things look like in practice and helping you to develop that confidence in things like active learning, lesson planning, classroom environment, which might make you then feel more confident. But I often think that confidence can sometimes be a real hindrance, can't it? I don't want to assume anything about anyone's context, but I wonder if you're actually very capable of leading training in your school. You know your school very often, or sometimes, schools will approach us and say that, you know, we very much want somebody external to come into our school. And that person might be a Cambridge expert, but that person isn't an expert in your school, not an expert in your context, doesn't know what it's like to teach on a daily basis your learners. You do. You are very much an expert in your context. And I would like you to take real confidence from that. The Preparing to Teach programme is very supportive. You get time to take on board all of the resources. You come along to the training session, you'll get confidence from talking to the trainer, your masterclass leader, who will answer all of your questions, really help you to feel more confident and supported. And then you can go and lead your training. But I would encourage you to consider how much of an expert you are in your context. Okay, great. So the next question is from Amber Craig, who asks, we are a very small school teaching year 7 to year 10. There is only one teacher per subject. Is it possible to deliver this training as a general look at Cambridge approaches for maths, science and English? That is a really good question. So obviously your year 10 students might be on a different programme at that point. They might be on an IGCSE programme. I'm not sure about that. But let's take that 7 to 9 because that obviously fits very neatly into lower secondary. So each of the packs are subject specific, but each of them will have overlap and will have generic sections. So you could certainly take the packs and deliver parts of it to all of your teachers together. But parts of it, especially when you get to lesson planning, will be subject specific. So what you might want to do in your school, and maybe this is applicable to other people in different contexts, is you might want to have the teachers each be able to look at their own packs, maybe purchasing the self-study version, it's up to you, looking at their individual packs and you can do some of the sessions that are generic together and then you can work through some of the materials individually on your own where it's subject specific. One of the schools, I've taught at four schools in my 14 years and one of the schools I taught in was very similar to that. We only had two English teachers. So I could see how that could be challenging. I'm just thinking about how we would have done it there and I think we would have done the bits that we could have done that were generic, we would have done those together and then we would have gone off individually to work through the other bits. It might also, again, thinking about the other products we've got available, you might find the teacher support service to be really valuable because that will connect you. It's really isolating and again I know being the only one or one of the only teachers of your framework, of your syllabus in your school, joining a community where you're with quite a lot of other teachers around the world who are teaching your subject can be really supportive and can really help to build confidence and that's the person that you can, those are the people you can bounce ideas off and again the teacher support service has a subject specific mentor for each group that you can ask questions directly to as well as gaining support from your peers. Fabulous. So this next question, Timmer has responded to but I just thought I'd address it in case there are other people who are thinking the same kind of thing, just to clear up any confusion around it. So which of the certificates is better or more recognised, the online masterclass or face-to-face workshop? The face-to-face training in my country, 2020, but my school principal said the online is more recognised. Please, I need your explanation on this. So they are absolutely and in every way equal. Obviously the self-study, you know, just for the benefit of this I'm just going to share my screen again and I'm just going to flick backwards through my slides and I'm just going to, oops, can I get off there? Yes, I can. Right, there we go, let's go all the way back in time and, oh no, let's go forward in time now. Sorry, got too giddy, didn't I? There we go, right, let's stop here because this is the key difference here. So the self-study on the left, that's the mode of delivery here, does not come with a certificate or any interaction with a Cambridge trainer. So that one is quite separate. Of the other two, the online and the face-to-face, they are both completely equal. You both get very similar training from your Cambridge trainer. Of course, you do get a bit more training in the face-to-face because you're with them for a day rather than with them for a couple of hours online. But you still get the same information, just a little bit more condensed and the certificates hold exactly the same weight. I wonder, and I will just clear this up, if your school principal is thinking about different types of Cambridge training because Cambridge is absolutely huge and different departments do offer different training. So, for example, the Cambridge International Group will offer face-to-face and online training, which is more framework or syllabus specific. And our resource training, which we do cover the framework, we do cover the syllabus, but we're really focused on the delivery. We're really focused on what goes on in the classroom. And I wonder if maybe your principal is talking about training from another department. But just to clarify, the same is also true if you're doing training with Cambridge International, whether you do the online or the face-to-face, they hold absolutely equal weight. And it really does depend on what is realistic for your school life, whether it's realistic to be able to go away for two days or it's better to do an online course. And if it's possible to have online in your region at the moment, which I think for the vast majority of regions, it is not, which is why we've been heavily focused on our online masterclasses. We're quite lucky. We had already come up with the online mode prior to 2020 and we'd piloted that. So, we were in a really good position to get started with the online masterclasses as soon as we needed to. Very interesting question. Thank you very much. Great. So, another question. I think we've got time for maybe a couple more. So, in what ways would you say the preparing to teach courses support the development of leadership skills for the teacher that's undergoing the training? Absolutely. Yes, that's a great question. I think this course works very nicely if you're an experienced leader, if you're already a head of department, a second in department, and this is something that you're very familiar with. You can pick up the pack. You can probably see what you need to do. You can come to the masterclass. You might have some questions, but in terms of training, you're very confident. You can take that and run with it and adapt it, and that'd be fantastic. If you've never done anything like this before, I think this is a wonderful place to start because it is so supportive. You have all of the resources made for you in advance. You get them all. Of course, you can tailor them. You can change them. Again, we've talked about the importance of contextualised training, and you can adapt them to meet your needs, but they're all done for you. They've got extensive notes underneath, so you know exactly what the slide is designed to do. You know if there's an activity. Like I said, we have that little icon at the top to show you that there was an interactive aspect to that slide. The activity will be described in detail underneath with any additional sheets along with that as well, so it's really supportive. You look through all of that. You've got all of those materials, but then you come to the either online or the face-to-face masterclass with the trainer, and you can get support. You can say, look through these materials, but I'm not sure what I'm doing with this bit, or I really don't feel confident with what I'm going to say on this bit because this is a bit challenging in my school, and they can talk you all through that. They can really support you to do that. I think if you haven't done something like this before, this is a great place to start. Of course, at the end, you come to a reflection session, which I think is absolutely crucial, isn't it, whenever you take on any professional development, to have that session at the end to reflect on how it went, what went well, even better if, and again, you can talk to your masterclass leader, ask them questions if you need to do it again at another time, and get that support and feedback. So this is a wonderful place to start, I think, if you've not done anything like this before, and again, if you want to combine it maybe with the Teaching Skills Roadmap and Video Library to help build your confidence, then that might give you some extra support. Definitely. So another question, how can we be a school Cambridge leader, and how or from where can we apply these preparing to teach courses? So I'm not sure, I think they might be referring to how they kind of go about getting involved in preparing to teach, and how to get started, where to go, who to talk to. Yes, yes, okay. So I'd say probably the best way forward would be to talk to the Cambridge people in your country. So who are the Cambridge representatives in your area? But you can also come to the website, and on our website, we have professional development section, and these courses are available to purchase as well. Self-study, on the left there, is always available to purchase, of course, because that doesn't come with a live synchronous aspect, so you can always access those materials. The online masterclass and face-to-face options will have dates coming up on the website as they are available. So we are imminently, within the next 10 days or so, going to put a new selection of dates for the online masterclasses. So of course, global, you can, wherever you are in the world, you'll be able to come along to those and sign up for those. We do have a limit of places per course of 40. So, you know, when they come up on the website, you can keep an eye out for that. We'll put it, we will, won't we, Laura? When it's live on the website, we'll put that news out there everywhere, so we're sure it'll come your way. And face-to-face workshops, likewise, we will get them on the website as and when they come up, but they're going to be few and far between for this year, and we're really hoping to go a lot bigger on them next year as the global situation stabilises. Perfect. Do we have time for one more, or maybe not? It's time to wrap up, Laura. I'll leave it to you. Yeah, I just wanted to check in if there's anything else that you wanted to say to us before we wrap up. Yeah, there were a couple of things I was going to cover, but actually, the questions that everybody's asked has helped me to communicate everything left over that I needed to communicate. So, me and the participants today, we are one. The things that they were thinking about, I was thinking that we needed to go over one more time or clarify or cover. So, I'm really glad that you asked all the questions you did. I'm so thankful for the interactivity today. Thank you so much for joining in. It helps me to tailor what I say in those kind of situations because I know who you are, and it also reminds me that I'm delivering this to wonderful global teachers out there and not just talking to Laura and my camera. Yeah, perfect. We do have some other questions, but I will say we'll also answer as many as we can through the Brighter Thinking blog afterwards, and we'll share that in the email that you'll receive seven days after the event today. So, yeah, please check back and see if we've provided some further answers to your questions. We do also have, as has been mentioned a few times throughout the session, additional webinars throughout this week on the Cambridge Teaching Skills Roadmap and the Cambridge Teacher Support Service, and I've just posted the sign-up links for those in the chat as well in case you're interested in finding out about anything else to do with our professional development. If you think perhaps these opportunities are more suited for you than the preparing to teach courses, then please do take a look at those sessions and come along if you are interested. And then, yeah, as we've also said, if you have any questions or you want to find out more about the resources discussed today, then please reach out to your local sales representative or visit cambridge.org forward slash education. Alternatively, if you have any specific questions about our preparing to teach courses or any of the other professional development opportunities that we offer, you can email cpd at cambridge.org, and I think my colleague Timmer will drop that email into the chat as well. And finally, when the webinar ends today, there is a short survey to complete that will pop up on your screen, and it really helps us to understand how we can support you going forward and what else we can do to help you basically. So if you have a quick five minutes to complete that, that would be fantastic. And yes, so all that's left to really say is thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you to Timmer and to Victoria for helping deliver the session today. And remember that seven days after this event, we will send out a recording of the session and let you know where you can find all the slides and frequently asked questions and follow-up information from the webinar. And don't forget you can also use your confirmation email as proof of attendance that you attended today. And the other sessions this week are happening tomorrow at the same time and also Thursday at the same time. So it's an 8.30am UK time start. So thank you very much for attending and good luck with all of your teaching. Thank you again to Victoria and Timmer. And have a good day, everybody. Thank you. Thank you, Laura. Thank you so much. Okay, bye.