Early Career Teacher

Content of the ECT Programme

Throughout the 15 Modules delivered, there are key recurring themes to ensure they are part of the ECTs everyday practice, which further develop into becoming ‘learning habits’. The theory behind this is to ensure the ECTs continually build upon their knowledge and skills in small amounts, as opposed to acquiring many skills all at once. Research states that the brain cannot easily process large amounts of knowledge all at once, and that it is more effective for individuals to learn and acquire greater amounts of skills over a longer period of time. Therefore, this programme allows for ‘little and often’, through the delivery and scheduled professional development opportunities it has planned over the 2-year induction. 

Each conference will act as the starting point for the Module being studied and all weekly meetings, coaching observations and CPD opportunities following this will be directly linked. This would allow the ECT to see the knowledge and strategies from the Module being applied into a variety of contexts, furthermore, ensuring teacher development.   Likewise, all Mentor coaching observations, lesson observations and weekly self-study tasks will also focus on key content from the Module being delivered. This enables the knowledge and understanding gained from the Module to be effectively applied into practice, then reviewed and further developed to enhance teaching practice. 

Each Module has been designed based on substantial research, evidence and best practice of effective professional development, and includes: 

• Conferences – Launch of the Module delivered, where ECTs come together to and participate within group tasks, individual reflection materials and explore the Early Career Framework with their colleagues. These will be facilitated by highly skilled and experienced practitioners who will extend ECTs’ thinking and support their planning by sharing practical applications of the research in the classroom. 

• Self-study materials - These explain the research behind the Early Career Framework and give exemplifications of what this looks like in the classroom, to ensure ECTs can secure their understanding quickly. These materials are designed to take into consideration ECTs’ busy professional and personal lives, and so can be accessed at any point during the week to support flexible learning and professional development. 

• ECT-Mentor meetings – One-to-one sessions to provide support, review self-study/reading tasks and to conduct instructional coaching. 

• Video clips - Sample of pre-recorded snapshots of good practice for ECT to gain ideas from experienced practitioners showing what key strategies look like in practice. 

• Observation opportunities - Planned ‘live’ good practice lesson observations from schools across the Trust. Good practice observations will be narrated by experienced teachers/leaders who will be able to break the key techniques delivered down into clearer parts, so that ECTs can have a strong view of what ‘good’ looks like in practice. 

It is important for ECTs and Mentors to understand why certain techniques do or don’t work in the classroom and it is vital for them to understand what theory underpins that outcome. Therefore, it is critical that ECTs on the programme can see what effective teaching looks like in practice, so the programme uses a mixture of example videos and lesson observations from a variety of different contexts, to show how real teachers put these theories into practice. This enables the ECTs to see what the statements of the ECF look like in a real-life classroom.