Teaching & Learning at Debden Park High School

Teaching & Learning is at the very heart of everything we do at Debden Park High School, we know this will always be the most important part of our teacher’s jobs and we give this the respect it fully deserves. So much so, we have changed our school day to accommodate weekly CPD for our staff.

Every Tuesday, we don’t have Period 1 (lessons begin at 8:30am with Period 2) and the day finishes for students at 14:45. This allows us to have 2 hours of staff CPD each week from 3-5pm. These sessions are known as Debden Minds, our own in-house, bespoke CPD programme tailored to the needs of our school and our students. These sessions are run by our Teaching & Learning Team and are based on the latest educational research such as the Education Endowment Foundation and books from the likes of John Hattie, Dylan Wiliam, Hywel Roberts, Daisy Christodoulou and Doug Lemov.

Alongside Debden Minds, we also have 5 Inset days per year, Teaching & Learning Team breakfasts, Teaching & Learning communities and BE Evolving, for the development of our Middle Leaders. Our SCITT trainees and Early Career Teachers will also receive additional CPD throughout the year to help them to become our leaders of the future.

At Debden Park High School we encourage our staff to be creative, innovative and inspirational in their teaching and will never criticise our staff for trying something new. Our lessons follow a structure that we know works;

Link to prior knowledge (most commonly through Retrieval Practice)

Explicit instruction

Scaffolding

Deliberate Practice

Consolidation

And throughout the lessons our staff are encouraged to check for understanding and adapt their teaching at each stage in order to ensure all students are suitably challenged throughout.

Finally, we believe that Continued Professional Development through Debden Minds is vital for every member of our staff because every teacher at Debden needs to improve, but not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better than they are currently.