A 6 Week Professional Development Cycle: A Model for Great PD Training

A Practical Framework for Embedding Impactful Teaching Strategies

📚 Catch Up on the Series

Missed a part? Here’s what we’ve covered so far:

Get It, See It, Name It, Do It: A Model for Great PD Training

ADAPT Meetings: A Model for Great PD Training

💡 Let’s Get Stuck In

If we want teachers to embed strategies that actually improve teaching, then professional development can’t be a one-off. It needs to be sustained, focused, and contextualised. This year, we’ve introduced a six-week PD cycle for all Year 1 to Year 6 staff. It’s built on three pillars:

1. One clear priority for everyone.

2. Shared understanding of what it looks like.

3. Time to adapt and apply in context.

The goal is to help every teacher not just know a great strategy, but use it, shape it, and make it stick. This post builds on earlier WAGOLL posts around Get It, See It and ADAPT Meetings to show how we’ve pulled it together into a rhythm that works.

*Context: My current school is a 7-form entry International School with Heads of Year overseeing each year group. Even if the model isn’t quite right for your context, hopefully it still proves useful.

👀 Inside the Six-Week Cycle

This PD cycle runs across six weeks and rotates through three key learning formats: whole-school focus, year group adaptation, and professional learning groups (PLGs). Each cycle builds towards deeper embedding of one strategy. Here’s how it works:

🎯 One Teaching Priority

Each cycle has a single teaching priority. For example: Checking for Understanding. Everyone focuses on this across the six weeks. This keeps things simple, aligned, and focused.

Week 1️⃣: Get It, See It

We kick things off with clarity. Teachers explore what a single strategy that Checks Understanding looks like when it’s done well, using videos of colleagues, video clips, and practical classroom examples. Staff unpick the ingredients of effective implementation. An example of this might be a session looking at Hinge Questions.

It’s about seeing good examples (not necessarily perfect ones because they still need to feel real). It’s about seeing it in action, asking why the different steps to the strategy matter, and connecting them to student learning.

Week 2️⃣: Adapt It

Now it gets contextual. In ADAPT-style meetings, year groups and specialist subject teachers meet with their Heads of Year to discuss:

• What does this look like in Year 2 maths?

• What tweaks do we need for our EAL-heavy cohort?

• Where in the lesson do we build this in?

• How can we plan this into this week’s lessons

This is where shared language and strategy meet contextualised knowledge, and the embedding of change begins.

Week 3️⃣: Year Group PD

This week gives each team space for their own priorities. It could be moderation, book looks, assessment planning - whatever is timely for them. This breather ensures we’re not layering too many new things all at once. It also means there is a two-week period for staff to trial and tweak strategies.

Week 4️⃣: Get It, See It (Round 2)

Here, we return to our focus. But this session is more about reflection and refinement.

We use real classroom clips of our teachers attempting the strategy, pupil work, and example resources. It isn’t always the best bits. We want staff to be vulnerable and share their challenges. The times the strategy hasn’t landed or hasn’t worked as well. This allows for problem-solving and the sharing of experiences to overcome these.

We use this session to also tackle early misconceptions that may have appeared within the early implementation of a strategy. This avoids lethal mutations in the long run. It’s about staying true to the intent, learning from each other, and making sure we all move forward with clarity to embed the strategy well.

Week 5️⃣: Adapt It (Again!)

Now teams implement and adapt again. Year groups take what’s worked and what hasn’t, and they embed tweaks into future planning. It is another opportunity for year groups to have ownership because what works in Year 6 does not necessarily work in Year 2 without adaptation.

Week 6️⃣: Professional Learning Groups (PLGs)

These groups focus on whole-school work that’s important, but not urgent: curriculum review, task design, policy tweaks. It ensures big-picture progress continues alongside day-to-day improvement. I’ll write more on this in another post.

🔁 Coaching Cycles

Alongside the six-week PD cycle, every teacher takes part in two rounds of one-to-one coaching using StepLab. This provides:

• A focus on individual goals

• Personalised feedback

• A clear connection to the wider PD focus

This means teachers are developing on personal priorities as well as whole-school teaching strategies. These priorities can be aligned or can be different based on need.

🧠 The Bits That Stick

Research from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) highlights the importance of clarity, feedback, and sustained focus in professional development. Our cycle draws directly from this:

• One focus

• revisited over time

• Adapted collaboratively

• Supported by coaching

It is not perfect by any means, and the cycle still needs to be responsive. But already, we’re seeing more confident teachers, stronger conversations in year group meetings and strategies to support Checking Understanding becoming part of the daily routine.

Professional development is about habit-building. And with a systemised cycle that builds the right rhythm, it’s possible.

In a bit,
Coops 😎

🔒 Ready for More?

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📚 References & Influences

1. Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). Effective Professional Development Guidance Report (2021). https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/effective-professional-development

2. Tom Sherrington. The ADAPT Model – from Walkthrus (2020). https://teacherhead.com/2020/09/06/adapt-a-model-for-professional-learning-and-collaboration/

3. Steplab. Steplab Professional Development Platform. https://steplab.co/