During my career in education, my overriding experience of staff training was to be gathered in a classroom or hall, watch a slideshow and be spoken to about it.

Would your offer your students this learning experience?

Some staff gave clever, politicised comments back. I exaggerate a little. Yet it was often ‘us and them’. Sometimes staff would reluctantly stand when invited by the visiting speaker, do an ice-breaker and discuss something. We’d fill out personality scores like Myers Briggs. Sometimes the leadership would hire experts to come in and talk to us. We’d discuss it and some people would talk for ages.

Then we all went back into our classrooms and meetings and behaved in exactly the same way.

How we lacked imagination.

I worked with many well intentioned, talented professionals, yet many of the management who led us had little real idea about how to put into action what they wanted. They were skilled at structures, meeting inspection criteria and putting in place management systems, yet they were often not personally invested in a culture of learning themselves. So we kept on doing the same old training days. Very little was learned. Despite best intentions, most management leads with its historical tendency. Because of this, many staff rooms were ultimately cultures of resignation rather than places of aliveness and learning. The spaces that were alive, were those where we practised our specialisms as individuals.