Helping great teachers get better
Professional Development
You'd like to rekindle your teachers' passion with help from someone who can span the gap between researcher and practitioner, an authentic teacher with wide classroom experience who can demonstrate how the big ideas look in a real classroom? You don't want a one-day bump, or the next pedagogical fad wrapped in false optimism.
Evidence based PD for teachers, by a teacher, educational researcher, and innovator.
It's PD delivered the way a teacher should.
Choose from the ideas below or reach out for something bespoke. Regional NSW school inquiries welcomed.
Harnessing Generative AI
School Empowerment Package
Beyond the hype, Generative AI brings a tsunami of opportunity and challenge to schools.
We want to retain integrity across varied assessments and prepare our school community for the the emerging future (isn't that our core business?).
Understanding is the first step - but you know that, you're a teacher!
Together we can build a package perfect for your school
Building Blocks to choose from:
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Whole staff Hack-a-thon. Let's get hands-on practical and competitive in a session that's learning-by-doing. It's way more fun that PD is supposed to be. (1 hour)
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School leaders think tank. Aimed at your key staff, this session explores strategic thinking and how to prepare your school for this complex adaptation. We draw on some great national and international thinking to plot and efficient path to an effective framework that will work for your learning community. Start building your adoption and policy framework. (1+ hour)
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Understanding Generative AI. Aimed at your whole staff (and assuming nothing) this session gives enough of an understanding "under the hood" to stimulate great thinking. Nothing empowers like understanding - of course! (0.5 hour)
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Authentic Assessment. This is the (first) pointy end of AI, the challenge to retain authentic and varied assessment without replacing everything with a test. Critically re-examining assessment lifts the hood on some great thinking to retain richness and authenticity even (and especially) in the age of AI. best combined with the Understanding Generative AI. (0.5 hour)
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Trail Blazers and Early Adopters. You know who they are in your school and how crucial they are for effective change, so don't leave them yawning. In this session they start creating their own agents, harnessing the power of AI as creators not consumers and look towards the near future through the lens of "how can this boost teaching and learning?". (Max 6 participants, 1 hour)
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Departmental Workshops. Small teams are a great place to bridge from the big ideas to the actual in a subject-specific context. The logical step is to assist your department teams to brainstorm, try, review and embed. (Flexible duration)
Stage these across the year and keep your staff in that zone of proximal development.
Big Ideas Grow
Wide screen Professional Development
Let's take the biggest ideas and show how meeting student needs for BELONGING, AUTONOMY, AND COMPETENCE nurtures the best from all our students. Focussing on the special tasks of adolescence, this powerful framework is garnished with practical ideas from and for real classrooms.
The goal of this PD is to empower time-poor teachers to make effective, incremental changes based on improved understanding.
This PD aggregates theories like Cognitive Load Theory, Load Reduction Instruction, etc within an overarching framework of Self Determination Theory to make sense of the world of modern pedagogy. We then pepper it all with decades of experience and collections of practical ideas and mesh that into a framework for overloaded educators to make achievable gains in their practice.
This is a terrific opening to a teacher-owned whole year professional goal setting, deliberate practice, followed by review, sharing an embedding to build your teachers' expertise.
1 - 4 hour variations available in your school.
Supported with curated professional readings for teacher action-research. Supporting your for the whole journey: thinking-idea-try-review-embed-celebrate.
Synaptic Connections
Lessons from Educational Neuroscience
Medicine used to be a craft, a bunch of "try this" passed on from colleagues with little true understanding of what is actually happening with disease, but sprinkled with luck and hope. A vibrant connection between practitioners and researchers transformed the understanding and effectiveness of doctors.
Education is undergoing a similar transformation. What we have recently learned about how, why, and when our brain learns can inform educational practice. Educational neuroscience sits at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and pedagogy. Avoiding the over-hype of "just-so" stories, this professional learning looks at the most relevant findings of educational neuroscience and offers insights for teachers with a passion for students and learning.
(1 hour)
About Roger
Throughout a secondary teaching career spanning three decades, Roger has focused on student motivation, learning, and engagement through innovation. He thrives on the challenges of leading teams of teachers and derives joy from crafting lessons he would enjoy as a student. He has headed up departments in leading schools across Victoria and NSW.
Meshing this wealth of practical experience with his Ph.D. in Educational Neuroscience, Roger bridges the gap between educational research and reality of schools, classrooms and Year 9 period 6 Friday.
Working part-time as a post-doctoral research assistant at UNSW, he loves the evidence based approach to evaluating teaching pedagogies and the practical utility of great theories of learning. He is a current contributor to the educational research field and is an academic reviewer.
Roger established The Future Project, a collaboration of schools, research companies and universities to provide secondary students with authentic experiences of real-world research science. His adventure as a Teaching Scientist at Quantal Bioscience sees him continuing to forge school-research-industry partnerships, inspiring students' enthusiasm for learning by empowering them as creators in real-world scientific research. He has recently established Learning Forge as an opportunity to indulge his passion for teacher education and professional development.
He describes himself as a teacher who researches educational psychology and neuroscience, loves new challenges, electronics, and creating tech. Mostly, he simply enjoys working with high-school students in all their majesty, complexity, simplicity, and potential.