Planning the perfect INSET day

At this time of year as the September INSET day requests start rolling in, my mind often turns to thinking about how to make these ‘one hit wonders’ most impactful and successful. With only a short amount of time to make an impact, at a time of year when teachers have a lot on their minds, how can we ensure that INSET sessions are as beneficial as possible?

Make the impact obvious and measurable

There is very little worse than sitting through a day of training thinking ‘how is this going to make anything better?’ In everything we do as teachers, our focus should always be pupil outcomes, and that applies to INSET days too. You should make it clear to teachers throughout the day how the ideas, activities, theories and methods demonstrated will have impact on pupil outcomes. You also need to set aside time within the session to discuss how to recognise and evaluate the success of any new initiatives you put in place post-training. Crucially you should plan how and when you are going to come together to discuss how things are working. This will encourage teachers to put the training into action without delay, but at the same time ensure that this isn’t a long-term waste of time and energy if the new ideas don’t work with their classes!

Look for evidence and expertise

One much unloved former Secretary of State for Education once declared that we had ‘had enough of experts’. What we need for a successful and valuable INSET day though, is access to expertise, and training with a strong evidential basis. Ideally what you are looking for is someone who is expert in their field, with both practical and theoretical / research experience, but who is also expert in training other teachers! That can be quite a tall order, especially for a subject like music where sometimes specialists deliver training with very little understanding of the needs of generalist class teachers, for example. I have sat through many a ‘just do what I do’ type demonstration which the presenter does not realise is not replicable by someone who doesn’t have a musical background… Even worse are the presentations which turn out to be led by someone from an organisation’s marketing department who has no classroom experience at all but thinks they know ‘what teachers need!’

Allow space for collaboration & challenge

Teachers are professionals, and an INSET day should never be about listening in silence to one external speaker’s opinion! Even with an expert delivering training in the room, the teachers are still the experts in your pupils, your school, and your community. There should be built in time in any INSET for discussion, questions, and co-creation. If the training is going to work, the teachers need to take ownership of it, and that means trusting them to tweak and adapt it to fit your own unique context. Obviously there are some subjects that can’t be argued with; no-one wants individual teachers interpreting safeguarding procedures however they see fit! But as a general rule, teachers should never leave a session feeling like they’ve been told to do something in a specific way that they have no right to adapt.

Consider your colleagues’ comfort

There must be biscuits, lots of biscuits! You think I’m joking, but really, the food provided at INSET sessions is crucial to developing a sense of occasion and making people happy to be there! If you can throw in a buffet lunch, even better! What you want from an INSET session is happy, engaged, motivated teachers; we’ve all seen the impact on our pupils when they’re hungry for their lunch, and adults are no different!

If you’re in a primary school, consider the size of the chairs and the level of the desks in the room you have chosen for your INSET session. No adult can concentrate properly if they’re made to sit on a chair designed for a child, and stooping over a table to take notes all day is just asking to get people signed off with back problems! If you want to get the best out of your teachers all day, they need adult-sized furniture, as the airlines say ‘for your comfort, but primarily for your safety!’

Finally, if your INSET day falls on the first day back after a holiday, you should build in some time for teachers to be themselves! Hopefully you have a happy team who enjoy spending time together, and they will have missed having a daily chat. Make sure there is time built into the early part of the day for them to reconnect. You could start the whole day with a coffee and chat break before beginning the training, or you could incorporate some social time into the training. I often like to start a music INSET with a group activity where the teachers turn a review of their holiday activities into a soundscape using their voices, bodies, instruments, and found sounds, which always leads to some interesting results! You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a piece of music made up of rollercoaster impressions, fake sneezes, crying babies, and wine bottles being uncorked…

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