Research and reflection: creating confident teachers with professional development qualifications
Teachers who grow professionally know how to reflect personally on their progress. But how do you truly teach reflection? That was the starting point for our recent project with Misk Schools in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Misk Schools is one of seven entities in the Mohammed Bin Salman (Misk) Foundation, a national, nonprofit initiative set up in 2011 to discover, develop and empower young Saudi talent.
The school is an accredited Cambridge Professional Development Centre with a dedicated training academy that offers our teaching and leadership professional development qualifications (PDQs) to teachers who aspire to lead in their fields.
In 2023, the Misk Schools leadership team came to us with a question: could the PDQs do more to create confident, reflective teachers who go on to nurture equally confident and reflective students?
We worked closely with the leadership team and teachers taking the PDQs on an impact study to find out.
Together, we explored two specific areas so that we could better understand the impact of our training:
1. Did current PDQ mentors have the skills to bring out the best in trainees?
2. Did PDQ trainees effectively reflect on their teaching practice and feel confident bringing new teaching methods to the classroom?
We co-created a mixed-method research approach that supported the school's professional development priorities. This included online journaling, pre-and-post surveys and semi-structured interviews to capture qualitative and quantitative insights during the trainees' studies.
We recommended an approach; Misk Schools made it real
We guided the team, making sure they had the steps and resources to complete the study. We gave teachers and mentors the space to reflect on their teaching practices and provided school leaders with the tools to capture those insights, all through a technical solution: the Recollective online research platform.
Recollective gave us insights while giving participants autonomy
The platform allowed participants and mentors to complete tasks, submit reflections, and participate in surveys at scheduled intervals. This helped us collect data, including:
- confidence ratings
- qualitative reflections on classroom practice
- feedback on mentoring.
The platform also helped us monitor progress remotely without influencing participants in any way - crucial for managing data ethically.
As part of the process, we asked trainees to complete reflective journalling. That meant documenting their classroom experiences, thinking through learning activities and sharing thoughts on the impact PDQ training was having on them.
Mentors also kept journals to reflect on any changes they made to guiding trainees.
Mentors were open about what they found more challenging
Mentors support Misk School's PDQ participants through structured feedback, collaborative discussion, coaching and reflective practice, driving professional growth. To do that well, mentors need to be reflective too.
In interviews, some mentors were more confident than others. Those who found giving feedback more challenging often used broad, abstract terms, were too positive or negative or focused on assignment tasks. Some felt that they gave solutions too quickly, without allowing mentees to explore their own. Having conversations about this helped them consider their practice.
Trainees had different levels of confidence, too
At the start of the process, our surveys showed that not all teachers felt confident bringing new teaching practices from the PDQs into their classrooms or reflecting on the results when they did.
This posed another challenge: how could we help trainees consider the benefits of reflection? That's where the Recollective platform really shone - giving teachers the freedom to share their thoughts in their own time and way.
Misk Schools saw immediate benefits and long-term possibilities
Some participants were unsure about using reflective practice at first. But by the end of the PDQs all trainees agreed that reflection was important for their professional growth. Nearly two-thirds left feeling fully confident about using it to improve classroom teaching.
Other outcomes included:
- enhanced reflective practice overall
- increased teacher confidence in trying new teaching approaches
- improved constructive feedback and coaching from mentors
- a greater culture of reflection and professional support.
Additionally, the journalling approach has been such a success that the leadership team is encouraging teachers right across the school to use it.
Looking beyond the 12 months of our study, Misk Schools also sees four areas of potential long-term impact:
- Continuous professional growth for staff from embedding reflective journaling across the school.
- High-quality mentoring support from ongoing mentor training.
- Improved student outcomes thanks to confident, reflective, and effective teaching.
- National and international recognition of PDQ impact through even greater collaboration between Cambridge and Misk Schools.
Misk Schools is already using findings from the surveys, journals and interviews to identify strengths and development areas in our PDQ programme. They will use this to guide future PDQs as well as school-wide professional development strategies.
