Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) Guide to Effective Professional Development in the Early Years
We are all aware of the challenges of providing professional development opportunities for practitioners in terms of time and resources. But we also recognise the positive impact of focused, relevant, high quality professional development on provision and outcomes for the children in our care.
The EEF Guide to Effective Professional Development in the Early Years provides a framework to support those choosing, developing or planning high quality professional development opportunities for early years practitioners. It is based, as with all EEF guidance documents, on extensive review of the evidence on ‘what works’ in practice.
Essentially, this guide explores four key components/stages of effective professional development:
- Build knowledge
- Motivate educators
- Develop teaching techniques
- Embed practice
“High-quality professional development for educators working in the early years should be sustained, well-organised and include four areas of professional learning.”
Each of these 4 areas is then explored in detail, through practical ‘mechanisms’ for implementation, case studies and worked examples.
The guide then goes on to explore the role and structure of effective professional conversations, around which much professional development is structured.
It provides a 5-step Professional development conversation cycle model which underpins the processes of planning, building knowledge, translating into practice, embedding and reviewing.
An additional tool Prompts for facilitating professional development conversation provides example questions and discussion points for each stage of the process. It also includes an action planning proforma and a completed example.
The document concludes with a brief section on effective implementation, using the Explore, Prepare, Deliver, Sustain cycle. This is drawn from the more extensive EEF guidance report A School’s Guide to Implementation, also available on the EEF website, and is supported by a range of practical process tools.
Access the guide and associated resources on the EEF website here:
Guide to Effective Professional Development in the Early Years | EEF