A PROFESSIONAL LEARNING PASSPORT FOR NEWLY QUALIFIED TEACHERS.

A System To Support Professional Learning - Designed For Educators, By Educators

The Education Workforce Council (EWC) is the independent regulator for the education workforce in Wales, covering teachers and learning support staff in school and further education settings, qualified youth/youth support workers and work-based learning practitioners. One of EWC’s principal aims is to contribute to improving the standards of teaching and the quality of learning in Wales and monitoring Induction for Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs). For this project, PebblePad was adopted to support a process of enabling NQTs to capture their learning and development and receive support from mentors as they embark upon their teaching career.

The Professional Learning Ambition 

At the heart of the EWC's ambition was a desire to not only support NQTs through the induction period and process, but to instill an attitude of lifelong learning and continual professional development. They required a system that would support:

• recording evidence against the professional standards

• planning for future development

• professional dialogue between the NQT and their Mentor

• access for external verifiers - to ensure quality assurance and provide additional support.

The EWC needed a mechanism for ensuring that Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs) are well supported, get off to the very best professional start and establish career-long activity of developing and maintaining their practice against professional standards. 

The Successful Workflow (in two languages)

The EWC have developed the Professional Learning Passport (PLP), to be used throughout the NQT’s first year of teaching. The purpose of the PLP is to capture learning or any experience that may contribute towards learning and development, and to encourage reflection on those experiences. This allows Newly Qualified Teachers to more readily identify strengths and areas for development, and to plan further learning in those areas that need more development. The completed PLP enables NQTs to present their learning and development journey.

The EWC provides its registrants access to the PLP, a fully bilingual personal learning platform powered by PebblePad. Created with a PebblePad workbook, the PLP consists of a number of templates that allows learners to record and reflect on learning experiences and evidence their developing competence against the Professional Standards for Teaching & Leadership. If learners happen to be offline, the PebblePocket App allows them to record experiences which can then be synced back to their PebblePad account and added into the PLP once online again.

               Our PebbleVision video, while not specifically about this case study, shows the use of PebblePocket to record evidence of              stages of skill development - anytime, anywhere it occurs.