Teaching and Learning

At Debden Park High School teaching and learning is at the very heart of our school. We are unapologetically ambitious for what our staff and students can achieve. We are committed to cultivating exceptional teachers, who continually develop and reflect on their practice to ensure outstanding outcomes. 

We are so committed to improving our teaching staff that we have a shortened day on a Tuesday (finishing at 2.45, rather than 3.20) to facilitate 2 hours each week to Debden Minds, our in-house CPD programme, tailored for the needs of our staff and our students. These bespoke sessions are planned and delivered by our Teaching & Learning Team (TLT) and include all our teachers from SCITT trainees and cover supervisors all the way up to our Head of School. We firmly believe that all our teachers need to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because we are ambitious and believe we can become even better classroom practitioners. We are constantly striving to improve our classroom practice. 

In addition to Debden Minds, we also have fortnightly TLT breakfasts, additional CPD to support our trainees and ECTs focussing on the pedagogy of student behaviour, Be your own future sessions for career development opportunities, Be Evolving middle leaders training and 5 inset days per year. Teaching and Learning at Debden is heavily research informed, with a continuous focus on what has been proven to have the greatest impact on student outcomes for example feedback and metacognition. Debden Minds is informed by the research of John Hattie, Dylan Wiliam and the Education Endowment Foundation and heavily influenced by the work of Hywel Roberts, David Didau, Guy Claxton and Robert Bjork amongst others.

We encourage teachers at Debden Park High School to take risks in their lesson planning, not to play it safe but to bring our curriculum to life and inspire our students beyond engagement into botheredness, which extends far beyond the boundaries of our classrooms. We love nothing more than seeing a Year 12 Economics class playing table tennis in the sports hall or GCSE PE students walking through the chambers of the heart laid out with cones. We want to make our lessons ‘stick’, we deliberately and systematically interrupt the forgetting to ensure our students transfer key knowledge into their long term memory, therefore Debden Park students can remember more to help them be prepared for future assessments. We know learning happens when you think hard and we work with our teachers to ensure our students are continually challenged in their lessons and inspired to be their own future.

You can explore our framework further through our teaching and learning curriculum.