Whatever your profession, training is an essential part of career development. As a teacher, you will typically attend around 5 Inset Days a year. These days provide valuable opportunities to work as a team with other colleagues and to learn new skills to take back into the classroom.
Just like the training you will have experienced during your teacher training, Inset Days enable you to gain a broader understanding of school development priorities and methods that will enrich your teaching and the learning of your students.
Nonetheless, an Inset Day that involves simply sitting and listening for the whole training period will potentially disengage and lead to a lack of focus on key objectives. Inset Days should be vibrant, collaborative and interactive processes that involve all participants and help them to improve their pedagogic practice.
What is an Inset Day?
An Inset Day is a day when a school is closed to most students and teachers are on site, receiving training in some form. This could be with speakers, leaders from within the school or through webinars.
Often, teachers will gather together at the beginning of the day so that objectives, goals and priorities for the training are shared. This helps everyone concentrate on the essential targets for the day and enables the school to explore and fulfil its continuous professional development (CPD) agenda.
Sometimes teachers will split off into groups to complete tasks related to the day’s objectives. Groups may compare and contrast their work or reconvene at the end of the training session to create whole school outcomes.
Schools may set out their Inset Day agenda for the whole year in September so that days are linked together and teachers have clear expectations around what to expect and what work will be completed.
How to prepare for Inset Days
Knowing that Inset Days are an opportunity for teachers to communicate, collaborate and learn is a key aspect of preparation for the day itself. Approaching the day with the idea that you have the chance to broaden and deepen your teaching skills, and learn more about the ways in which you can enhance your students’ experiences will also help.
It might be useful to know the topic of the Inset Day beforehand so that you can read around and research the subject. Talk to your colleagues about what to expect and who will be delivering the training. You will then be fully prepared for the day and be able to get the most out of the experience.
3 tips to get the most from an Inset Day
There is plenty you can do to maximise what you gain from Inset Days. Here are three tips to help you achieve more with your training.
1. Arrive prepared
Have pens and paper or a device to take notes. It is amazing how much information you have to process as a teacher, so taking notes and referring back to them post-Inset helps you to refocus on your priorities.
Chat through your expectations or hopes for the day with your mentor or colleagues. You might discover that there are additional aspects to the training you hadn’t previously considered.
Read around the topic and come prepared with a few ideas or concepts you can discuss or suggest if asked to contribute. Being engaged and enthusiastic from the beginning will enable you to learn more throughout the day.
2. Get involved
Volunteering to help organise a section or lead an activity can help boost your confidence and consolidate your skills. In essence, it’s just like teaching or sorting groups in a classroom, so you already have experience with this type of situation.
Leading groups or collaborating with others will also enable you to get to know more people around your school, which is great for establishing your presence and gaining useful connections.
3. Make time for reflection
Life in school is busy. We all make that promise to ourselves to come back to an important idea when we have the time, but often this is forgotten in the hustle and bustle of everyday teaching life.
However, setting aside just 15 minutes the week after an Inset Day to action some of the reflection points from the day and then returning to these a month later can help you focus on your objectives and make sure you actually achieve the targets you agreed.
If you’re working with a mentor, this can be part of your regular mentoring process, or you can make a pact with your fellow teachers to work together in some allotted reflection time.
Engaging Inset Day ideas for school leaders
Teachers with plenty on their plate can very easily turn off if Inset Day training isn’t dynamic. Keep sessions short and active, with opportunities for Q&A or feedback if there isn’t an activity to get stuck into at this point in the training.
Try to incorporate a varied set of activities into a training day. If you can add in at least one each of the following at different times during Inset, teachers will be kept on track, focused and engaged in achieving the agreed Inset goals:
- Icebreaker activity that gets people talking and raises energy levels.
- Group discussion with a defined outcome.
- Relevant games that explore key learning priorities.
- Creation of a practical activity or resource to be shared with other groups.
- Ask newer colleagues to contribute to a section of the training to bring in fresh ideas.
- Demos of new pedagogic practices which help teachers to practically understand how to present in the classroom.
Finally, Inset Days need to be focused, engaging and active so that everyone feels they can get involved and have something important to contribute. Training is a great opportunity to develop whole school and departmental objectives so that teaching and learning are consistently evolving to meet the needs of all of our learners.
