Cambridge Teacher and School Leader Standards
What are the Cambridge Standards?
The main purpose of the Standards is to set out the characteristics that teachers and school leaders need to deliver Cambridge programmes effectively. The Standards provide a benchmark of what Cambridge International considers to be teacher and school leader quality.
The Standards focus on supporting all aspects of a leader’s or teacher’s professional learning and development, recognising the demands and complexity of their job.
They can be used by teachers and leaders to identify what they are doing well in practice and what they can improve through support and professional development.
If teachers and school leaders are keen to understand how they are performing against the Cambridge Standards, our surveys can help them to answer key questions to identify strengths in their practice and opportunities for improvement.
The surveys are translated into Chinese, Portuguese (Latin America) and Spanish (Latin America), and asks practitioners to respond to the questions on a frequency scale.
- Never
- Rarely
- Sometimes
- Often
- Always
The best approach to completing the surveys is to be absolutely honest. If you respond to statements with never, rarely or sometimes it will become clear where to focus effort and make improvements to your practice. The report can be used as part of discussions for ongoing professional development and to show progress being made over time.
Make a start
- Download a copy of the Cambridge School Leader and Teacher Standards and become familiar with each of the domains.
- Share the standards with colleagues and discuss their relevance to your school's values and mission.
- Use the standards as an opportunity to reflect upon the effectiveness of leadership and teaching practice in school.
- Consider how the standards might be used to begin conversations about improving classroom practice.
The surveys are designed to help assess your self-efficacy against the Cambridge standards and are accessible for those with English as a second language. They have also been translated into Chinese, Portuguese (Latin America) and Spanish (Latin America), with more languages to come.
Click on the links below to start completing the surveys online.
Use the surveys to:
It is important that teachers and leaders feel safe to answer as honestly as possible without fear of judgement or penalty, and feel comfortable with sharing their results with one another. Facilitating conversations where colleagues can discuss their reflections, review the analysis within a safe space, and share ideas to progress their learning or put together a plan for improvement is at the heart of this process.
We should be looking at ways to increase teacher (and leaders) confidence and knowledge in interpreting the data so that teachers can be empowered to work together for change and improvement.
Each school's context will be different, so there are a few considerations to be mindful of before introducing the Cambridge standards. Although, these considerations should not be barriers to making improvements, so there are a some key questions to ask yourselves as a leadership team or a group of teachers.
Culture
- How can we establish the right culture at our school to positively impact learning?
- How can we encourage regular and consistent participation?
- How can we use the evidence to get the support needed?
- How can we evaluate what is working?
Action
- What action do we want/need to take?
- What outcomes do we want to see and why?
- How do we engage others in action?
Impact
- How can we ensure the impact is focused, valid and measurable?
- How often should we review and evaluate?
Reflection activities
Engaging in reflection is a fundamental aspect of teacher Professional Development. Gibbs' Reflective Cycle (1988) in this image has been merged with Kolb's Experiential Learning cycle (1984); Driscoll's 'What?, So What?, Now what? cycle (2007) and Jasper's 'Experience, Reflection, Action (ERA) cycle (2003).
Deliberate and critical analysis of classroom events and asking 'What?' and ‘Why?’ to determine the reasons behind events, help teachers to subsequently develop their practice and expertise, whilst recognising what changes to make to their practice in the future.
Any activity that supports teachers to reflect, learn and then act to improve their practice can be classed as teacher Professional Development, and such activities can occur in a face-to-face or an online environment.
You could try this:
Individually or in pairs select a Domain that resonates or interests you most. Look at the standards within that domain and think of a situation or experience where you can ask yourself the questions below:
- What happened?
- What were you thinking and feeling?
- What was good or bad about the experience?
- What sense can you make of the experience?
- What do you need to improve on?
- How will you improve?
Alternatively you could try this.
Working in small groups of 3 or 4 people consider:
- Which standard from each domain has the most impact on learner outcomes?
- Justify your choices and note down any opposing ideas.
- Of the 5 Domains, which is the most difficult to capture evidence against.
- Which standard is the most important to you and why?
Next steps
Using the Cambridge school leader and teacher standards offers a reflective opportunity to think about what this means for your individual development, but also as a team.
Thinking about your school and your context, you may want to consider the following questions as you approach how to use the standards more regularly.
What do you hope your school will gain from using the Cambridge Standards for teachers in the short term/ medium term/ long term?
Specifically, what improvements do you hope to see in terms of:
professional learning
teaching
learning
learner outcomes
team working
leadership
Do you anticipate any challenges in introducing/using the Cambridge Standards?
How do you plan to overcome these challenges?
What support from Cambridge would you find helpful, as you develop your use of the Standards in the future?
It’s how teachers think that makes the biggest difference. If they think that evaluating their impact is at the heart of their job, all good things follow.
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