A sharing session is not a box to tick

The programme asks for at least three sharing sessions so that the few core teachers who go first can spread their experience across the school. Treat it as a ceremony for the stamp and that spread never happens: the people listening take away nothing they can use, and the person presenting just reads from the page. Three slots are all you get, and each one is worth using properly.

Useful sharing sessions have one thing in common: when it is over, each teacher leaves with one thing they can use next week, a lesson plan they can adapt, a specific classroom practice, or a warning about a pitfall to avoid. Design to that standard and the format falls into place.

The rhythm and topics across the three

Spreading the three sessions across the three school years, each matched to where the programme stands at the time, works better than cramming them into the last year. Year one covers getting started: which tools were chosen, and the experience and setbacks of the first trial teaching. Year two goes deeper: the practice around the teaching demonstrations and open lessons, sharing what works and what does not. Year three is about the harvest: pulling together two years of practice and settling the school-based experience into guidelines that can carry on.

Focus each session on one or two topics and no more. Rather than packing six subjects' reports into one sitting, take one classroom practice that genuinely has substance and go into it deeply, so the teachers in the room can ask real questions and actually learn.

The format and who presents

The presenter should be a core teacher from the school who actually delivered on the commitments, not an outside speaker or a vendor. The reason is simple: what a colleague made in the same school, facing the same students, carries the most weight and is the easiest to copy. A vendor's role is technical support at most and should not take over the room.

On format, leave half the time for interaction. Rather than running slides the whole way, let the teachers present try a practice hands-on, or discuss how they would give feedback on a real piece of student work. If a sharing session can double as a small workshop, one event covers both training and spreading the practice.

Feed open-lesson findings into the sharing session

A sharing session does not need fresh subject matter, because the open and demonstration lessons are the best source of content there is. One open lesson, run through trial teaching, observation, and post-lesson discussion, builds up plenty of specific findings: which part drew a strong response from students, which prompt needs rewriting, and when AI's suggestion should be overruled. Turn those findings into the spine of the sharing session and the two commitments support each other on the same material.

This arrangement also eases the load on teachers. Preparing an open lesson takes real effort, and if the sharing session then has to be built from scratch it becomes needless duplication. Let the session catch the results of the lesson and teachers do the work once while producing evidence for two commitments.

Records as report evidence

Each sharing session should leave three things behind: the attendance record, the slides or materials from the day, and a short summary written afterwards setting out what was covered, what teachers took away, and what to follow up next. Together those three are the firmest proof, in the midterm and final reports, that three sharing sessions were held.

File those materials into the implementation team's shared folder on the spot, sorted by commitment. The programme requires records to be kept for at least seven years, and saving as you go is far more reliable than rummaging through boxes after the fact.