Graeme Finnie is the guest for this post

We had a great conversation about coaching and mentoring at the Summer School. Ollie has reminded us of the different ways that teachers and school leaders can work with coaching and mentoring and the distinctions that it can be helpful to make in terms of these approaches. During the SEED coaching and mentoring initiative we’ve created opportunities for teachers, school leaders and other professionals to talk about how they are taking things forward in their own schools and authorities.  You can hear a selection of them on CPD Scotland. These were recorded at a large group conversation at Pollock Halls earlier this year.

The General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) have announced new guidance on probation supporters http://www.gtcs.org.uk/News/GTCS_launches_new_guidance_on_probation_supporters.asp

They have recently published a leaflet on how to select mentors for probationer teachers. Providing guidance on everything from selection and training to support, the leaflet aims to help key stakeholders select the people who will mentor probationer teachers.

A copy of the complete guidance document is available at:

http://www.gtcs.org.uk/Publications/GuidanceforTeachers/probation_supporter_guidelines.asp

Here are the smiling faces on the final day of the Scottish International Summer school. Watch here for the first news of next year’s exciting event!

A number of colleagues have commented positively on the 4-stage model described in the Teachers for Excellence paper. They tell us it offers a useful progressive model for considering how to develop professional learning.  I thought you might be interested to see how colleagues working in the Determined to Succeed agenda have used it to shape up a model of CPD for enterprise.

Ollie Bray finishes his series of posts on the Scottish International Summer School, here he provides a summary of day four of the conference.

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Judith McClure was the fourth person to take up the position as Chair at the International Summer School. Judith is the current Convenor of the Scottish Educational Leadership Management and Administration Society (SELMAS). In her opening address Judith picked up on some of the emerging key themes of the conference including the importance of building relationships, emotional intelligence and allowing time to think. She even managed to slot in a quick advertisement for the forthcoming SELMAS Conference in September.

The morning was taken up by an activity led by Graeme Finnie around the theme of coaching. We were asked to use group coaching to see if we could think of ways to develop leadership capacity through coaching and mentoring. I have written about coaching before and do believe that it is a powerful way to support leadership at all levels. However from the various conversations that emerged from the morning discussions it seemed that there was still a bit confusion in terminology as to what the differences were between coaching, mentoring, life coaching and counselling. Although we may never reach a true consensus or exact definition of what each of these things are for. I do believe that there is some work to be done in really helping Scottish teachers and leaders understand what we mean by “coaching” in an educational sense.

Here’s what I think:

Mentoring is normally provided by to another person or group of people who have an expertise in the subject that the person is being mentored in. As well as reflection mentoring is also about giving advice based on the experience of the mentor.

Coaching does not have to be provided by a subject expert. Instead the coach has been training in questioning techniques. They are skilled in getting the participant to come up with their own answers by providing structured questioning to allow the person to have some really focused thinking time.

With this definition in mind and one of the recurring themes of the conference being that all leaders need more time to think. I think that coaching could be one way to push forward this aspect of the leadership agenda.

I also think that it is important that we differentiate between “formal” and “informal” coaching if there are such terms? School leaders may already be using informal coaching in schools because it is really just structured questioning. However, I think formal coaching is different. During a formal coaching session a coach will guide the participant in order for them to find their own solution to a particular problem or obstacle. The coach will also help the participant set their own goals to help them overcome or review the problem. Coaching is powerful and important to school leaders because most of the time our minds are filled with more than one task and sometimes it is difficult to prioritise or tackle these tasks in any sensible order. I also believe that coaching can be immensely valuable when helping school leaders plan strategically. All to often school leaders get tied down with the day to day running of the school / authority and do not give enough time to strategic “blue sky” thinking or a clear vision for the school. Working with a skilled coach can provide a way to give some quality time to both of these issues.

One final point, I believe that coaching is here to stay and I hope that there are some plans to engage the ITE Universities in the coaching process. To me this seems a useful way to push forward and develop a coaching model. 3580 students will enter ITE next year and I think that if they all new what coaching was (a clear definition) and if they had all had an opportunity to be coached and perhaps even benefited from being a peer coach then this would be a huge step forward and 3580 less people to convince about the merits of coaching when they enter the profession full time.

After Lunch the conference received a presentation from Graham Donaldson, Senior Chief Inspector, HMIe and Eamon Stack, Chief Inspector, Department of Education and Science, Eire. It was interesting to hear a little bit about the inspection model in Eire and to hear Graham Donaldson’s speak about school leadership. One big difference between the Scottish and Eire systems is that there is no Local Authority Education structure in Eire. Schools report directly back to the centre. After their presentations both Graham and Eamon received a number of questions from the delegation about the advantages and disadvantages of both systems and the inspection process in general.

The final presentation of the day was from Norman Drummond on the Columba 1400 experience. After a motivational introduction from Norman staff and students from Lossiemouth High School and Cumnock Academy took the lead and spoke to the conference about their own Columba 1400 experience. I have always been enthusiastic about outdoor learning and the power of the outdoors to develop leaders, aid reflection and empower people. The presentation provided me with even more evidence to support my theory. The audience listened to two groups of young adults explain to them how the Columba experience had changed their lives. The audience also had an opportunity to take part in some Columba activities and to find out how the schools had gone on to develop their own sustainable leadership programmes. This presentation was an excellent end to the day and for many the highlight of the week.

If you haven’t already heard, I am delighted that HMIE has invited the CPD network to join them for the national launch of Part 3 of the Journey to Excellence.   We now have confirmation of the venue which is to be the Caledonian Hotel, Princes Street, Edinburgh. 

The day will start with coffee at 9.30 a.m. prior to the launch at 10 a.m.   The meeting will finish at 12.45. 

We have arranged lunch for the network and we will meet together in the afternoon.   Our agenda will be PRD (Jim Keegans); CPD Scotland (Con Morris); Leadership Conference (Ollie Bray) and I will give a CPD Update.   We will close the meeting at 3.30 p.m.

I promised you an update on what’s happening with CPDReflect toolkit (see blog here) and would welcome your thoughts at any time in any form!

We are hoping to sign off the detailed design in early September. The process by which we are getting there is enlightening.

The project is adopting a user-centred design approach that puts the end users’ needs first before pen touches paper (so to speak!)

I am very grateful to the usability group some of whom are pictured above. These brave souls took part in the 1st usability workshop before the summer break and took the trouble to return questionnaires during it.

A key part of the next stage has been the production of a document which highlights key journeys through the system. I have posted an extract from the document. If there are key journeys you think we have missed please feel free to comment.

I will post soon on the best way to exemplify the reflection process and I look forward to sharing with you the 1st ‘look and feel’ screenshots in September.

The CPD Team needs your help!  Our latest Occasional Paper is here (CPD for Teachers Years 2 to 6 Draft ).  It is still in draft form but we would very much welcome your comments and feedback to help shape it.  In particular, we would like to hear from you if you have completed your induction year and are in years 2-6 of your career. 

The paper includes  a number of case studies and if you have a CPD experience which would make an interesting case study, then please let me know.  My e-mail address is: f.taylor@LTScotland.org.uk

 I look forward to hearing from you!

I sneaked in to the last session of day 4 of the Summer School. I was bowled over!

The topic was the Columba 1400 Ambassadors’ Leadership Academy. The 90 minutes flew by as the presenters from Cumnock Academy and Lossiemouth High took us through how they:

• spent 5 days on Staffin on the Isle of Skye and learned about core values such as integrity and perseverance
• instigated curricular development and extra-curricular programmes based on these values
• planned and delivered in-service days for all their staff.

The session ended with series of searching questions on leadership from the floor which were ably answered by the 7 presenters  from both the schools.

 Oh, did I mention the 7 presenters were S3 and S4 students? Wow!

Ollie Bray continues to share his thoughts on the third day of the international summer school

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The third day of the summer school was chaired by Gordon Mackenzie the Headteacher of Balwearie High School in Fife. Gordon skilfully introduced the day by picking up on the main themes from yesterday’s presentations and asking the important question and a recurring question from the conference, “How do we target leaders of the future?”

The first presentation of the day was from Mike McCabe, Director of Education, Culture and Lifelong Learning, South Ayrshire Council on Adaptive Leadership. I had heard Mike give this presentation before at the Deputes Together Seminar earlier in the year and I was glad that I had as I managed to take even more away the second time that I heard the talk. I liked Mike’s analogy to the difference between a broken heart (emotional difficulty) and a broken arm (technical difficulty). As leaders in schools we often offer a technical fix to problems but sometimes forget to go back to make sure that the problem has also been emotionally fixed.

Mike also tried this analogy into CPD. In schools we often spend a huge amount of time on technical CPD (ICT, risk assessment, health & safety) but how much time do we spend on CPD to do with attitudinal change? Do we in schools / authorities need to find more time to help develop emotional intelligence?

After Coffee the next speaker of the morning was Alma Harris, Director, Institute of Education at the University of Warwick. Alma gave an excellent presentation on Distributed Leadership and School Transformation. I took a huge amount from Alma’s presentation and I was pleased that she mentioned the work of Thomas Friedman and also relatively new corporations and organisations such as Google and how the “flattening” of the world will have a significant impact on education and school leadership. This part of the presentation linked nicely back to Keir Bloomers presentation on the first day of the conference.

Alma also talked about the four “D”s of Transformation:

• Diagnosis (what is the current situation like?)
• Development (what needs to take place?)
• Drive (how can this change be sustained?)
• Data (without data you can’t make informed decisions about school improvement).
• (could Derived Distributed Leadership be a 5^th “D”?)

Other key points from Alma’s presentation included:

Distributive leadership:

• is more than a theory
• is not delegation
• does not mean that everybody leads
• is mainly about building leadership capacity

“Teachers working conditions are students learning conditions”

Further information about Alma and her work can be found on her website http://go.warwick.ac.uk/distributed_leadership

After lunch the conference changed venue and moved to the Scottish Parliament. After a brief tour the conference was spoken to by Fiona Hyslop, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning. I was impressed when I heard Fiona speak at the Scottish Education Awards earlier in the year and was even more impressed with her presentation today. Personally, I felt that she spoke from the heart and I felt reassured by her vision for education in Scotland. I was interested to find out some of the ideas that seem to be high on her agenda and I was particularly pleased that some of these ideas feature early intervention and the development of professional development including coaching and mentoring.

The final presentation of the day was from Richard Holloway the former Bishop of Edinburgh and author of over 20 books. Richard spoke passionately about his own ideas and feeling on what makes a good leader and I feel quite sure that all of the conference went away with plenty to think about.