I am having a whale of a time doing the rounds at CPD Festivals, Scottish Learning Festival seminar, Orkney Integrated Children’s Services Festival and Shetland Islands In-Service event. Here are the links I promised all the participants.

Influences

Collegiality and impact - Richard Elmore’s work is highlighted here

Types of CPD - See a previous blog post on this topic

To find out more about the 4-stage model of CPD, read Margaret Alcorn’s paper on Teachers for Excellence 

Seen it, done it and bought the virtual T-Shirt

For general CPD information - try CPDScotland

For specific CPD opportunities, try CPDFind

To find out more about Glow, visit www.glowscotland.org.uk

To get regular CPD updates subscribe to the CPD team email bulletin

John Johnston and his CPD Collective can be seen on OpenSource CPD

Read and comment on Don’s Ledingham’s Learning Log

Even though we never got to see Andrew Brown on Glowmeet, please drop him a comment on his blog

Find out more about CPDReflect here   

If you have a Glow password

• why not join the CPDCentral professional community?
• Or try CPDReflect for yourself. You’ll be one of the first, so please feel to drop me a comment above

Finally here’s the t-shirt I promised all who attended!

Members of the CPD Team will be attending the Annual National Lecture which takes place on the 1st October at the National Gallery for Scotland in Edinburgh.

This year’s annual lecture will be delivered by Elish Angiolini the Lord Advocate for Scotland. Appointed the first female Solicitor General for Scotland in 2001, she was also the first Procurator Fiscal and the first solicitor to hold the post. In 2006, she was appointed Lord Advocate, the head of Scotland’s prosecution service, the first woman in the 500-year history of that post.

For more information about this event, please email alison.mcwilliams@gtcs.org.uk

Join the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning Fiona Hyslop MSP in a live discussion on Wednesday 17 September from 5.30 pm until 5.55 pm to exchange views, to chat, ask questions, or share your experiences.

Following this, on Wednesday 24 September the Cabinet Secretary will be at the Scottish Learning Festival, giving her keynote address. Register for this event now on the Scottish Learning Festival website.

Also there will be an opportunity for comments, questions and reflections from the audience following the address. You can also submit questions in advance.

Judith McClure would like to pass on the notes of the discussion points raised at the SELMAS Leadership Conference 2008. She would also like to express her heartfelt thanks to the excellent group of facilitators and to everyone who contributed. Just select this link to download the discussion questions and points raised.

This is a guest post from a good friend of the CPD Team, Jean MacMillan from Determined to Succeed

Dear Colleagues

We are delighted to tell you that the Partnership with Employers website is now live.

The web site taps into a rich seam of video clips and resources related to and supporting work on employer engagement and entrepreneurialism. The site has been designed to allow teachers and others, working collaboratively or on their own and at a time and place of their own choosing, to explore a number of resources associated with employer engagement and entrepreneurialism.

The materials can be used to develop and enhance teachers’ understanding of the concept of partnership, the videos show the exciting and innovative teaching and learning that is going on across the curriculum in Scottish schools.  The resource should provide inspiration and the tools to support teachers across all sectors in the  development of  effective partnerships with employers,

Our aim is to keep the website fresh by adding new video clips and resources over the next few months.  You can also access the entire suite of training materials that are currently being used in the National Training Programme

Please disseminate this information as widely as possible, with only a few clicks we could reach thousands of colleagues across Scotland.

Thanks

Jean MacMillan

http://www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/34006.html

The Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework Partnership (SCQFP) will very shortly open a consultation on the referencing of the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF) to the European Qualifications Framework for lifelong learning (EQF) and welcomes your participation. The consultation period will run from 9 September to 28 November 2008. To access a copy of the initial report and consultation document, please see the SCQF website.

This week Jim Keegans will be attending an international conference with colleagues from the University of Glasgow. A team from the Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge have completed an evaluation of Flexible Route to achieving the Standard for Headship (FRH) and will present in Sweden a research paper on integral features of the FRH programme including the impact of coaching. As FRH project manager, Jim has represented the National CPD Team on the national priority of providing choice and flexibility through an alternative route to the Scottish Qualification for Headship (SQH). The conference coincides with the next phase of FRH with a programme launch planned for participating authorities on 30th - 31st October in Stirling.

Jim Keegans

Professor Richard Teese, Director of the Centre for Postcompulsory Education and Lifelong Learning (CPELL), Melbourne Graduate School of Education, will visit Scotland and be a guest of the National CPD Team during September.   On Monday 22nd he will make a presentation to staff of Midlothian Council on issues related to priorities at Authority level and with reference to the recent OECD Report for which he was a co-author.  On Tuesday 23rd he will present at the national CPD Coordinators meeting in Edinburgh again with a focus on the main themes emerging from the OECD Report and its implications for CPD.  The National CPD Team continue to promote this involvement of international thought leaders and welcome the opportunity to engage in discussion and share experiences with such a major figure internationally in education.

I represented the CPD Team at the BERA annual conference on Saturday at Heriot Watt University.

The keynote was delivered by Professor Ken Eichner, Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the U.S.

Ken spoke eloquently on how we need to rethink educational research to remove the divide between practitioners and academics. An early remark questioned the wisdom of having separate ‘practitioner days’ at conferences such as these was greeted by a few cries of ‘hear, hear!”

He propounded a ‘3rd space’ theory that links the 1st space of practice-based knowledge creation and the 2nd space of a largely academic route.

He used a number of examples of ‘boundary crossings’ to illustrate this third space:

• ITE students drawing on practitioner research. See the Carnegie Foundation on how teacher educators use these web sites to educate teachers
• Hybrid educators who work in both schools and universities
• Mediated field experiences where academics / teachers learn from each other (similar to professional learning rounds work being led by Graham Thomson here in Scotland?)
• Professors teaching children and documenting it for teacher education
• ‘professional development schools’ that are part of faculties within US universities

Some of the issues highlighted by Professor Zeichner:

• Teacher action research is still largely ignored by academic world
• We should consider changing the funding model (currently based on the amount of published research) to include post-research and ongoing dialogue
• Presentations and publications should be defined by topic not by the source of the research.