CPD Team

Slideshow courtesy of @mikecoulter

During last week’s Summer School on Leadership, I was privileged to host a TeachMeet ‘unconference’ on the broad topic of educational leadership. If you haven’t heard of them before, an unconference is where the participants take charge. There are no special guests, keynote speakers or even an agenda!

Only a few weeks before the event a blank page was posted on the Teachmeet web site.  Participants were urged to sign up to deliver a micro-presentation (no more than 7 minutes), a nano-presentation (no more than 2 minutes) or just to ‘lurk’. Distributive leadership in action or sheer madness expecting educational staff to give up a holiday evening to attend a CPD event?

Word of the event spread through email, blogs and Twitter. The online conversation included suggestions of topics for debate by a number of colleagues including @frankcrawford of HMIE. By the evening of the event, we had a sell-out crowd (more than 60), generous sponsors, and more speakers than we could fit in.

The format was a mixture of group activity, learning conversations and short thought-pieces. Group activities included:

• “describe your ideal leader through the medium of ….Lego”
• Randomly generated activities using this tool from @johndavitt
• contribute your favourite leadership characteristic for the Leadmeet09 Wordle (thanks @katiebarrowman).

The speakers were randomly selected using a tool from classtools.net . Sadly, many were willing but only a few were chosen! The lucky ones included David Noble, Margaret Alcorn, Frank Crawford, Gary Johnstone and David Pyper (all the way from Ontario, Canada!)

Even the unlucky ones get a say thanks to the power of online technology. Here’s Ian Stuart’s presentation on Situational Leadership

The online aspect continued throughout the event. Some people attended remotely using webconferencing technology set up by @parslad . In addition, many attendees ‘tweeted’ their comments, asked questions and  posted pictures (thanks @tessawatson).

The last part of the event was the ‘show and tell’. You can see a selection of the Lego Leaders here (thanks @annemcghee). Other collaborative works, such as the ‘Leadership Blues lyrics’ and ‘The French Revolution in 20 seconds movie clip’ are awaiting permissions and legal advice!

The next Teachmeet is a fringe event to the Scottish Learning Festival. I would recommend it!

If you want to know more, or if you attended #Leadmeet09, please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Con (aka @cpdscotsman)

Tags: #leadmeet09, #lss09, Leadership, teachmeet, unconference
Categories: Innovative CPD, Leadership