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.

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.

On the martyred teacher syndrome

“Come down off your cross, we need the wood!” (Dolly Parton)