CPD Team

This post continues our discussion on key learning points from online CPD communities on Glow. It contains links to Glow but you can also click on the images to see expanded screenshots.

Here’s a thing we have learned! We can set up community pages for local events and programmes which ‘feed’ into CPD communities at a national level.

Here are some examples of this…

When the HWB team at Education Scotland led an event for NQTs, we worked together on a mini-community for the event which, in turn, fed into the national hwb-cpd community.

South Lanarkshire has a local version of the Outdoor Learning community. It sits within the “affiliated “ Outdoor Learning community in CPDCentral, and anything shared in that community can also be shared at national level, on the same principle outlined above.

Several authorities have local communities for their CPDLeaders which sit within CPDLead, which, in turn, is part of CPDCentral. Whatever is learned locally in these communities can be shared at a national level.

All of the above examples are local versions of national CPD communities. How about if all local communities shared at a national level? National communities wouldn’t have to come first. National communities would then be amalgams / curated versions of local communities.

Examples of this too are beginning to emerge on Glow…

MLPSNet (a community for primary languages practitioners in Stirling Council) share almost all of its activity nationally through the collegiate tools on CPDCentral. There are also links to existing authority areas on Glow to allow privacy where required.

Extending your Potential is an online, early leadership programme led by Rodger Hill of Dumfries & Galloway. The eyp-cpd community, however, is built at a national level so that the sharing can be seen by all on CPDCentral.

So here’s a thought. In the next iteration of Glow, instead of building ‘national’ CPD communities why not build a partnership with colleagues from local authorities to build communities that meet their local needs? The trick would be that each of these communities also shares at a national level, and possibly international level.

So why not have Stirling Council support modern languages for primary teachers across Scotland? And why not have an early leadership area of the proposed Virtual College for School Leadership (Teaching Scotland’s Future, recommendation 50) led by Dumfries & Galloway? And a coaching community led by Shetland folk, and an NQT community led by Aberdeenshire colleagues, and so on?

As always, your comments will be much appreciated

With the forthcoming changes to Glow which we will know more about in the coming months, we thought it might be helpful if we outline a few of the features on our CPD communities thus far. Although we don’t know as yet what Glow will look like in the new session, we can share here some of the key learning points from our work on CPD communities so far.

Note to illustrate these points we make several links to Glow communities below.

Learning point 1 – Share once, see many

We started a couple of years ago with CPDCentral –  a hub where you could find other educators and share your ideas and practice?

From CPDCentral, you could then find links to CPD communities that might interest you, eg CPD leaders and Health & Wellbeing. The problem we hit quite quickly was that if you had the same thing to share, or say, in more than one community, you had to add it several times.

So we flattened the hierarchy for sharing and did away with many of the sub-groups. You’ll see now that CPDCentral has spawned a lot of mini-communities, and although they are nested within CPDCentral, they have their own identity and hashtag. The beauty of this system is that you can share and interact in more than one community at a time.

So, to take the example, CPDLead is the online community for leaders and co-ordinators of CPD. A member of CPDLead sharing some CPD practice on Health & Wellbeing can tag the item with #cpdlead and #hwb and share simultaneously across both communities.

Many other CPDCentral communities operate in this way: Outdoor Learning; CPD Consolarium; Gaelic; CPDStepin; Global Citizenship to name but a few. 

The icons for these communities are shown here.

In addition, as an individual educator you can also see all your own community activities to date on the CPDMe page  This might come in handy at PRD time!

In the new Glow, we would like to see this Share once, see many idea extended to the CPD work done by individuals, establishments, local authorities and national organisations.

Examples:

• the option to share items directly with colleagues from your online profile without double entry. A piece of evidence of impact could be shared in the profile, but also appear as part of a school contribution to LA improvement planning and a contribution to a CPD community
• you profile yourself once and those details are made available to all your school, authority and national communities
• a local authority CPD community can share a learning and teaching policy (and with the judicious use of tags) make it available to all its own educators but also to supply teachers, probationer teachers, leaders throughout Scotland as it sees fit

In the next post, Con Morris and I will be reflecting on our next (and related!) learning point – Learn locally, share nationally

Your comments would be very much appreciated below!

Flexible Route to Headship Report 2011 worddocThanks to all of you who contributed to this review of the Flexible Routes to Headship Programme. And thanks to all the participants, coaches, supporters, officers who have made it so successful.
We are currently recruiting for FRH Cohort 6 and are delighted with the early interest.

CPDStepin is still going strong!  This CPD Community on Glow is for supply teachers and others who may not be able to access CPD and PRD through the usual channels. The community is facilitated by  CPD Team associates and CPD Team advisers and supported by Susan Lafferty of the National CPD Team at Education Scotland.

In the video below, Anne McGhee, CPD Team associate, chairs a discussion with CPDStepin colleagues and mentors which features the benefits from membership of the community. Enjoy!

Remember,

• If you are a supply teacher and want to join CPDStepin, then see this link here. If you don’t have a Glow username, we can help with that
• if you have mentoring or other skills that can support CPDStepin colleagues, please drop us a line at stepin@educationscotland.gov.uk

https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/CM-7980.pdf

This publication offers interesting insights into the future direction of the English school system. There is I think much to reflect on in terms of the relevance and likely impact of some of the proposals it contains.

The White Paper begins by confirming that “the first, and most important, lesson is that no education system can be better than the quality of its teachers” but notes that while the system is improving, it is not matching, nor keeping up with, the performance of other countries. It says that “our school system performs well below its potential and can improve significantly”.

The White Paper outlines wide-ranging and significant strategies that will be taken to deliver the required improvement. For example, there is a commitment to:

• free teachers from constraint, ”helping them to learn from one another and from proven best practice, rather than ceaselessly directing them to follow centralised Government initiatives.”
• free schools from external control and “hold them effectively to account for the results they achieve”
• reform teacher training by increasing the time spent in classrooms, focussed on core skills
• develop a network of “Teaching Schools” to lead teacher and headteacher training
• “Sharply reduce the bureaucratic burden on schools, cutting away unnecessary duties, processes, guidance and requirements, so that schools are free to focus on doing what is right for the children and young people in their care.” 
• Increase teacher authority to search pupils, issue same day detentions and use “reasonable force where necessary”
• review the National curriculum to reduce prescription and allow schools to decide how to teach
• ensure that exam standards meet the highest international standards
• raise the age of participation in education and training to 18 by 2015
• help every school who wishes to enjoy greater freedom to achieve Academy status, to support schools as “autonomous institutions collaborating with each other on terms set by teachers, not bureaucrats”
• reform OFSTED inspection, “so that inspectors spend more time in the classroom and focus on key issues of educational effectiveness, rather than the long list of issues they are currently required to consider.”
• end the current centralised target-setting process, increase the number of head teachers of excellent schools committed to supporting other schools – and develop Teaching Schools to make sure that every school has access to highly effective professional development support.
• Radically reform the funding model to make it more transparent, fairer and progressive

Lots of interesting ideas to discuss in our staffrooms!

Teach First Ofsted Report Summary FINAL26132_1375[1]

Attached you will find a summary of the OFSTED report into Teach First in England.

In the report Ofsted reported that “Teach First is very successful in meeting its commitment to address educational disadvantage”. It describes Teach First participants as “exceptional” with many on their way to being inspirational teachers in their first year. The training they receive was found to be “consistently high quality” while the leadership and management of the organisation was “very strong”. Ofsted highlights the way Teach First participants work effectively in collaboration with other colleagues and teachers in their schools.The report also notes that Teach First’s retention is “exceptionally high” and “significantly above the national average”, while noting it recruits a “diverse cohort with a high proportion nationally of participants from a wide range of minority ethnic backgrounds”.

Currently Teach First has no base in Scotland, although I understand they are in negotiation with a Scottish University to seek a programme which would allow registration for those teachers who have completed their training on the programme. Regardless of the outcome of this, it is worth considering those elements which seem to have been most successful, particularly in relation to the Donaldson Report and to our national purpose to improve attainment for children and young people in disadvantaged communities.

Recently a few members of the CPD team visited the Teacher Development Agency in Birmingham. We were invited by John Westwell who heads up one of the Directorates in the TDA following a visit he and colleagues made to Edinburgh earlier in the year. We were keen to learn more about the work of the agency, and to explore any potential for shared activity or learning.  A fuller report of what we learned will follow later, but we were particularly interested in the National Framework for Mentoring and Coaching which was first published by CUREE (Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education) in 2005,  as part of the DfES’s CPD strategy. The Framework offers some principles of mentoring and coaching, some core concepts, describes skills for coaching and mentoring and offers a “non-prescriptive” comparison between coaching and mentoring.

I am aware that there is a lot of interest in coaching and mentoring in relation to CPD, and there are some useful articles and case studies on this site. Well worth a read!

Carpe Diem School in Yuma, Arizona is one of a new type of “Bricks and Clicks” school. In this article in the Harvard Education Letter, Brigid Schulte describes a very different educational experience on offer to students. They are offered a combination of the best face-to-face teaching and cutting-edge online curriculum. Results are impressive with the school being designated as “highly performing”.

The hybrids began to develop in the States after the US Department of Education released a meta-analysis of on-line learning that seemed to confirm that a blend of face-to-face teacher time and on-line curriculum produced better outcomes than either strategy on its own.

Also worth checking out is the Top Ten Web Tools for Education by Dave Saltman – “In the quest to work smarter, not harder, teachers are flocking to an ever-expanding galaxy of web-based tools for help with everything from classroom manage- ment to classroom discussions . . . . “

in 1978, I became part of the exciting educational innovation that was Wester Hailes Education Centre. Along with many other colleagues, I committed myself to the concept of community schooling as a way to redress social and economic injustice. We were young, passionate and bursting with ideas and energy.

One of my new colleagues was Ian Smith, and from our first meeting he prompted me to think in new ways about education, learning and the responsibility of teachers to change society. For me he was a key thinker who had a huge impact on my thinking, and of course, he was great fun to work with.

We parted company as colleagues after just a few short years, and he went on to influence a much wider range of people, and to have a much greater impact on ideas of learning and teaching than had been possible as a class teacher.

At various points, we reconnected. His unrelenting focus on good learning and what it looked liked, was a touchstone for many of us who continued to work in schools in areas of poverty. He was always generous with his knowledge, skills and friendship.

I met Ian last year at an event in Orkney and he was still firing on all cylinders – his passion for learning undimmed. Being with him, talking to him, reminded me – as ever – of the essential importance of education and teachers. I will miss his energy, insights, learning and essential humanity.

On behalf of the CPD Team I extend our deepest sympathy to Ian’s family and colleagues.

I was delighted to be invited to talk to Gaelic colleagues at the national conference in Inverness. Here are the challenges Mary MacMillan and I set.

Seo na dùbhlain a gheall mi fhèin agus Con dhuibh aig “An t- Alltan 2010”. 

• Gheibh sibh an taisbeanadh agus ceangalaichean aig http://bit.ly/cpdlinks
• Tadhail air an duilleig seo air buidheann Glow An t-Alltan 2010 airson:
  • pàirt a ghabhail ann an CPDMeet Gàidhlig
  • aon  buidheann/neach ainmeachadh a b’urrainn CPD a’ tabhainn.  Cuiridh sinne fios thuca gus an tèid an ainm air CPDFind. 
  • aon rud a cho-roinn.
  • beagan innse mu do dheidhinn fhèin agus do dhealbh a chur suas!

Mòran taing agus tha sinn an dòchas cluinntinn bhuaibh agus coimhearsneachd air-loidhne a leudachadh.

Màiri