CPD Team

Many of you will remember with pleasure the visit of Dr Avis Glaze to Scotland a few years ago. Many more Scottish educators have had the privilege and pleasure of visiting Avis in Ontario as part of the SCIPD programme.

A highly respected leader and mentor to many Ontario educators, Avis has worked in several school districts, both rural and urban, and has been a supervisory officer and director of education in both public and catholic school boards. She knows education systems across the world firsthand and has been asked to work with educators in many countries, including, of course, here in Scotland.

The CPD Team were delighted when Avis agreed to act as a critical friend to the team, particularly in relation to the Leadership Framework that we are developing with our network partners.

She contacted us recently to say:

“Scotland’s leadership development model represents innovation at its best. It is current, creative and progressive in its approach. It is research-informed. It appeals to all domains of learning and achieves its strategic intentions by challenging minds, inspiring hearts, honing and acquiring new skills and stimulating action. It assumes an inside-out approach, beginning, as great thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle would, with the importance of self awareness and knowledge. It includes values, personal attributes and commitments. This Framework is truly comprehensive.

I commend the work of the National Continuing Professional Development (CPD) team for its fidelity to research, respect for the promising practices that exists in the field and its efforts to ensure international comparability for their model.

Well done! I am impressed! With such assiduous attention to deep implementation, the school system will continue to improve as you build upon current successes and push the boundaries for higher levels of student achievement. I hope there will be opportunities for us to work together as we continue in our efforts to close the achievement gap and ensure that schools deliver on their promise to educate all children successfully.

Within today’s global economy, and with international efforts to improve school systems, Scottish children deserve no less.

Congratulations!”

Needless to say we are delighted with this very positive endorsement and look forward to continuing to learn from this inspirational thinker and leader.

Lots of you will remember the funding that Scottish Government provided to every local authority in 2006/2007 to support a range of coaching and mentoring projects. Given the renewed interest in this topic, as discussed at the recent CPD Network meeting, I thought it might be helpful to remind you of the outcomes from this piece of work. Below you will find the final report which contains a large number of case studies reflecting the wide range of activity that was supported by this funding.

Following on from the seminar on the potential of the Learning Rounds in an inter-agency context the team has been engaging with Kersland School in Renfrewshire and Barshare Primary school in East Ayrshire to explore the potential of the model. Kersland is an all through  special school which caters for children  and young people with complex  additional support needs and Barshare Primary has three integrated additional support needs classes. In each situation there is involvement from a range of agencies . In Kersland the Learning Round focus is on the delivery of the school policy on communication and in Barshare on practice in support of inclusion. In both schools the LR observation teams include teachers, support staff, educational psychologists and speech and language therapists.

Initial feedback from colleagues is very positive in terms both of individual CPD and the potential for enhancing collegiate understanding and response to shared “next steps”. The initiatives in both schools will continue for the remainder of the session and the National CPD team will publish a final report on the Learning Rounds on line community on GLOW.

As a result of our work with local authorites on PRD processes and procedures, we’ve been giving a lot of thought to the potential of PRD as not only a mechanism for professional development, but also a lever for system change. This diagram is intended to reflect some of our thinking on the issue.
The PRD meeting feeds out of, and back into, the professional learning continuum, which is made up of all the elements you can see along the bottom. It starts with self-evaluation based on any of the themes in the middle of the cycle,then moves into a coaching conversation, which results in a CPD plan which then feeds back into the professional learning continuum. Intervening coaching conversations support progress along the learning continuum, and lead into the next cycle.
As a model, this is aspirational, certainly. But is it useful? Is it worth aspiring to?

At two recent CPD days with colleagues from a special school and a specialist service, the CPD team had the opportunity to explore an approach to considering the challenges of distributed leadership within the context of multi-partnership working.

The focus of the days was on personal and collegiate reflection on a shared understanding of the meaning and relevance of distributed leadership and the related professional development profile and reponses necessary to ensure that the service priorities are delivered. The implications for PRD were also considered.

The approach and an exemplar of the outcomes of the discussions will be available on CPD Find in early 2011.

As part of the PRD initiative the team has been looking at the 2002 document on Professional Review and Development. It is interesting to note that inspite of the fact that it predates Curriculum for Excellence by a number of years and it doesn’t articulate the importance of PRD and teacher professional learning specifically in relation to Curriculum for Excellence, it remains entirely relevant and valid for today’s purposes.

In the paper below, written in 2006, I gave my view of the professional development implications which might arise from the development of curriculum for excellence. The paper outlines five essential elements that are present in excellent teaching. Although described separately, they are of course closely linked and interdependent. Taken together, I believe, they describe a model for developing teachers for excellence.

The paper is now four years old, but much of the argument is still relevant and, I hope, helpful in developing good models of teacher CPD.

This is the final report from the survey of leadership development within the local authorities that the team completed in May 2010. The findings in this survey have continued to shape and influence much of our work on leadership since we initially published this report.

It is fair to say that the noticeboards at Stirling Management Centre on Thursday 18th and Friday 19th November weren’t displaying their usual lists of meetings. Yes, Scotlands’ Colleges were there,  NAR people were there along with a few more seasoned regulars but one event stood out from the others:  Hoo tae luik guid glaikit. This was a two day creative hothouse to give CPD leaders and managers from local authorities the opportunity to  “makeover” their online communities, with the help of the National CPD team and Glow development officers.

Con Morris orchestrated the session, outlining in his introduction the drivers behind the “Glaikit” concept: not just tightening purse-strings but also the massive potential there is in Glow as learning and sharing platform, and how having it brings a  responsibility to use it for sharing at every level especially nationally.

Anna Rossvoll from Aberdeenshire gave a local authority perspective on Glow communities which then lead into groups establishing their priorities and principles for online communities , before getting down to some practical work, expertly supported by the Glow development officers, Katie Barrowman, Sarah Burton, Alan Hamilton,Charlie Love, and of course each other!

As the day evolved, a really useful “makeover sample book” started filling up with useful short “how – to guides”  on using web parts in Glow. A thought-provoking discussion on levels of participation online – the #Glaikit Lurkers Debate began to  probe our understandings and beliefs on communities, sharing, participation and responsibility( collegiality), and spilled over into Twitter, where some people were following our hashtag with interest and joined the debate.

Progress was shared via the trusted puggy machine at the end of Friday afternoon, and before departure people were invited to share their intentions for their communities in the dedicated glaikit i-share area, which will be revisited.

Thanks to CPD Managers at local authority level for returning the leadership survey. Interesting now for the National CPD team to be looking at models of leadership development within schools. Really worthwhile to hear of interesting initiatives on this to support our own observations.