CPD Team

Each member of the National CPD Team has committed to sharing 5 ‘things’ about their SLF experience on the CPDCentral professional community on Glow. We would love you to join us!

You don’t have to share 5 items, just one will do. Why is it called I-share? Because we ask you to share an intention, an issue, an idea, an insight or an item of interesting practice, all beginning with ‘I’.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to the I-share form here

2. You may have to enter your Glow username and password

3. Complete the details and attach stuff if you like

4. Use the hashtag #slf10 in the keywords section please

5. You can see the latest shared items in the Share Section of CPDCentral

Thanks

PS Loads of colleagues have already added themselves to the About Us section, so while you’re on why not introduce yourself with a wee photo?

Scottish Government Summer School on School Leadership ran from 4^th- 6^th August and was attended by teams of officers and school-based colleagues from 26 authorities. Several universities and other partners of the CPD Team were also represented. The school addressed issues of system-wide change in the context of CfE, and will be followed up by a series of recall days in November.

It was an intense and invigorating experience, and I believe we achieved our aim of offering new insights and significant challenge to current practice. Well it worked for me! 

Part of our commitment is to continue the conversation online and on Glow in the Summer School on Glow community. Membership is open to all who have attended Summer Schools in the past and their invited guests. If you want to know more, please drop Susan a line (s.lafferty@ltscotland.org.uk)

I am delighted to tell you that the CPD Team and partners are continuing their full programme of CPDMeets (free webconferences on Glow).

The season kicks off with the subject of professional learning communities. Fearghal Kelly will talk about “Subject learning communities” which is East Lothian’s take on professional collaboration.  You can register for Fearghal’s CPDMeet on Glow

You can’t find out more about the CPDMeet programme here.

As previewed before the summer break (The Summer School on Glow), the CPD Team intend to ‘+glow’ the Leadership Summer School to enhance the event and improve its impact. This will provide benefits for both attendees to the Glasgow event and those who come along on Glow

There will be 3 outputs of this work.

1. An online community to share resources, host discussion points and help with evaluation of impact
2. A series of CPDMeets (live video streaming from the event). These will feature sessions led by Mick Waters, David Hopkins and David Mongon.  
3. A series of CPDShorts. These will recordings of the CPDMeets with appropriate reflection / discussion points

Please feel free to express an interest in this unique event on Glowand you will be contacted with more details shortly. 

• More details on the CPDFind opportunity – The Summer School on Glow
• You can see highlights from the previous 3 Summer Schools on the Summer School website

The Scottish Government’s Summer School on Educational Leadership is now in its 4^th year.

From August 4^th to 6^th of this year, teams from local authorities and national organisations will be addressing the issue of System-wide change in the context of Curriculum for Excellence.

 Participating teams will be supported, not to say challenged, by radical thinkers and doers in the area of leadership:

• John Seddon of Vanguard, who help organisations change from ‘command and control’ to ‘systems-thinking’ leadership
• Mick Waters of the Curriculum Foundation. This not-for-profit organisation’s starting point is the conviction that there is a universal core at the heart of every successful curriculum
• David Jackson and Denis Mongon of the Innovations Unit, a not-for-profit organisation who support the strategic leadership of change
• David Hopkins of Institute of Education, University of London

The National CPD Team will be opening up parts of the 3-day event on Glow using Glowmeet and the CPDLead professional community on Glow. Please feel free to express an interest in this unique event on Glow.

You will be contacted with more details in July. 

• More details on the CPDFind opportunity – The Summer School on Glow
• You can see highlights from the previous 3 Summer Schools on the Summer School website

This post is from Jane Malcolm, The Princess Royal Trust for Carers, who is also a member of our CPDStepin professional community

The Princess Royal Trust for Carers is developing an online Identification Toolkit for Young Carers in Primary Schools in Scotland. The toolkit will help schools to identify and support young carers by providing a variety of resource materials and a framework for education staff to support young carers that encourages collaboration with Young Carers Services.

The aim of the toolkit is to allow:

• younger young carers to feel more comfortable about their caring role because they have been identified and are receiving support.
• young carers to feel less isolated because they realise that other children and young people have caring roles.
• young carers will be aware of support available to them.
• younger carers to feel less stigmatised because of their caring role and feel more comfortable about asking for help.
• education staff to be more skilled in recognising and supporting young carers.

What resources do you think the toolkit needs? Have your say! Browse the Young Carers Toolkit, complete the online survey, add your comments and resources.

The letters of invitation for this year’s summer school have now been sent out by the Scottish Government to directors and other stakeholders. The theme will be Achieving System-wide Change in the Context of Curriculum for Excellence.

The school will focus on the challenges involved in the implementation of Curriculum for Excellence and will support innovative and creative thinking around leadership issues, as well as practical “hands-on” approaches that can be applied across schools and authorities. The Goverment are also keen to capture learning and practical developments that have arisen from previous Summer Schools.

Each authority has been invited to send a team of three, with the possibility of “bidding” for extra places if wished.

Although the format will be quite different this year, you can expect the usual high quality discussion, debate, fun and new learning.

A wee while back at a South Lanarkshire CPD event hosted by Andrea Reid, I was lucky enough to see Caroline Gibson in action. Caroline spent many weeks over the summers of 2007, 2008 and 2009 in Malawi helping teachers and students, all on her own time and partly funded by her too.

I was delighted then when she agreed to be captured for a CPDShort. Here she talks to Anne McGhee (an associate of the National CPD Team) about her three educational visits to Malawi and her CPD plans for the future.

Caroline has also kindly agreed to answer questions on the Glow page for this CPDShort

You can find out more about Caroline on her blog and follow her on Twitter @carolinegibson

… join the CPDShort on this topic … 

There has been some recent discussion about the usability of Glow. You may have noticed the recent changes in Glow’s interface at national level (see the National Site) or may have been following Andrew Brown’s initiated ‘Glowbetter’ work. While navigation through Glow might be a bit daunting, one of its saving graces for me has always been its ‘hyperlinkability’. It means if you put a resource on Glow, you can copy the shortcut and publish that shortcut anywhere you like, ie add a bit of Glow, or +glow it!

What does this mean? For CPD, +glow usually means ‘now with added collegiality!’. For example, I might recommend a CPD thought-piece (eg Temple Grandin’s TED TV talk – The World needs all kinds of minds). The problem with this approach is it’s an open loop – there is no feedback. I have no idea who follows the link, or what they think about it, or what one thing might they change in their practice as a result of watching and reflecting on the video. But more importantly, numerous colleagues from all over Scotland may be accessing the same video and not realising they have something in common, or know of better examples, or have CPD resources to support teachers of autistic students and so on.

I like the analogy of building escalators not just stairs. By putting that same video onto Glow and asking colleagues to ‘sign up’ you turn a stair into an escalator. Participants get to see the video and also get an instant snapshot of interested colleagues from around Scotland. They can start (or contribute to) a discussion and share practice collegiately.

Try the Temple Grandin +glow version by following the link from CPDFind. Of course, you will need a Glow password for this version.

We have been developing these +glow CPDShort thought-pieces since the turn of the year. A thought-piece doesn’t need to be a video. It could be a discussion paper, an example of student work, a vox pop, results of a survey, etc.

Furthermore, +glow doesn’t just stop at thought-pieces. In future posts I will look at how colleagues +glow lots of different types of CPD; newsletters, face to face events, skills training and more.

Go on, if you are on Glow, start building escalators instead of stairs. You rarely see an escalator marked ‘Out of Order’.  The worst that can happen when you build an escalator is that folk use it as a stair.

So, +glow those thought-pieces and send me a link!

image courtesy of victoriapeckham on Flickr