CPD Team

I joined 1799 others last week to take part in the biggest leadership conference in the world. It felt a wee bit like the Scottish Learning Festival with presentations, workshops, exhibitors’ village, etc.

 I particularly enjoyed Sandra Stein of the New York City Leadership Academy which has a very successful “principal” development programme that includes problem-based real-life simulations, Richard Olivier, son of Laurence, who deconstructed the lack of ethical leadership displayed by Macbeth, Mick Watters formerly of the Qualifications and Curriculum authority in England, who I remember seeing at the Dundee/Angus leadership conference a couple of years ago and Steve Munby who is the CE of NCSL (and who will be coming up to the Summer school).

Lots more information, video links (check out the overview of Day 3 for some great speakers) and resources on the website.

If you are an educational leader (aspiring or otherwise) you will be interested in the latest provider to CPDFind.  The National College for School Leadership (NCSL) website has a wealth of online leadership opportunities and has kindly given LTScotland and the CPD Team permission to highlight some of them through a partnership provider on CPDFind.

My own particular favourite, 50 lessons!

All these opportunities are in the public domain already but we will be featuring more soon that are only available through the NCSL Learning Gateway and explaining how Scottish teachers can access them.

I spent today with Aidan Melling of NCSL  (the National College for School Leadership) at their very impressive Nottingham centre. The reason for getting together was sharing where we are with online CPD.

NCSL has an impressive online CPD pedigree going back to the Talking Heads online community. Their website (www.ncsl.org.uk) gets 100,000 plus visitors per month and hosts a variety of CPD and leadership resources, tools and programmes. Much of it is on public view but some of it is only available if you are subscribed to one of their own programmes.

Available to all (follow the links and see if you are as impressed as I am!)

Information on their blended programmes for:

• Mid-level leaders, aspiring, new and experienced headteachers and school business managers
• An impressive research publications area featuring works by a wide variety of experts (some of them weel-kent in Scotland like Alma Harris!)
• Stand-alone sets of resources on subjects like succession planning, leadership where Every Child Matters, on safer recruitment and a smashing e-learning facilitation toolkit (this one is particularly timely for all of us planning professional communities on Glow!)

Other resources made available through NCSL Learning Gateway to registered users are equally interesting, including:

• a 360 degree diagnostic tool which guides participants to tailor NCSL programmes appropriately
• a Virtual School where you get to make leadership decisions (or not!) and see their effects
• Talk2Learn (a Talking Heads type forum but no longer restricted to just head teachers)
• a Leadership Library with a wide range of resources from Harvard Business School and Ashridge Virtual Learning resource centre

As with the visit to the Highland Council, I intend to make sure at least some of these resources are captured on CPDFind.

In return, I shared with Aidan our work in Scotland on CPDScotland,  CPDFind,  CPDReflect and Glow.