Blog feedEducation Service Managers (ESMs) and Glow
July 9th, 2008The Glow team have been focused on Mentor Training for teachers but some Local Authorities have moved on and are also looking at ways to provide support for their Education Service Managers.
Quality Improvement Officers very quickly realise the potential of Glow to take forward school planning and a Curriculum for Excellence. I have two recent examples of this. Firstly, I was asked to show the Glow portal and demonstrate Glow Meet in action at an ESM meeting in Perth and Kinross. Stuart Oliphant joined the meeting via Glow Meet from Optima. At the meeting I was asked what evidence there was to assess the impact of Glow on teaching and learning. It is a tough question and one that ESMs will ultimately answer for themselves as they begin to measure the progress of Glow with CfE in schools. I left the meeting pondering the question of how QIOs can begin to measure enhanced learning with Glow.
Secondly, I was recently asked by Aberdeen City to deliver training on Glow for fourteen ESMs. It was a critical day because of the increased demand in Aberdeen for Glow to deliver cost benefits for education services. The training focused on Glow tools and Glow Groups. I enjoyed showing how to design and create a Glow Group for Education Service Managers. All the participants designed very purposeful and role specific Glow Groups and in the afternoon our Key Contact took time for consultation with these managers about how Aberdeen City can get the best from Glow. The idea of a QIOs National Glow Group was put forward and I suggested this may be a question for the Key Contacts Glow group discussion page but it is a good idea - QIOs are well placed to influence teaching and learning with Glow and to collect examples of emerging practice.
At the end of the day we took time to answer the question I had been previously asked in Perth and Kinross - how can we measure the impact of Glow? After a session discussing the criteria that may be needed for measuring this impact, they left with some good ideas, and more questions about HGIOs 3, CfE, Uptake and Usage and their role in taking Glow forward.
I would like to see more teachers writing confidently about action research. As for quantitative versus qualitative approaches in educational research, I have some reservations about an overly quantitative approach. We should be wary of purely quantitative evidence and more so in educational research? As a ‘Social Scientist’, I think that we are tempted to measure what is easy to quantify rather than what is most valuable to teachers or learners. Having said that we need good evidence, like yours, of integrating Glow into teaching and learning and we need more teachers like you to reflect on their use of Glow in developing new approaches to effective teaching and learning in Scottish schools…..and blog about it!
The other problem I see with relying on qualitative measures is that they do tend to be quite subjective, varying from observer to observer. Having said this, my research collaboration over the next year will focus on the nature of the raised attainment due to use of GLOW, by classroom observation, coding, and thematic analysis of lesson transcripts, and so is perhaps a little more qualitative, albeit on the qualitative aspects that drive the quantitative measurements.