CPD Team

Margaret Alcorn and I had the real privilege of sharing the work of the CPD team with a range of colleagues from Norway recently. We are both grateful to the GTCS for their kind offer to take part in the international visit. You can see my bit of the presentation here.

Even though Glow goes from strength to strength, access is currently limited to:

• pupils and staff in public sector educational establishments
• key national bodies such as SQA and HMIE
• selected guests both nationally and locally

The Glow team is looking to establish which organisations involved in Scottish Education might also be entitled to be part of the Glow community. As a rule of thumb, if you, or your organisation, has taken part in activities in a Scottish school, then you may be entitled to be on our ‘virtual school premises’, ie Glow.

Please contact the team at glowadmin@ltscotland.org.uk if you wish to express an initial interest

I met with CPD colleagues from Orkney Islands Council on Monday to look at ways that CPDFind can be used to promote local CPD. Luckily, I had the excellent work of Andrew Jones and Aberdeen City Council to draw upon. I worked with Carol McManus (CPD manager) and some of her team Alison, Kelly and Rachel, ably assisted by Graham Bevan, a weel-kent figure in both CPD and ICT networks. The end-result was we came up with a plan for a low-cost (ie free!), reasonably efficient advertising and booking system using a combination of CPDFind and Microsoft Outlook. Carol and her team are now in the process of testing it before its possible use for the Orkney Learning Festival in October.

As a result a group of CPD network colleagues are getting together to take this approach further in Aberdeen on the 25th June. If you are interested in the detail of this or joining us, just drop me a line. I’m not that hard to find!

Jeff from Moffat Academy (head teacher of the year, no less!) started his talk with his early (lack of) CPD tales back in the ROSLA day (Raising of School Leaving Age for you youngsters!) These days convinced Jeff that a head teacher should take charge of CPD in his/her school. Points raised are covered in his presentation above but here are my highlights:

• concern about CPD being a soft target
• colleagues learning from each other
• the race for quality has no finish line
• create a climate of openness and regular consultation
• a culture of self-evaluation
• shared understanding of values, principles and purposes of CfE
• Ensure our staff are successful, confident, responsible, effective achieved by 3 E’s
  • enlightenment through quality CPD
  • embed practice in the classroom
  • empower pupils in their learning
• use the tools we have, HMIE, LTS material, Glow, ICT websites, CPD from children etc

As part of the work for the National CPD Conference in 2009, participants were asked to contribute CPD words beginning with ‘C’. Here are some of them and associated images from Flickr Creative Commons

This is a guest post from colleagues at HMIE

 ‘Learning Together: Opening up Learning’ draws together themes, features and characteristics of effective improvement through self-evaluation, and descriptions of good practice. It is a reference point for teachers who are working together to improve the impact of their work and to plan for the changes which will be necessary as Curriculum for Excellence is adopted.

It can be used alongside the many examples of good practice published at www.journeytoexcellence.org.uk, the quality indicators and illustrations described in ‘How good is our school?’, ‘The Child at the Centre’, and ‘How good is our community learning and development?’, and the series of self-evaluation guides and portraits published at www.hmie.gov.uk.

HMIE publication: Learning Together: Opening up learning