CPD Team

With the forthcoming changes to Glow which we will know more about in the coming months, we thought it might be helpful if we outline a few of the features on our CPD communities thus far. Although we don’t know as yet what Glow will look like in the new session, we can share here some of the key learning points from our work on CPD communities so far.

Note to illustrate these points we make several links to Glow communities below.

Learning point 1 – Share once, see many

We started a couple of years ago with CPDCentral –  a hub where you could find other educators and share your ideas and practice?

From CPDCentral, you could then find links to CPD communities that might interest you, eg CPD leaders and Health & Wellbeing. The problem we hit quite quickly was that if you had the same thing to share, or say, in more than one community, you had to add it several times.

So we flattened the hierarchy for sharing and did away with many of the sub-groups. You’ll see now that CPDCentral has spawned a lot of mini-communities, and although they are nested within CPDCentral, they have their own identity and hashtag. The beauty of this system is that you can share and interact in more than one community at a time.

So, to take the example, CPDLead is the online community for leaders and co-ordinators of CPD. A member of CPDLead sharing some CPD practice on Health & Wellbeing can tag the item with #cpdlead and #hwb and share simultaneously across both communities.

Many other CPDCentral communities operate in this way: Outdoor Learning; CPD Consolarium; Gaelic; CPDStepin; Global Citizenship to name but a few.

The icons for these communities are shown here.

In addition, as an individual educator you can also see all your own community activities to date on the CPDMe page  This might come in handy at PRD time!

In the new Glow, we would like to see this Share once, see many idea extended to the CPD work done by individuals, establishments, local authorities and national organisations.

Examples:

• the option to share items directly with colleagues from your online profile without double entry. A piece of evidence of impact could be shared in the profile, but also appear as part of a school contribution to LA improvement planning and a contribution to a CPD community
• you profile yourself once and those details are made available to all your school, authority and national communities
• a local authority CPD community can share a learning and teaching policy (and with the judicious use of tags) make it available to all its own educators but also to supply teachers, probationer teachers, leaders throughout Scotland as it sees fit

In the next post, Con Morris and I will be reflecting on our next (and related!) learning point – Learn locally, share nationally

Your comments would be very much appreciated below!

The Learning Rounds report provides a comprehensive overview of the range of engagement which the CPD Team, Education Scotland has enjoyed with establishments, schools and local authorities. The team is very appreciative of the opportunities to colloborate with colleagues as the model has evolved across a range of settings.

We are also very aware that Learning Rounds is featuring in self evaluation and professional development activities across the country and would be delighted if other experiences could be shared on the Learning Rounds Community on Glow. If you want to join this community, contact Ruth Johnston on cpdanswers@educationscotland.gov.uk.

GTC Scotland has launched a consultation on a proposed scheme for Professional Update.

You can view a position paper on the GTCS website along with the consultation which will run from Wednesday 1 February to Wednesday 7 March 2012. The scheme is a direct consequence of the implementation of Teaching Scotland’s Future.

The key purposes of a system of Professional Update for teachers are defined as follows:

• To maintain and improve the quality of our teachers and to enhance the impact that they have on pupils’ learning
• To support, maintain and enhance teachers’ continued professionalism, and the reputation of the teaching profession.

The results of this consultation will have a big say in the future of PRD, the way we evidence impact of CPD on learning and the nature of the online profile (also a TSF recommendation), please get involved!

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.

Report of a review of teacher education in Scotland

The CPD team welcome the publication of “Teaching Scotland’s Future” with its clear case for a high priority to be given to teacher quality and leadership. We are delighted to see lots of themes that build on current CPD Network concerns and activities.  There are many relevant references, for example:

• recommendation 33 talks about the “shift from set-piece events to more local, team-based approaches which centre around self evaluation and professional collaboration”;
• recommendation 34 addresses the need to consider the likely impact of CPD on pupils;
• recommendation 40 is about on-line CPD as “part of the blended, tailored approach for all teachers”.
• And many more . . .

We are delighted that the report recommends that our work on CPDFind should be developed (see recommendation 41), and that PRD emerges as a key tool to improve school and teacher effectiveness.

However the Report describes many challenges in the “ambitious and far-reaching  agenda” set by the Report, and success will require new partnerships, creative solutions and new ways of working for many of us involved in all aspects of teacher education. We look forward to contributing to this agenda.

Following on from the very well received “Learning from each other” event, the team has been consulting with colleagues from a range of agencies and stakeholders on the potential of extending the Learning Rounds model to involve partners in  collegiate CPD activity. The focus would be to consider how best to develop partnership working to deliver on the expectations within CfE, ASL,GIR and MCMC. As always the observations will take place within a learning environment which could be early years, special or mainstream and the principles which underpin the LR approach would equally apply.

The team is hosting a seminar on the 19th January which will explore the potential of the model with a view to trialling it during January and February of next year.

If this is of interest to you we would love to have you on board ! Please get in touch margaret0@cosla.gov.uk

http://bit.ly/aq12A6

Just published by the Universities of Stirling and Glasgow:  Report of a Pilot Study into Means of Investigating the Impact of Accomplished Teaching on Pupils’ Learning in the Context of the Chartered Teacher Initiative in Scotland.

This is the report that was written about 18 months ago by a group of CPD managers led by Gillian Brydson of Dumfries and Galloway and Jim Keegans of the team. It was shared with the network at the time, but I then couldn’t find it in the archive so have republished it.

As ever, keen to hear any comments!

To study the report:

• download the PDF version Evaluation of CPD Impact
• or select the full-screen option in the reader below

Happy reading!

Tags: CPD network, impact
Categories: CPD network, Impact of CPD, Leadership