CPD Team

This will be my last blog post as National CPD Coordinator as I leave Education Scotland at the end of the month.

A lot has changed since I was appointed in May of 2004 with a very open remit to make things happen in the world of CPD. As I look back there are so many highlights and friendships, so much wisdom and fun. Here are some of my personal best bits from the work of a wonderfully dedicated and talented team :

The establishment of the National CPD Network as a learning community, sharing, challenging, learning together – making sure that the real business of CPD – teachers making a difference for children and young people – has stayed at the front of the agenda.

The International Thought-Leaders Programme
Finding the best practice in CPD and leadership internationally and bringing this to Scotland. Ellen Moir, Richard Elmore, Janet Gless, Terry Dozier – so many great thinkers have helped shape our learning

The Flexible Route to Headship
From a single line in the Ambitious Excellent Schools agenda of 2004 (“We will establish new routes to achieve the Standard for Headship, during 2006, to provide choice and alternatives to the Scottish Qualification for Headship”) to the excitement of the launch of cohort 6 in May of this year.

The International Summer Schools on School Leadership
Inspiration, innovation, creativity – learning with and from the world’s best over three great years.

CPD and On-Line Learning
Glow meeting, tweeting, blogging, CPDFind, CPDShorts and building community – this is a journey that has only just begun.

Also PRD, Learning Rounds, Coaching and Mentoring, Strategic Leaders Development Programme, CPD for Educational Leaders, study visits, thought-pieces, occasional papers, Building Windmills – the list goes on.

So thanks to all past and present members of the National CPD Network – you have been our bedrock, our inspiration, our lodestar and our conscience.

Good luck to Laura McAllister and Kate Paton, who will be working with Education Scotland colleagues to carry the flag forward.

And a very special thanks to all the members of the National CPD Team over the last eight years:
Angus MacDonald, Marjory Holmes, Fiona Taylor, John Daffurn, Con Morris, Kat Healey, Jim Keegans, Ruth Johnston, Catriona Oates, Sheila Smith, Margaret Orr

Please keep in touch – I can’t wait to find out what I’m going to do next!

Margaret

margaret_alcorn@yahoo.com

At last year’s Scottish Learning Festival Sir John Jones became the first ever keynote speaker to get a spontaneous standing ovation.

And at last week’s Edinburgh Learning Festival (ELF!) he once again moved, challenged, amused and re-energised a large group of senior educational leaders.

His theme was the need for inspirational teaching and quality leadership to become the norm in every Scottish school. He spoke of our calling as educators, and the need for each of us to develop and show passion, wisdom and – most importantly – righteous indignation at the educational experience of many of our children and young people. These three elements need to be glued together in the relentless pursuit of excellence and in the context of a culture of UPR – unconditional positive regard for every child.

On a personal note he took me right back to my days running the Returning to Teaching programme in Edinburgh where this quote by Haim Ginott used to form the core philosophy of the sessions on positive behaviour:

“I’ve come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de-humanized.”

In the second part of his address Sir John turned his attention to the learning experience of children. He quoted Ken Robinson who says we are trying to prepare our children for the future by repeating what we did in the past. He challenged us to consider whether our schools are more than centres of standardisation and conformity, where learners play the “Let’s guess what is in the teacher’s head” game, and where teachers forget to teach the love of learning in order to focus on content.

For success our young people need to be helped to move from logical, linear thinking to inventive, empathetic, conceptual thinking as described by Daniel Pink. Technology changes everything, he believes, by bringing infinite choice.

Sir John argued that the most successful systems such as Finland and Singapore had a new focus on curiosity, problem-solving, collaboration, initiative, personal responsibility, etc and had moved to a belief that to teach less was to learn more.

Mick Waters, who many of you will remember from the Selmas conference this year, says that to achieve deep learning, we need high engagement, and our lessons need to be relevant, interesting, and ideally naughty and with a giggle.

As educators we need to reconnect with our moral purpose – our righteous indignation – to deliver opportunities regardless of poverty, family, post code, and to remember that good schooling doesn’t just make the difference, it makes all the difference. We need to change some of the negative metaphors that describe our work, and change the script to change the picture.

Sir John challenged all of us to dare to think differently and to strive to be “Magic Weavers” in all of our schools every day. Our pupils will remember us for ever if we achieve this.

The Finnish school improvement activist Pasi Sahlberg was in fine form at a recent event in the Scottish Parliament. He had been invited to describe the strategies and policies that have taken Finland from a fairly low start in terms of educational attainment to a leading place internationally. It was interesting to hear these in the context of the Teaching Scotland’s Future report and the work of the National Partnership Group. There were lots of positive echoes, interlaced with a number of significant challenges.

Pasi Sahlberg offered three key drivers that he suggested had transformed Finnish schools:
Firstly there was a focus on equity – ensuring children were ready for learning through universal child-care and pre-school provision. The well-being of children was important, and teachers were expected to “prevent rather than repair”.
Secondly, there was a core belief that less is more. Teachers spent at least one hour a day less teaching than in Scotland, therefore releasing more time for collegiality, and he shared evidence that there were benefits in this to children’s learning. “The less time we teach, the more they learn”
Thirdly, there was a drive to build teacher professionalism. Only the best graduates were accepted on the initial teacher education programmes. This early investment meant that there was no need for close inspection.

Pasi Sahlberg then offered six lessons he felt might support Scotland in our quest for better learning for our children and young people. In summary these were:

• Collaboration not competition
• Personalisation not standardisation
• Equity not school choice
• Trust-based professionalism not test-based accountability (including inspection)
• Pedagogy not technology (well at least less technology!)
• More professionalism; less bureaucracy

Professor Donald Christie of Strathclyde University replied to these challenges, acknowledging the pressing need to address equity, and the challenge that this represents in the context of wider social issues. He endorsed the need to invest in teacher professionalism and spoke of the strengths of teacher education in both systems. The high levels of trust enjoyed by Finnish educators, linked to high expectations was a key issue as was the need to ensure that we built personalisation into our CPD programmes.

This was an enormously stimulating debate, attended by the Cabinet Secretary, and it was refreshing to hear and engage in some challenging high level discussion regarding the values and direction of travel that we need in Scotland if we are to achieve our ambitions for change and improvement.

It reminded me of the deep learning and challenge that emerged from the “Thought-Leaders Programme” that the CPD team ran on behalf of Scottish Government several years ago – the legacy of which can still be seen in changed views of coaching and mentoring, Learning Rounds, etc.

You can find out more about Pasi Sahlberg here.

This post continues our discussion on key learning points from online CPD communities on Glow. It contains links to Glow but you can also click on the images to see expanded screenshots.

Here’s a thing we have learned! We can set up community pages for local events and programmes which ‘feed’ into CPD communities at a national level.

Here are some examples of this…

When the HWB team at Education Scotland led an event for NQTs, we worked together on a mini-community for the event which, in turn, fed into the national hwb-cpd community.

South Lanarkshire has a local version of the Outdoor Learning community. It sits within the “affiliated “ Outdoor Learning community in CPDCentral, and anything shared in that community can also be shared at national level, on the same principle outlined above.

Several authorities have local communities for their CPDLeaders which sit within CPDLead, which, in turn, is part of CPDCentral. Whatever is learned locally in these communities can be shared at a national level.

All of the above examples are local versions of national CPD communities. How about if all local communities shared at a national level? National communities wouldn’t have to come first. National communities would then be amalgams / curated versions of local communities.

Examples of this too are beginning to emerge on Glow…

MLPSNet (a community for primary languages practitioners in Stirling Council) share almost all of its activity nationally through the collegiate tools on CPDCentral. There are also links to existing authority areas on Glow to allow privacy where required.

Extending your Potential is an online, early leadership programme led by Rodger Hill of Dumfries & Galloway. The eyp-cpd community, however, is built at a national level so that the sharing can be seen by all on CPDCentral.

So here’s a thought. In the next iteration of Glow, instead of building ‘national’ CPD communities why not build a partnership with colleagues from local authorities to build communities that meet their local needs? The trick would be that each of these communities also shares at a national level, and possibly international level.

So why not have Stirling Council support modern languages for primary teachers across Scotland? And why not have an early leadership area of the proposed Virtual College for School Leadership (Teaching Scotland’s Future, recommendation 50) led by Dumfries & Galloway? And a coaching community led by Shetland folk, and an NQT community led by Aberdeenshire colleagues, and so on?

In the next post we look at  Educators leading their own learning

As always, your comments will be much appreciated

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.

Get the lates news and updates from CPDLead here in the January newsletter.

If you are a leader of CPD in your setting and aren’t yet a member of CPDLead – what are you waiting for?! Have a look at our online community and sign up – it’s simple and it’s free! http://bit.ly/cpdlead3

Flexible Route to Headship Report 2011 worddocThanks to all of you who contributed to this review of the Flexible Routes to Headship Programme. And thanks to all the participants, coaches, supporters, officers who have made it so successful.
We are currently recruiting for FRH Cohort 6 and are delighted with the early interest.

This is a guest post by Jean Ward of Kirkwall Grammar School, Orkney

Jean Ward, DHT at Kirkwall Grammar School in Orkney has been making good use of our CPDShorts by creating an innovative programme of lunchtime sessions based around them.

The Glow CPDShorts – thought pieces on current issues in Scottish education – were held on four successive Wednesdays at lunchtime; all staff were invited to bring their lunch. These sessions are quick and informal – in order to make the most of time available the sessions are “flipped” with some suggested advance reading or watching.

Jean has kindly shared her programme with us. CPDShorts are freely available to all members of CPDCentral, so if you are a CPDLeader in your school, why not try them out as part of your collective CPD plan and get some lunchtime learning going on!

Wed 2 November. CPDShort 3 – Advancing Waves – what should education be about?

Presenter, John Connell

Wed 9 November. CPDShort 13 – Coaching and mentoring in the context of PRD 

Presenter – Bob Cook’s paper on GLOW and the following YouTube links:

http://bit.ly/cAGz6f http://bit.ly/tTXqR8 http://bit.ly/s0X5cV

(or just ‘search’ coaching and mentoring on YouTube for many more excellent presentations for discussion)

Wed 16 November.  CPDShort 8 – Sharing – the moral imperative

Presenter – Dean Shareski

 Wed 23 November. CPDShort 4 – Motivating all learners

Presenter – Alan McLean

POSTPONED DUE TO INTERNET GOING DOWN!

Although each meeting attracted only a small audience, it was important to those who came that they could share discussion in an informal setting. It was noticeable that most participants were from smaller departments with limited opportunity for professional dialogue.

Please get in touch if you would like more details.

Jean Ward

jean.ward@glow.orkneyschools.org.uk

The next SELMAS conference will be on 13th January 2012 in Tynecastle High School, Edinburgh.  The focus will be on how schools raise achievement and improve learning by working in partnerships.

This event will be centred on five presentations on good practice but will be enormously enhanced by the input of Professor Mick Waters and Professor Susan Deacon. The attached flyer gives the details of the content of the event.

You should also note that in these cash-strapped times this event is being offered on an exceptionally economical basis.  The delegate fee is £25 per person; £10 for current full-time students.  Places will be awarded on a first-come (with payment) first-served basis.  To make a booking contact SELMAS Secretary Alex Wood – contact details below.  Cheques should be payable to Scottish Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society.

49 Acredales
Linlithgow
West Lothian EH49 6HY

Tel: 01506 848259
Mob: 0775 989 8890

alexander.wood@blueyonder.co.uk
v1awood6@staffmail.ed.ac.uk

NO SCHOOL IS AN ISLAND promotional leaflet

Many of you will remember with pleasure the visit of Dr Avis Glaze to Scotland a few years ago. Many more Scottish educators have had the privilege and pleasure of visiting Avis in Ontario as part of the SCIPD programme.

A highly respected leader and mentor to many Ontario educators, Avis has worked in several school districts, both rural and urban, and has been a supervisory officer and director of education in both public and catholic school boards. She knows education systems across the world firsthand and has been asked to work with educators in many countries, including, of course, here in Scotland.

The CPD Team were delighted when Avis agreed to act as a critical friend to the team, particularly in relation to the Leadership Framework that we are developing with our network partners.

She contacted us recently to say:

“Scotland’s leadership development model represents innovation at its best. It is current, creative and progressive in its approach. It is research-informed. It appeals to all domains of learning and achieves its strategic intentions by challenging minds, inspiring hearts, honing and acquiring new skills and stimulating action. It assumes an inside-out approach, beginning, as great thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle would, with the importance of self awareness and knowledge. It includes values, personal attributes and commitments. This Framework is truly comprehensive.

I commend the work of the National Continuing Professional Development (CPD) team for its fidelity to research, respect for the promising practices that exists in the field and its efforts to ensure international comparability for their model.

Well done! I am impressed! With such assiduous attention to deep implementation, the school system will continue to improve as you build upon current successes and push the boundaries for higher levels of student achievement. I hope there will be opportunities for us to work together as we continue in our efforts to close the achievement gap and ensure that schools deliver on their promise to educate all children successfully.

Within today’s global economy, and with international efforts to improve school systems, Scottish children deserve no less.

Congratulations!”

Needless to say we are delighted with this very positive endorsement and look forward to continuing to learn from this inspirational thinker and leader.