CPD Team

On Wed 30^th May at 3.45pm , staff and young people from Ormiston Primary will tell us about their Learning Stories.

In Ormiston Primary School every child has a journal called a Learning Story containing photographs, video links and comments from parents, children and teaching staff. These Learning Stories have become integral to the life of learning at Ormiston Primary School and have replaced the end of term report card.

During this Glow Meet, headteacher Helen Gardyne and her pupils will share their journey of development with their Learning Stories and this will hopefully inspire you on your own journey and to reflect on the nature of reporting on children’s learning.

Sign up and join us for this inspiring CPD opportunity on Glow TV

I was very fortunate to spend a day recently with Helen Gardyne, the head teacher to work on a CPD opportunity for parental involvement and was bowled over by the work being done on this area.

The slideshow below will give you a flavour of Ormiston Primary. Press the play button to start and select More and Fullscreen if you want the cinematic experience!

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 is the fourth post in a series by the CPD Team outlining some of our thinking in preparation for the new Glow platform. As a result, a small number of the links below point to examples on Glow, so apologies in advance if you are not a Glow user!

One of the interesting discoveries in the development of CPDCentral on Glow (which is based partly on Microsoft Sharepoint) was the discovery of the ‘Me’ filter. This allowed us to create parts of CPD communities that reflect back what I have shared in that community. A good example of this is the CPDMe page on CPDCentral. The CPDMe area has a number of uses for the reflective practitioner, for example:

• keeps you on track with intentions
• records your community activities for further reflection in the PRD (professional review and development) process
• helps you find stuff that you know you have shared!

To take this a bit further, filters by ‘us’ also feature heavily in the existing CPDCentral. If I join a community, I can easily see who else has joined, shared or added intentions. Just follow the menu links on any of the communities on CPDCentral for examples of this in action (or watch the slideshow below).

Of course the definition of ‘us’ is anyone who signs up for that community. Individuals have no control over who joins them in the journey which is not necessarily a bad thing if you are a firm believer in the value of serendipitous CPD, like I am!

However, what would be really great is to add the concept of following or friending (as happens in Twitter and Facebook) to the community model on the new Glow.

In other words, if I want to see what is being shared by individuals I value, I can do so. That, combined with the ability to track keywords (eg #hwb for Health & Wellbeing) would mean the ability to create a genuinely personal, and more effective, one-stop shop for CPD.

You can read all of the posts in this series…

• Share once, see many
• Learn locally, share nationally
•  Educators leading their own learning
• This time it’s personal!

This is the third post in a series by the CPD Team outlining some of our thinking in preparation for the new Glow platform. As a result, a small number of the links below point to examples on Glow, so apologies in advance if you are not a Glow user!

Much has been written on the topic of educators being responsible for, and leading, their own CPD. Most recently I came across this blog post by Laura Varlas, an ACSD contributor in United States, who talks about how “schools in Sweden have moved from prescribed teacher training models defined by the central education ministry to teacher-designed projects focused on meeting real challenges in teachers’ own classrooms”

Of course, one of the big successes of the work of the National CPD Team in Scotland (in conjunction with SCSSA) was the development of the Learning Rounds model of CPD. In this model, educators do lead their own learning by observing each other in a non-judgemental way and discussing the learning. We are even seeing this being piloted as an initial teacher training model according to this BBC news story.

In this video, on one of our CPDLead communities on Glow, Denny the head teacher from Mossneuk Primary in South Lanarkshire explains how circumstances forced the school to look inward for its CPD and is all the better for it!

So what does this mean for an online environment like the new Glow and how might it encourage educators to take responsibility for their own learning? The answer is very probably to provide some tools and templates and then get out of the way!

There are many examples of Scottish educators taking part in DIY-CPD online through;

• reflective journals both individual and public (eg chalkface blog, Sharing in West Lothian, Don’s blog)
• organising of TeachMeets (eg LeadMeet)
• conversations and sharing of practice around educational keywords (hashtags) on Twitter (eg #ukedchat)
• CPDFind and CPDReflect
• collaborative working using online communities on CPDCentral/Glow and other means (eg Edubuzz, Pedagoo and CompEdNet)

So, here are some ideas to support the reality of educators leading their own learning on the next generation of Glow.

• Support the Scottish educators mentioned above to come together as an outward-facing and forward-facing community.
• make it easier to host TeachMeets online
• open an online, CPD Conference Centre where educators can do their own stuff with the web-conferencing tool whatever that may be (see the Conference Centre on Glow currently)
• expand the CPDRequest service to be more of a ‘swap-shop’ where educators can do deals to support each other in their learning
• start and support a CPD ‘dating agency’ for peer mentoring (there’s a nascent one on CPDStepin at the moment)
• above all, continue to promote curiosity and rigour by providing tools to encouraging online reflection and sharing.

Let’s make our professional learning visible (to borrow a phrase from John Hattie)! Please feel free to add to the ideas mentioned above, or chuck stuff at them, in the comments section!

In the last of this series of 4, we look at This time it’s personal!

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

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!

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.

CPDStepin is still going strong!  This CPD Community on Glow is for supply teachers and others who may not be able to access CPD and PRD through the usual channels. The community is facilitated by  CPD Team associates and CPD Team advisers and supported by Susan Lafferty of the National CPD Team at Education Scotland.

In the video below, Anne McGhee, CPD Team associate, chairs a discussion with CPDStepin colleagues and mentors which features the benefits from membership of the community. Enjoy!

Remember,

• If you are a supply teacher and want to join CPDStepin, then see this link here. If you don’t have a Glow username, we can help with that
• if you have mentoring or other skills that can support CPDStepin colleagues, please drop us a line at stepin@educationscotland.gov.uk

https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/CM-7980.pdf

This publication offers interesting insights into the future direction of the English school system. There is I think much to reflect on in terms of the relevance and likely impact of some of the proposals it contains.

The White Paper begins by confirming that “the first, and most important, lesson is that no education system can be better than the quality of its teachers” but notes that while the system is improving, it is not matching, nor keeping up with, the performance of other countries. It says that “our school system performs well below its potential and can improve significantly”.

The White Paper outlines wide-ranging and significant strategies that will be taken to deliver the required improvement. For example, there is a commitment to:

• free teachers from constraint, “helping them to learn from one another and from proven best practice, rather than ceaselessly directing them to follow centralised Government initiatives.”
• free schools from external control and “hold them effectively to account for the results they achieve”
• reform teacher training by increasing the time spent in classrooms, focussed on core skills
• develop a network of “Teaching Schools” to lead teacher and headteacher training
• “Sharply reduce the bureaucratic burden on schools, cutting away unnecessary duties, processes, guidance and requirements, so that schools are free to focus on doing what is right for the children and young people in their care.” 
• Increase teacher authority to search pupils, issue same day detentions and use “reasonable force where necessary”
• review the National curriculum to reduce prescription and allow schools to decide how to teach
• ensure that exam standards meet the highest international standards
• raise the age of participation in education and training to 18 by 2015
• help every school who wishes to enjoy greater freedom to achieve Academy status, to support schools as “autonomous institutions collaborating with each other on terms set by teachers, not bureaucrats”
• reform OFSTED inspection, “so that inspectors spend more time in the classroom and focus on key issues of educational effectiveness, rather than the long list of issues they are currently required to consider.”
• end the current centralised target-setting process, increase the number of head teachers of excellent schools committed to supporting other schools – and develop Teaching Schools to make sure that every school has access to highly effective professional development support.
• Radically reform the funding model to make it more transparent, fairer and progressive

Lots of interesting ideas to discuss in our staffrooms!

Teach First Ofsted Report Summary FINAL26132_1375[1]

Attached you will find a summary of the OFSTED report into Teach First in England.

In the report Ofsted reported that “Teach First is very successful in meeting its commitment to address educational disadvantage”. It describes Teach First participants as “exceptional” with many on their way to being inspirational teachers in their first year. The training they receive was found to be “consistently high quality” while the leadership and management of the organisation was “very strong”. Ofsted highlights the way Teach First participants work effectively in collaboration with other colleagues and teachers in their schools.The report also notes that Teach First’s retention is “exceptionally high” and “significantly above the national average”, while noting it recruits a “diverse cohort with a high proportion nationally of participants from a wide range of minority ethnic backgrounds”.

Currently Teach First has no base in Scotland, although I understand they are in negotiation with a Scottish University to seek a programme which would allow registration for those teachers who have completed their training on the programme. Regardless of the outcome of this, it is worth considering those elements which seem to have been most successful, particularly in relation to the Donaldson Report and to our national purpose to improve attainment for children and young people in disadvantaged communities.