Scottish Learning Festival

Every year I book up with the intention of going to the SLF for two days, with great intentions and mostly bits and pieces turn up that mean I miss parts of the two days. I couldn’t get yesterday but managed along today and felt pretty inspired by some of the things I saw. Great reviews from people I met on Caroline Gibson and Jaye Richards sessions at the glowing lounge. Good on them flying the flag for SLC. Saw Liz Mercer doing her bit on persona dolls, which everyone was loving. Liz is one of the most dedicated and enthusiatic practitioners you could hope to meet. Caught up with Trevor Gray from LTS who will be doing an input at an event in our area on how to get to planning in CfE. He’s already done some really nice things on big question planning which are great starters for people. Was a bit embarassed to see my name on an ASG project at the SLC stall along with Caroline Gibson’s when all I did was bid for the money and she did all the fantastic work with a group of teachers across our Learning Community on rich tasks related to Africa and Malawi. I reminded her that I still feel like she’s a bit of an adopted daughter, its such a buzz to watch someone become increasingly skilled, confident and inspirational to others. That’s what this job is all about. Seeing leadership grow gives great hope for the future every time you see it.

Will have to go and catch up with some of the keynotes etc later on video links at LTS. As always so much to see and hear and time just disappears… I found it interesting to see how CfE impacted on the materials on display. It was heartening to see so much on outdoor play,  global citizenship, ASDAN  etc where a real sense of community is being worked on with our young people and the wider community.

I’m currently helping to organise a CfE visualising day for our area of Cambuslang/Rutherglen - I’m looking forward to this and we’re hoping to get several speakers including Trevor who can show how much of this we already do and how we can start moving forward making the connections and implementing CfE fully.

Last week we had our first 5-14 data meeting which hopefully the LC of Trinity found of some use. Now we have so much data available from the EA it is making tracking and monitoring and really digging deep much easier to do. Obviously there are questions as to what will replace this but in the meantime I’m keen that all our schools can be even more skilled in this area as it will become  even more crucial in many ways that we have excellent means of monitoring attainment and achievement as we move to CfE.

TESS

Jaye getting a mention in the TESS

WATCHING TOO MUCH TV

I’ve  been very negligent recently with this blog. Due in part to watching 5 series of the wire over the past few weeks in spare moments while at the same reading David Simon’s related books about Baltimore.  

 Its great to hear about Jaye Richard’s success with her big lottery fund bid. This together with a Learning Community CfE bid for a  project she will lead on will give great opportunities for liaison work across the community, sharing good practice and continued roll out of some of the great work she’s been doing. You can read more about it on her blog. This will add even more exciting transition work to the Learning Community

Cathkin Community Nursery are  in the midst of a submitting a bid too, where they hope to roll out accredited courses in conjunction with SLC college for their parents. Building Community Capacity in action.

We’re in the run up to the first of the new HMIe inspections, and the first obvious thing coming out of this is already additional joint working. With CLD alongside secondary, the links and amount of work going on within one small area are phenomenal. At the last count CLD had identified 57 partnership organisations working alongside one secondary and with the local community. It will be interesting to see how the inspection week itself proceeds.

Caroline Gibson’s blog writing about her visit to Malawi has been an inspirational read. After loving working with her at Castlefield, I’m really chuffed she is now a glow mentor on secondment for SLC and is already out and about in her additional capacity of CfE developmentwork, moving forward links with establishments on Malawi. She was out at Hallside Primary the other day in one of the Rutherglen/ Cambuslang Learning Communities where they have previously had successful links with Malawi.

Loch and Cathkin Primary have had a running start with their P1s - the teachers and SMT members have already put in an immense amount of work developing numeracy materials for planning in P1. All P1 classes in these 2 schools will be 18 or under as part of SLCs reduction of P1 numbers work. They are working on baseline assessments using tools such as PIPs and the Leuvin scale looking at engagement. The work will develop over the session.

Writing continues to be an area where many establishments have been looking at improvement work and I’ve been really impressed by the Ros Wilson materials - Big Writing  -from East Dunbartonshire where they take forward the VCOP approach - I was even more impressed by the amount of free downloadable resources to support VCOP I managed to find with a little bit of googling!

We held our Early Years Area Forum the other day which was hosted by Oakwood Nursery one of the partnership nurseries I visit. We had a good evening with input on persona dolls from Liz Mercer (you can read about the work she has done with her team in the LTS Early Years Matters Magazine) and a great tour round their newly built 0-3 facility - everyone had their notebooks out scribbling down nice ideas they saw!

So enough of this - back to my wire dvds….

Lighting Up Learning

Jaye Richards from Cathkin High has now published her research project which looks at Glow and learning and teaching. It can be found here

http://www.gtcs.org.uk/Research_/TeacherResearcherProgramme/TeacherResearcherReports/will_the_lights_stay_on.asp

Here is the GTC summary “

Summary

Despite huge investment in school ICT over recent years, there have been relatively few, if any, reports of the substantial transformation of teaching and learning expected by governments as a result of this funding. GLOW, the Scottish School’s Digital Network is the latest of these costly initiatives.

This research study tracked four S3 classes working through the same modules as part of the standard grade Biology course. Results were tested using summative instruments of assessment comprising topic-specific questions from past standard grade Biology papers, and an end of year exam. One class, after two modules taught without it, studied one module using ICT timetabled for one of three lessons each week over one school term, with a mixture of independent and collaborative learning tasks reinforcing the learning objectives for that week, delivered using the GLOW virtual learning environment.

Results for this class with the same pupils and the same teacher showed a mean increase of 32.27% for the GLOW vs. non-GLOW modules. The attainment of this class on the non-GLOW modules was consistent and significantly below the best of the four classes. However, on the GLOW module, it was better by 14.69% than the mean of the other three classes. Further examination of the results showed that the weaker students benefited at least as much as their more able classmates.

The report discusses the challenges of embedding ICT into subject curricula and makes suggestions for a model of good practice. This use of ICT could facilitate a partial move away from a predominantly subject based focus in teaching to the more applied approach as advocated by a Curriculum for Excellence.”

Have a look at John Connells blog to read his comments on Jaye’s report http://www.johnconnell.co.uk/blog/?p=932. He says it much better than I could!

Caroline Gibson who has taken up a secondment as a Glow mentor in SLC has just returned from a LECT visit in Malawi. Her blog is worth looking at to find out how this went

http://carolinegibson.wordpress.com/

Lacking sun sea and sand

Summer fun. So having booked up my three weeks leave, I fell down stairs on the first day and sprained my ankle…I’ve also to do jury duty during my break.

Never mind, I’m enjoying daytime tv instead of sun sea and sand. Hallmark channel is full of the joys of judges, various cops and csi types which are keeping me occupied along with my bag of summer books. I’ve passed my management coaching and mentoring diploma so I’m pleased about that and hopeful that this will be something I can use at work.

Multi Agency Working

One of the joys of my job is being able to see how well we can do things together when all the right pieces are in play. I really enjoyed my evening at the cinema in Hamilton tonight where there was a first viewing of a new DVD called Make A Difference. 3rd year pupils from Cathkin High, Stonelaw High and Trinity High came together with volunteer teachers and police officers from Rutherglen Community Safety Deprtment over several weeks after school. The pupils were involved in producing the DVD - script writing, lighting, camera work, sound, editing and acting. FPS Media provided the techy help. The DVD includes dramas, documentaries and some out takes. It deals with a range of aspects related to anti social behaviour - racist incidents, weapons, loitering and drugs.

It was great to see how this multi agency approach with funding from various partners came together to produce such a worthwhile resource which will be used by schools and groups throughout South Lanarkshire.

 

Interaction for buttons

Thanks Alan Stewart for this Ted Talk by Johnny Lee. Cheap interactive boards with a wii remote and some sticky backed plastic! Polish off your blue peter badges and get to it.

 

Colour Coding

Jaye Richards was sharing the results from her Glow work with her S3 biology class with me, and the resulting attainment rise is extremely impressive. Seeing her collation of results etc just confirms the importance of this kind of careful reflection on impact. We need to be doing much more of this within our classrooms to ensure we get off the hamster wheel of development for development sake and ensure that we use our resources for improvements which are carefully considered. I noticed she was discussing how innovation fatigue can set in within schools and I think its really important that the kind of work she has been doing is seen as a model which others can try, albeit perhaps on a smaller scale - practice where practitioners are focused on the improvement they are trying to achieve and carefully considering whether or not there has been an impact. I’ve been pestering various people with her results because I feel something as significant and well researched as this should be looked at seriously. The next question to ask is - is it the ICT and GLOW which is making the difference here or the one I suspect is more likely… is it the methodologies she is trying out as she teaches because the tools she is using are helping her try innovative teaching?  The other thing in amongst this is the amount of time Jaye is spending networking, researching etc via online communities and how much impact that is having on her practice in the classroom.

Meanwhile out in the nurseries I had a ball in Westburn Nursery the other day where they had made an indoor beach (just glad I wasn’t having to clean up later), it was great fun for the children. The whole nursery was looking vibrant and interesting - I had to go to the toilet for hankies as I get very sniffly when things are going so well!

At Loch Primary today I was really impressed in a QIO quality kind of way! The Head has set up a new colour coded filing system with the HGIOS colours and QIs for evidence gathering for HMIe. I took a picture but saw the look of horror on her face as I snapped away.It may be odd that I could be so excited by her new filing system…. It was pretty damned impressive though!

 

Enterprising Calderwood Primary

Calderwood Primary are always very keen to take forward enterprise activities and do so very well. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to their art exhibition today. Opened by a local artist, there were framed artworks on display from all stages. It was all very impressive and there was a great turnout of parents snapping up the art work.

I had another coaching session the other day and again I am finding the experience of being coached and also that of coaching very worthwhile. One of the things which is interesting me is the depth of trust that I feel towards my coach and how quickly that has been built. It is a different kind of relationship with a colleague than those I have had before and a very powerful one. If this approach was embedded in all our practice we would be moving very much towards the kind of collegiate/sharing and empowering model which could affect real change and improvement in our schools.

This along with the space I now have for reflection at work is a learning experience which I’m finding very useful. Its also making me realise just how much time I have always spent crisis managing and whirring to keep up. There’s an enormous need for us all to stop and really think about the why of what we do in our daily lives in education at every level. This is becoming more and more apparent as I visit establishments and see the amount of activity and work that is going on everywhere. It’s how we harness all of that energy to make an impact that’s the killer question. How much of what we are doing every day is just for the completion of tasks so we can move onto the next one? How much of it is making a positive difference to the lives of the children in our care?

 

QIO duties

So I’m now three months into this post and have spent much time reflecting on  what I think people would find useful from the role I undertake. This is very much a new and evolving role and I’d be really keen to hear the views on anyone  on what they think a QIO should/could be doing to support schools. Bearing in mind my role is one where the vast majority of my remit is to support 20+ establishments from early years, through primary to secondary with a quality assurance slant. What does that mean for you?