Writing improvement plans

Spending some time at the moment on a variety of tasks including supporting schools as they are writing HMIe action plans, performance profiles, improvement plans etc. As always a rake through Don Ledingham’s blog brings up some useful advice. I’m finding some interesting reading from his Harvard school notes and his comments on developing outcome agreements which he has written about in several posts over a period of time. His posts are a great help.

Being involved in learning about coaching continues to be really useful and I’m finding that it has heightened my need to be self reflective and to renegotiate my own thinking in my head on a whole raft of issues related to my job, learning and teaching. I find myself doing this in big blocks of thinking and reflecting, which can overwhelm me- it’d be much easier if I could do this in smaller chunks in a more measured way, so I’m working on that!

Bob and smoothies

This week I have been mostly eating smoothies. I may have the occasional worn carpet and have an unintentional shabby chic (or not) look around the flat, but I do love to buy electronic gadgets, great speakers and various white goods! Anyway after bursting the bank with a Smeg fridge I’d been lusting after the other week, I got a better smoothy maker this week that can cope nicely with ice and frozen Summer Berries. Nice!

I discovered that in common with a friend we’ve both been rediscovering Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks over the past couple of weeks. As a bit of an old punk I came late to Dylan as he was not on my High Fidelityesque musical snobbery list of favourites. But when I did pay him attention he became an obsession… Anyway I’m looking forward to some books from amazon on the making of this album. I’ve also been snorting at the advertising of The Attic Lights new cd – they managed to even get a mention in the Mail on Sunday! They have had the audacity to call it “God” and as you can imagine have caused a bit of a rumpus with their shenanigans.

HT Conference

There’s to be a Glow section next week at the HT conference in SLC. It’ll a great opportunity for everyone to find out more about the practice already going on in early adopter schools. I know Caroline and Jaye are both presenting and I think they may be bringing some of the young people involved who will really spread the message about how useful they are finding using Glow. It’s only useful if it is impacting positively on learning and teaching and I’m sure that the enthusiasm of these two will show just how helpful a tool they are finding Glow. As Glow rolls out it’s important that the mystique which at times has grown around it is taken away and it can be seen to be an easy to use tool, which can save time for teachers and make it easier to teach! I know having seen both these practitioners using Glow the impact it has had on attitudes to learning within their classes when in use – impacting on pupil collaborative work, active learning and depth of learning. And that sounds very like what we’re trying to do through CfE!  I’m looking forward to  seeing their presentations next week.