Stonelaw High

The parent event at Stonelaw High went well last night with a good turnout. The support from the area schools in providing displays of work they are doing linked to CfE was wonderful. It’s pretty humbling when you see the amount of development work which is going on at the moment. The Stonelaw display included a lot of the work they do with ASDAN and Duke of Edinburgh awards. As with the other secondaries in the area there’s so much going on here too. They are particularly proud of the Fair Trade work they do and their charity work sponsoring orphans in Africa.  Brian Cooklin as ever managed to get to the core of CfE for the parents, easy to understand and always with a light hearted touch. One of the ladies from the office had been liaising with their PTA to organise tea and coffee, and had unfortunately been ill yesterday. Today she popped into my office to just check that everything had been ok for us, dedication is something we see every day in my job but it still delights me to see what people do to give the best education opportuntities to our children at every opportunity, and her checking in was a small example of the kind of dedication we see in our schools. Equally the turnout of HTs and other staff last night was also impressive in the midst of exams, parents nights etc.

What does excellence look like?

One of the PTs in a secondary I visit was showing me a bit of work his faculty team had been doing. They had been using Sirius self evaluation software to do a broadstroke of their department and decided as a follow up to look at what excellence would look like in a classroom in their faculty. They took all sorts of areas which they wanted to look at eg AiFL and used Journey to Excellence part two, then made a grid up with the things they’d want to see in an excllent classroom for AiFL then next to that were about to write what they needed to still work on which will be the basis for their improvement planning for next session. They had looked at lots of aspects of teaching and learning in this way – real self evaluation in action and a big move from the tick box approach to HGIOS which we can often get stuck in. Their next step was to look at how they could improve classroom monitoring by having a self evaluation by the teacher of an observed lesson and then use this as a basis for discussion by whoever was visiting whether PT, DHT or peer. Lots of great ideas going on! Nearby in a couple of the nurseries a huge amount of work has been going on to revise their vision and values and then use the ten dimensions as a basis for developing their outcomes/aims for the next three years which will be used to assist with writing their improvement plan. One of the primaries gave me the heads up today on some nice work being done by Gordon Kerr with Phoenix publishing on interdisciplinary topics which sounded of iterest. This Thursday our area is holding a parent council event where parents from all over Rutherglen/Cambuslang will come together to hear a few presentations from Clyde Gateway, Brian Cooklin and a rep from Youth Connections. Local schools will be providing displays of ongoing work with parents on CfE etc. It should be an interesting evening.

In the meantime I’m off to attempt to clean my top floor tenement windows with some magnetic implement I purchased online. My sons are worried about my online purchases this weather, I’m kind of turning into Homer Simpson buying all sorts of helpful cleaning produts, generally made of plastic, with hundreds of extra free bits with them. Generally they don’t seem to work, maybe its my impatience or lack of elbow grease. However this thing has a handy string attached to it so nothing drops on pedestrians heads, whether it’ll clean the windows or not remains to be seen

Artsnet

Really enjoyed the artsnet performance the other night in Hamilton Townhouse. 200 chldren from across South Lanarkshire schools were involved in Safe and Sound. It gave important messages about child protection in a creative way. This is only part of what the cultural coordinators are involved in. The emphasis they have placed on the arts has been a wonderful experience for so many children over the years.

Had an HT drop in this evening. Lots of quick five minute slots on what schools are up to e.g. numeracy planning, active maths P4-7, HMIe visits, CfE in the secondary, learning stories for pre 5s using multi media, standards and quality reporting, CfE approaches related to Homecoming, termly CfE planning, preparing for HMIe, self evaluation using SIRIUS tool etc. Very worthwhile sharing exercise, but I’m not so sure they were keen on my prizes, they seemed to like the cream eggs and special person stickers, but spare copies of building the curriculum 3 and JtE part 1 and 2 weren’t quite so popular as special prizes……and here I’d taken a wee while to track down some extras!

Bruce’s diet

So my friend Bruce’s diet is going well. http://programmes.stv.tv/feelgood-factor/blog/. He’s been sore this weekend though after too much body pump. I’ve advised him to do better warm downs, so he’s off for a stroll with Smidgeon the dog…