West Coats Art

Visited a great art exhibition at West Coats Primary. This is a school where they have really used CCC time to their advantage. A member of staff has an art room and takes the pupils at CCC time. She does all sorts of super work and is a great example of teaching enterprise through art and also teaching literacy within art – really stretching the children’s language. The staff had worked really hard to pull together the children’s work which took up the entire hall. One really neat idea was the use of plastic crates, tied together with plastic ties to make long shelf type units, each srate with an individual piece of pottery in it – it looked stunning.

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?