Posted in Communication, Curriculum for Excellence on Jul 22nd, 2008 2 Comments »
I’ve been working on a letter to go out to all members of staff at the beginning of the new term. It started off being a list of “must dos” but as I reflected on how I would have responded to such a letter if I were still a teacher I moved to try to [...]
Posted in Allegiance, Communication, Culture change, Ideas, Positivity, Unconditional Positive Regard, professionalism on May 11th, 2008 2 Comments »
“THEM” Vs “US”
I reckon one of the greatest challenges facing Scottish education is the way in which people use the third person plural in a negative sense.
Listen to any conversation about education and very soon “they” will emerge as the problem. So teachers will talk about “them” (management), management will talk about “them” (teachers and the local authority) [...]
Posted in Children's Services, Communication, Conferences, Corporate, Early Intervention, Early Years, Integrated Children's Services, LAAC, Leadership Dilemmas, Parental Involvement, Partnerships, Public Services on May 6th, 2008 1 Comment »
We held a very successful “Corporate Parenting” Conference today at the Marine Hotel, North Berwick. .
Adam Ingram MSP , Minister for Children and Early Years gave a well informed and committed keynote address and emphasised the need for us to collectively address the needs of Looked After and Accommodated Children and to focus upon the improving [...]
Posted in Blogging, Communication, Community Learning, Consultation, Corporate, Edubuzz, Elected Members, Ideas, Learning Logs, Public Services, Social media on Apr 21st, 2008 No Comments »
We held a meeting last week where we explored the potential of weblogs to assist the community planning process - based on the edubuzz model -although not necessarily using the same platform.
Community Planning is a process which helps public agencies to work together with the community to plan and deliver better services which make a real [...]
Posted in Communication, Personal Lessons, honesty on Apr 7th, 2008 4 Comments »
Someone said to me today that some people found me scary.
I laughed it off but it’s set me to wondering.
I really don’t like the idea that anyone would be put off coming to speak to me because they were scared.
As ever Gill put it into context - “it depends what people mean by scary?”
Posted in Communication, Consultation, Early Intervention, Early Years, Learning and teaching, OUtcome agreements, Strategic on Feb 24th, 2008 2 Comments »
The power of our strategic groups came to the fore this week at our 3 -18 Strategic Learning and Teaching Group.
This group has 25 members who represent a wide cross-section of those of us involved in education in East Lothian. I know its accepted logic that such a large group can’t operate successfully but it’s [...]
Posted in Accountability, Communication, Culture change on Jan 21st, 2008 1 Comment »
I know I’m guilty of talking to people about the “big picture” as if I expect them to have the same appreciation of what’s going on in education in East Lothian as I have.
It was a bit like that today when I briefed the team at John Muir House about our Service Improvement Plan; the [...]
Posted in Blogging, Communication, Personal Lessons on Jan 21st, 2008 No Comments »
I was just about to write my evening’s post when I saw on the dashboard that I’d written 639 posts and had 1,151 comments on this log since it started in August 2006.
I just wanted to thank all those who have left comments over this period and to say that they have had a significant impact [...]
Posted in Communication, Ideas, Management, TESS on Dec 9th, 2007 2 Comments »
I’ll be submitting this article for publication to TESS later this week. I’m indebted to Mothersoup for contributing her thoughts on this topic. Does it hit the spot?
In a peculiar way there is a possibility that this article may offend, in equal measure, both the teaching profession and the parental body. I make no apologies if this is the case.
I believe [...]
Posted in Communication, Learning and teaching, Management, Planning on Dec 5th, 2007 4 Comments »
In was in Elphinstone Primary School this morning and managed to watch all four classes - nursery (3-4 year olds); P1/2 (5-6 year olds); P3-5 (7-9 year olds); and P6/7 (10 -11 year olds) - in that order.
Elphinstone only has 70+ children in the whole school but it enabled me to move up through the [...]