Posted in CPD, Curriculum for Excellence on May 31st, 2009 1 Comment »
I attended the National Education conference on Thursday. The event was organised by the General Teaching Council Scotland (GTCS).
I’ll make a few posts on some of the things I learned during the day and the first of these will relate to the OpenLearn website which gives free access to Open University course materials. By accessing [...]
Posted in CPD, Culture change, Leadership, Management, Public Services on Aug 8th, 2008 1 Comment »
A couple of months ago I joined my colleagues on the Leadership Team of East Lothian Council on a weekend course entitled “The Innerwick Experience”. The Leadership Team is made up of: all Heads of Service, e.g. Head of Education, Head of ICT and Finance, etc; the four Directors - Finance; Planning; Community Services; and Education and Children’s Services [...]
Posted in CPD, ICT, Parental Involvement, Partnerships on Jun 2nd, 2008 1 Comment »
East Lothian Council, in partnership with Lothian and Borders Police, will be hosting a series of Internet safety and responsible use training sessions for parents with pupils in P5 - S6 across the county. This is in response to growing concerns, expressed by individual parents and parent councils, about how to make sure young people [...]
Posted in CPD, Culture change, School visits on Nov 29th, 2007 10 Comments »
We had a very productive discussion this afternoon at the secondary headteachers meeting about classroom observation.
I was delighted to see the range of strategies being implemented in our schools but the overwhelming point which emerged from the discussion was the shift from observation with a focus on judging competence to one where the focus is [...]
Posted in CPD, Careers, Learning and teaching, Parental Involvement, Personnel, professionalism on Nov 25th, 2007 No Comments »
One of the issues facing schools these days is the concern expressed by some parents about a probationer teaching their child’s class.
A probationer is a newly qualified teacher (NQT) and in the past they would have just started teaching as a teacher - but without any of the support systems we now have in place.
I [...]
Posted in CPD, Ideas, Leadership, Partnerships on Nov 4th, 2007 3 Comments »
(John Muir and President Teddy Roosevelt above Yosemite Valley)
I’ve been researching some of John Muir’s writings to establish core values for our proposed John Muir Leadership Programme.
The quotations certainly provide direction and form to any development:
“Most people are on the world, not in it; have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them, undiffused, separate, [...]
Posted in CPD, Edubuzz, ICT, Uncategorized on Oct 6th, 2007 2 Comments »
Teachmeet is the ’unconference’ approach to professional development in East Lothian. TeachMeet, involves short, sharp demonstrations of one technology, showing its whole potential in no more than seven minutes. The team then reverse engineer what went into the product of the teachers’ learning, leaving plenty of time to play and discover new skills. Crucially, they leave time at the end [...]
Posted in CPD, Conferences, Head Teachers, Uncategorized on Sep 20th, 2007 1 Comment »
We held our first Head Teachers East Lothian Head Teachers’ Conference of the session at Musselburgh Racecourse this afternoon.
This was the first of five conferences which will take place over the session and adopted a new format following feedback from HTs last year. Each conference has a particular theme and has two distinct parts, the [...]
Posted in CPD, Corporate, Ideas, Leadership, Partnerships on Aug 26th, 2007 4 Comments »
I met Bill Stephen and Ollie Bray on Friday to explore how we might build upon some of the experiences I had at the Project Adventure programme in the summer.
We started off exploring how we might use some of these ideas at one of our Head Teacher conferences in the coming session but quickly extended [...]
Posted in CPD, HMIe, Leadership on Jul 31st, 2007 No Comments »
The HMIe have recently published a fascinating report into educational leadership in Scottish education.
It starts out by asserting that 85% of educational leaders in all sectors are good or very good – which obviously leaves a question hanging about the remaining 15%.
I really like Graham Donaldson’s foreword where he says something very important about the [...]
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