Don Ledingham’s Learning Log

 
I spent this morning at the Ansel Adams: Celebration of Genius at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh.
I first encountered Ansel Adam’s work a few years ago when I led a party of Dunbar Grammar School pupils to Yosemite Valley where we were “Following in John Muir’s Footsteps” - John Muir was a former pupil of [...]

 
One of the things that schools sometimes fail to appreciate is just how intimidating they can be, especially secondary schools. We all have our memories of school, and for those of us in the teaching profession they are, for the most part,   likely to be positive recollections. Yet when you speak to some parents you [...]

 
Over the last few weeks I’ve written a number of posts about parents as customers.
So it was great to a very extensive response from Mothersoup
All too often in education the dialogue takes place between the professionals and those whom we serve only play a peripheral role in shaping the future.
MS’s post is well worth read but [...]

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 [...]

  
You know that niggling feeling that you get when you’ve got an idea bubbling just underneath the surface and can’t quite express it - then again perhaps you don’t but it’s one with which I’m often afflicted.  It’s like that for me at the moment with this business of parents and children as customers.  I just can’t [...]

 
Let me put my cards on the table.  I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of seeing parents as customers.  For me it only served to reinforce a subservient model where we - professionals - would be told what to do by parents. The second difficulty was the transactional nature of my understanding of the [...]

 
I’ve been reading the Demos paper “Journey to the Interface” which I referred to in the recent leadership dilemma.  It’s a long document but a remarkably easy read and very thought provoking.
The paper’s focus is the development of “customer-centred services”. There a huge range of issues emerging from the paper which would be worthy of further [...]

Our curriculum architecture conference proved to be a great success.
 
The evaluations from the 100 participants has been exceptional. It validated the approach we selected to involve a wide range of participants - HTs, DHTs, PTs, Primary HTs, elected members, parents, students, business people, community services and members of the department in the development of [...]

 I attended my third community evening in Dunbar this week regarding Dunbar Primary School provision.
Due to a rapidly expanding population in Dunbar it has become necessary to enhance the primary school provision in Dunbar earlier than had been previously predicted. There are a number of options - all of which involve the construction of a new building.
As [...]

Diplomatic - skilled at dealing with sensitive matters or people 

I spoke to two head teachers today about how they deal with potentially difficult situations with parents. It was interesting that they both almost used exactly the same words: “If you feel you need to “win” you’ve actually lost” Their point was that we need to [...]