Chartered Teachers Conference
24 04 2007Here is the flyer for the CT conference (at long last). If you’re interested please complete and return to the university. This is a free event and the programme looks great. Certainly in line with what this blog has been trying to do - bring people together, share practice and look at the role of the CT within schools and how this fits within the authority.
Did anyone get along to the conference. I was already committed to something else so could not go.
What was interesting or controversial?
I went along to the conference. There were lots of CT there and quite a wide spread across the country. I was really interested as the theme was impact and influence and I was curious to see the examples from other authorities and what we could learn from this. The key note was Peter Gronn, an Austrailian professor working at Glasgow University. He gave a background to CT (perhaps a bit unneccessary given the audience!) and then talked about where to from here, the need for role clarity for CT and career mobility for CT, discussing how this is currently separated from traditional leadership roles and is this division helpful. The feeling after the presentation was that he really didn’t add anything new to the discussion and a number of people felt quite disapointed with it. As a fairly new member of staff I had heard a lot of his commentary before but I was interested in his ideas of observation as part of CT and the possibility of renewal and how we square up the role of CT with our currrent and future leaders.
The workshops I attended were about leadership and CT and I was particularly interested in hearing other experiences from other authorities. The presentations I attended focused on how leaders within schools support CT and barriers to teacher leadership. These were identified as:
Level of understanding
Level of commitment
Level of engagement
Tensions between policy paradigms
Willingness to take risks
I was encouraged to think that we’d discussed some of these issues at our CT meetings and hopefully will be taking some of these issues forward and addressing them at future meetings.