Richard Wilson

I am still perstiting with my collaborative writing project and will be adding work from the pupils here at Pinkie St Peter’s. I have come across some other resources that can help provide advice and a focus for motivating and directing pupils. I have used Comic Life with success in the past and will continue with it as it really motivates pupils and adds interest to their writing tasks across a variety of genre. Please note that is it now available for Windows as well as Mac. Some other comic making free web-sites are readwritethink which is quite a safe one and very easy to use. A couple of others you may wish to use with pupils but need a good checking out are stripgenerator and stripcreator, both of these also have adult content, especially stripcreator, so use wisely. A really good writing resource is to be found at khake which gives lots of advice in communication skills. A good cut and paste piece for your school web-site can be found at the Free Dictionary which has news, word games and a free on-line dictionary. For help with a variety of things Fact Monster is a good starting point, well worth a look.

Irene Williams,(our DHT), and myself have been collating information like mad for our HMiE Follow Through Report and our Quality Improvement Officer’s visit. This alone proved to be a bit of a challenge, not because there was little or no evidence, just the opposite, we had masses. Filtering the evidence was a challenge as it was stored as different media in a variety of places. Assimilating it and relating it to the Quality Indicators for HGiOS 3 was not an easy task. We resolved to set up a better storage system to gather and collate evidence for each QI. We have set up a simple system with a folder for each QI and a word document for each theme within the Quality Indicators. All staff will be invited to add to the bank of evidence we will build up over the year. This will make the self-evaluation process much easier as all the evidence will be located in the one place, hopefully making the process easier and much less painful. I may translate it to a wiki so that staff can add to it on-line without the need to be in school to access the folders. When I’ve done this I will publish it as I haven’t worked out how to upload folders onto this site yet. Any ideas?

You can access the folders at our school web-site, which is currently under re-construction.

The multi role nature of a HT post continues to grow and morph in a wide variety of ways, some of which I feel comfortable with but others are beginning to make me flounder. More and more often I have to lead or be part of very difficult discussions which can have a collosal impact on staff, parents and pupils alike. This can sometimes be as drastic as having potential for children being removed from their parents, or parents/carers going to jail. I feel I am not skilled enough in the art of difficult conversations to participate constructively in these situations and wonder if anyone knows of high quality training in this area. I recently attended a course on Dealing With Difficult People but this was not enough. One of the filters was, “is maintaining this relationship important to me?”. If we have the presumption of an unconditional positive regard for all people we deal with (and surely we do), the answer must always be yes. So, other, harder strategies are no good or at best limited. Any ideas anyone?

Dealing With Conflict Instrument £6.50

I was on an interesting course which dealt with conflict and conflict resolution. As part of the course I received a very useful tool, or, more accurately, an instrument that shows how to identify your own style of handling conflict and assessing the best strategies for resolving problems. It is very effective as it makes you consider other conflict handling styles. All of the different styles, Accommodation, Collaboration, Compromise, Avoidance and Competition are explained. Each has its own guidance of when the best time to use each strategy and is set out in a situation selector. The situation selector is designed to help you determine the optimal conflict resolution in a given situation.

• a situation where neither outcome nor relationship matter Avoid
• a situation where both are very important Collaborate
• a situation where outcome is important and not relationship Compete
• a situation where outcome is not important but relationship is Accommodate
• a situation in which both are somewhat important calls for Compromise

Follow the link above for further details, this make a super in-service tool and could also be used to give senior pupils better strategies for handling conflict and getting better resolutions. You don’t have to win all the time to be effective!