If you are reading this and you have any experience of these or know of anyone, either in schools or youth work who is already delivering(or planning to) these in East Lothian I’d be keen to have a chat so please get in touch.

I was lucky enough to take part in something called CPD challenge run by Con Morris  at LTS on Thursday of last week.  It was an opportunity to try out software applications to help improve the way we work. 

Amongst others I had a go at using Prezi, a dynamic, non-linear presentation tool.  Fantastic!  My first attempt is here, don’t laugh…  I also had a go using CPD Reflect which is essentially a reflective CPD journal but has much more to it than I can possibly describe here.  Check it out on the link, it could prove to be very useful to schools, in making the PRD process more reflective. 

I also made a pledge to start writing my blog again, which is good timing as I am returning to school in August after a year at LTS working in the assessment and recognising achievement teams.  I can’t wait to get my teeth into school life again, although I have had a really interesting year and have learned a great deal during my time with LTS.

One of the workshops I attended was from Jeremy Morris of Monifieth High School.  He was talking about how they, as a school, had begun to get to grips with CfE.  In short, they had organised their S1 programme around different ‘themes’ which ran for a few weeks at a time.  The ‘core’ was individual, local, national, and global Citizenship and each of the themes related to some aspect of the core(eg Africa, Languages fortnight, health promotion, “Eurofieth”-see website, etc).   Departments working together to deliver agreed outcomes over the course of the school session.

What struck me most was not the ‘what’, the content, but how they had gone about the process.  They had a very large ‘year planner’ prominently displayed in the staffroom (a focal point for much discussion by all accounts!), which could be modified and added to, to reflect changing or shifting priorities, as well as taking all principal teachers out of school for a planning session, to look at the experiences and outcomes and discuss how together they could create a coherent programme.

What came through above all else was that they had engaged staff across the school in professional discussion, dialogue and negotiation which had gone a long way to breaking the subject barriers that can be all too evident in secondary schools.  They had also taken a managable ‘chunk’ of the school timetable to innovate with and will learn from this for future years as CfE develops in the school.  I thought it a very interesting example of a school beginning to experiment with possible models of CfE within its own context, but also in such a manner as to make the ’risks’ managable. 

The main point that I have begun to explore further is that of the uses made of such testing at an individual level.  Standardised tests have (varying degrees of) predictive validity when used at a cohort level, ie when making predictions about achievement for year groups, but at the individual level there is too great a degree of variability to predict anything about a particular student’s future achievement. 

That, it seems to me, is the crux of the matter and is where schools who use tests such as MidYis and CAT face their greatest challenge.  How can we make best use of such instruments of assessment? How can we come to a fuller understanding of their limitations, as well as their uses, when using them to inform our practice and judgements about youngsters?  

Teacher and students expectations and beliefs about themselves as learners, as research has shown, are a significant factor in the achievement of youngsters, so using the information in an approriate way is absolutely vital.  What ways can schools use these summative assessments in a formative way to inform planning and practice? Are the assessments themselves key, or is it the use to which we put them? 

Do you think the changes that are happening are at the methodology level, ie people’s thinking about learning and teaching(beyond the inevitable early adopters group), or at a more superficial level(by the wider teaching community) in terms of the way things are organised and the content that is ‘delivered’?

It is an interesting question, because I think that we are, potentially, at a point of such monumental change in Scottish Education that we might end up with a big shuffle in the way things are organised, but not impact upon the deeper levels of thinking about learning. 

This may also be compounded if the NQ consultation returns a framework for qualifications that basically reflects what we already have without any move towards a recognition of teacher judgement that is being promoted in BtC3 as a necessary condition of CfE. 

Any thoughts?

I received an email this morning from a colleague in Senegal, West Africa, who has contacted me about the possibility of having some sort of educational exchange with us.  She sent a picture(above) of their secondary school, CEM Adeane, in Ziguinchor in the south-west region of Cassamance.

It brings into very sharp focus the material luxury we have in our country.  She also told me that they have no computers in the school at all and if youngsters want to access the internet they have to travel into the city(not a straightforward process with very little transport infrasturcture) to go to an internet cafe.  How easy we have it!

On a personal level I’m very keen to learn about the experience of education in semi-rural Senegal and hopefully on wider scale we can create a mutually beneficial and equal partnership between the schools, however that is some way off yet.

http://www.ukowla.org.uk/

http://www.britishcouncil.org/globalschools

First up, improving my learning ’success criteria’ in PSE lessons.  How will youngsters know when they have successfully achieved the aims of each lesson?  The idea is to generate clear success criteria for the main points of the lesson and share these at the beginning and review.