-developing an online framework for educational leadership
-working on the Strategic Leadership Development Programme as commissioned by the Scottish Government
-responding to planning demands at work regarding the “new organisation”
-work of the CPD team within the “Teaching Scotland’s Future” review
- supporting colleagues on our online communities in a business a usual type of way.

Its a strange place to be at the moment = being really busy trying to tie up all the loose ends before end of contract in February, but also being involved in some of these exciting developments which will obviously have a lifespan way beyond that date. I just wish I had a bit more time to do them all justice.

At present, my MLPS priorities are supporting the teachers in practice. I’m trying to ensure that all p6 & p7 learners across our authority enjoy their entitlement to learn a foreign language as part of their broad and general curriculum. This is not an entirely straightforward task. As well as supporting the teachers in this present cohort, I’m also planning to work with clusters to try to do this now that the training course will finish this weekend. This will be a time-consuming job, working in 18 schools across 2 authorities on one day a week, but the set of issues raised above are of an entirely different order and need strategic thinking and action. I have a few ideas – might Learning Rounds help here? Whatever happens – and we need to make sure that something does – it’s not going to be one person who will be able to resolve even some of these issues. We need discussions involving school leaders, class practitioners, national specialists if possible, and strategic leaders. We need to be aware of what research says about this problem. We need to find out how others are approaching the problem and find out what works, what doesn’t and why.  Above all we need to refocus on the learner in the middle of all this and make sure that they are the first concern, not the unfortunate casualty of a planning process which prioritises convenience over meaningful, cognitive progress.

In order to do this, we set up a page on Glow for people to sign up to in advance, introduce themselves, download the necessary papers, share any thinking they had already done around this issue and add interesting, relevant links. Interest in this was limited, which was no real surprise. The paper itself was I thought interesting, accessible in terms of language and freely available. Starting with a summary of the major learning theorists and their beliefs on learning, it wound up with a good look at Eric De Corte’s CSSC model of learning, that is learning is
•Constructed – we each need to make the learning our own in order to achieve understanding.
•Situated – learning is all the better if it is located in a meaningful context.
•Self-regulated – learning is an active process, it is not something that just happens to us. We each need to manage ourselves and know what to do to make it most effective, and develop the necessary skills for doing this.
•Collaborative – we learn better when we learn with other people .

The authors shared some really interesting vignettes to illustrate what this could look like in different learning contexts. All really useful, I thought. And the best thing of all for me is that Curriculum for Excellence is an ideal context for this CSSC model to work. And we also have Teaching Scotland’s Future recommendations calling for more and better partnerships between schools & universities, theory & practice. We had lots of good discussion around theory/research/inquiry and practice; the successes so far; the importance of CPD and PRD in all this; the free availability of research findings (research is too often in a glass box we can’t get into - it  is driven by funding, not impact on learning); the motivation behind the apparent desire for quantitative information about achievement; the role of teacher-learning communities in all this. But…..

……two things disappointed me about this session.

First one is that most of my colleagues thought the paper was difficult to read and would most definitely be inaccessible to teachers. I (and at least one other colleague) disagreed. A potted history of the major learning theorists which was once published by TESS was offered as a handy, pocket-sized alternative. That may be a great read, but I have a problem with this. We are a graduate profession: do we need academic writing on learning to be converted into a handy tips guide in order for us to be able to read it? It wouldn’t be the first time pocket-sized versions of weightier documents were suggested as a better alternative to “the real thing” but I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling slightly patronised by this idea - that the hard data is infact, too hard for me.

Secondly, only half the people who signed up, turned up, and this was true of both sessions I planned for and co-facilitated. I think this reflects really badly on us as a so-called “learning organisation.” Learning is our business, it’s what we are paid to do; to engender, develop, support and sustain for young people in Scotland. Indeed, we “transform lifes through learning” according to our strapline. But we don’t seem to value it enough to see it as more important than all the other stuff when a week has  been planned and organised to offer learning opportunities for us. Maybe it’s just not a priority. Well, in that case, I wonder what is.

The third session for me was a flu -jab. The nurse didn’t turn up. Couldn’t say I was surprised.

Rupert Murdoch in the Edtech space

Take a few minutes to get over the out-of touch descriptions of classrooms at the beginning – I don’t recognise the chalk & talk scenario he describes. He illustrates his vision with some exciting examples he’s seen at the end. The power of what he is saying  is in the challenge for educators to realise commesurate productivity gains through technology as seen by business, science and  medicine. He challenges the one assumption we often cling to in this country that failure is caused by poverty as “arrogant… you can build human capital even in extreme circumstances” ( famously  illustrated  by Sugata Mitra, and Charles Leadbeater and no doubt many others)  and unless I misunderstood – seems to advocate challenging, personalised learning experiences for everyone  and an open-source type  approach to sharing and availability of resources. Wow. Is the world of education ready to take him on? Can we afford not to?

I spent a very pleasant evening last night at the St George’s Centre for the annual SELMAS dinner.  The theme of the evening was Donaldson and Me and a succession of impressive speakers shared their personal responses to the Teaching Scotland’s Future review.

The themes picked up by the various speakers didn’t hugely surprise: Linda McTavish, Pincipal of Anniesland College was enthused by the prominence of partnership working in the review and talked about how this was a  functional necessity in her setting – without their partnerships with business, industry,  schools etc the college really couldn’t operate.  This addressed the issue  of providing  a bit of the “how” that discussion at my table identified as missing from the report – sharing the Anniesland experience in partnership building and working might be a useful thing to do.

Jaqueline Scott, HT at Trinity Prmary School Edinburgh mentioned improving quality and entry selection as priorities, and also called for greater flexibility with time commitments for probationers, suggesting greater flexibility with time management and allocations for probationers. She suggested longer continuous stretches in class, then concentrated, focussed periods out of class to really reflect, share, consolidate and build on their experience.  The weekly 0.7/0.3 split is sometimes seen as rigid and disruptive,  and it stands to reason that a more flexible system would be more user friendly. This is something I hope we can discuss further at the Probationer Support event we’re organising next week at SMC.

Gillian Hamilton was on her usual top form talking about her favourite subject - leadership; and asking what difference Donaldson will make to this theme. Looking to the future, the role of HTs will no doubt change, as it already has since Gillian was in the role and not necessarily in a positive way, with more attention to risk assessment,  budgeting, behaviour and grievances tending to sometimes eclipse the HTs role as lead learning in a school. The virtual college, as suggested by Donaldson via the national CPD team,  will provide a focus for CPD and connecting school leaders and should also help shape and support the various leadership roles a forward-thinking profession for the future might require.

The most contentious discussion of the evening came during the panel discussion at the end when Cara Aitchison Head of School at Moray House, Edniburgh saw Donaldson’s recommendations as an invitation to the TEIs in Scotland to diversify and offer specialisms, but suggested that the “traditional” model of teacher education ( research and university based) is best suited to an institution like Edinburgh, and more “vocational” approaches might be better if left to ” institutions in the west.” Not surprisingly, there was quite a reaction to this (at my table, anyway – we were in Edinburgh, at St George’s School for Girls, remember!). Firstly, this is patronising in the extreme; secondly, there are more places to consider than those on the east-west dichotomy; thirdly, some of those places might also consider themselves strong in research; forthly there is a suggestion here that post Donaldson, status quo rules in Edinburgh, and everyone else can think about the different routes into teaching as mooted by Donaldson. Interesting! For some reason, this made me think of what Stephen Heppell  has said several times about teacher education institutions - if they can’t make schools spectacularly good, what are they doing training teachers? It makes sense – TEIs should be modelling the best in education and for a profession fit for our times, is that best done through lectures, essays and seminars? 

Other memorable moments: HT from Govan said his best teacher was his granny because

1. she knew him
2. she loved him
3. she knew how to get the best out of him. Simple, really.

And another HT from Edinburgh expressed some concern at the homogeneity of students coming into the profession; regretting the demise of the outlyers, the mavericks, the independent thinkers (and operators) who took risks, often defied authority and still commanded respect, made big impressions and got the best out of young people. Are we creating a profession of robots?

Sadly the discussion was just beginning to get interesting when the evening was brought to a close. SELMAS is a loosely constituted, open organisation which provides a forum for leadership – I hope we continue the conversations.

 I’ve been following an online ongoing discussion on connectivism via the Canadian ed-tech researcher, Stephen Downes, ( I really look forward to his weekly updates – some hardcore tech stuff that is way beyond me but loads of good links, info & opinion on open learning; online learning & collaborative learning) and also Jenny Mackness’s blog Jennyconnected . Both of them really probe deeply into understandings  of the nature of collaborative, online learning and PLNs. Via my own PLN (@nick_peachey) on twitter I came across this excellent blogpost (where the graphic above comes from) which digs deeper into the nature of online collaborations and suggests some useful ideas for meaningful engagement and deeper professional learning – interesting to note a mention of Instructional Rounds – the US version of Learning Rounds, as one of the suggested activities, in the context of developing connected learners.

Along a related them,  last night on Twitter the #ukedchat the discussion was focussed on developing independent learners – how do we do it? But more importantly what do we understand by it. As usual the ideas were flying at supersonic speed, but for me a lot of what we were saying came down to two things:

1. most of what we talk about in #ukedchat when it is focussed at classroom level, often comes back to AiFL. i think if this set of principles are to be adopted as such, i.e principles and values and not tricks and strategies, then we’d be a long way to answering many of the questions  put to us as educators today.

2. I firmly believe that independent learning doesn’t mean learning only on your own, and I think this is demonstrated in my PLN,  where ideas are iterated, reiterated, bounced around, challenged and contested -in a shared way ( collaborative? connected? constructivist?). With a nod to Piaget and Vgotsky last night’s discussion  took account of the ego-centric stages of learning (pre-school) and the  ZPD (often when the learner is removed from the learning enviroment) as internal, individual  processes, but the learning we are concerned with, i.e in schools and  classrooms needs to model more of what we do online.

We need to encourage independence of learning and thinking but as John Connell  once pointed out more teachers need to model this, and it’s not easy to teach these values when paradoxically idependendent thought and formal institutions of education make for uneasy bedfellows.

Maybe we need to go back to the beginning, and consider the graphic at the top of this page as a model for independent but connected learning, where the learner is empowered within networks of his or her own construction to collaborate and work towards new understandings – can we call it connected independent learning?

Graham Donaldson and his review team have recently published the report on their review on Teacher Education in Scotland, which contains a hefty 50 recommendations.
I think it’s great – there is quite a lot to get excited about, and he hasn’t been shy to set some challenges for us all. Here are some of my personal reflections form my first few readings of it:

I love the idea of school – university partnerships and “hub” schools. These schools could grow out of existing learning communitites as referenced in the report to Learning Rounds (developed and supported by the National CPD team) and other learning community actvities. Imagine a partnership in teacher learning involving university teacher-educators,  experienced teachers (who will be considered as teacher educators) and beginning teachers, working together in one environment and sharing all their thinking, all the things they know. I think this could be a powerful vehicle for teacher learning at very many levels.

I love the fact that CPDFind has been recognised as a great basis to build a one – stop – shop for CPD for Scotland’s educators! So much to do, but we could be within striking distance of providing CPD experiences, endorsement and impact evaluation, focused on the learning outcomes for the young people who really matter at the end of all this CPD. Like I said – loads still to do, but much to be positive about…….He has also said that every teacher should engage in online CPD. that’s great, but also has its drawbacks……

I like the idea of a Virtual College for School Leadership (recommendation 50). It will aim to improve leadership capacity across Scotland, to co-ordinate resources, support and development and nurture distributed leadership. This could be a place where all teachers could develop their leadership capacity, from early career beginnings through the different stages of leadership on their career trajectories, sharing or recording privately their journey through a  CPD record and acknowledgement of what they achieve on the way - there could be much more to this  when you consider  the suggested “Standard for Active Registration” but I get the feeling there is quite a lot to be thrashed out before we reach a consensus on this one. Isn’t it great that we’ve already started thinking though?

I’m not well enough informed yet to say very much on the new “Standard for Active Registration.”  I know that this is a contentious issue and I need to think more deeply and speak to others in a socially constuctivist way to be able to get to grips with this. The process has started – last Saturday  I had a chat with David Noble – an inspiration to me  - who has thought (as always!) at a much deeper level than I on the issue of standards, and his thinking goes way beyond notions of managerialism or accountability and really focuses on what the standards are for, what drives them and why we pay attention to them.

I’m not sure about the Masters account for all teachers. The reason being that surely the possibility for all teachers to pursue studies at Master’s level already exists - if they choose to do it they already can, and will fund it themselves, as many, many have done over the years. So if no specific funding is to be made available to teachers to do this (and there is no reason for us to believe that there will be), what’s new?

I’m pleased that he has rejected the “placement only” route to achieving teacher status as is currently part of the teacher -education experiment south of the border – there is far too much to lose in disagregating from the universities, where links have been established. Yes, there is agreat deal to work on here, but it would certainly be a retrograde step for schools to go it alone in this respect.

I’m disappointed, in a very subject specialist way that he didn’t make any specific reference to the place of languages in the curriculum. To give you a bit of background, in 2001, a government comissioned report on languages in schools was published. Its official title was “Citizens of a Multi-Lingual World” but it was quickly renamed the “Mulgrew Report” as a tribute to its author. One of its recommendations  (recommendation 11 to be precise) was to embed languages learning in the teacher education of all trainee teachers. For whatever reason, the teacher education institutions declined the offer to take up this recommendation. So languages, especially primary languages , are left hanging in a very unusual space. Because of the refusal ofScotland’s TEIs to absorb this as a fundamental element of teacher education, this whole area of teacher education is left to the discretion of each individual authority, who are expected by government to provide training for this process to occur with no additional funding. That’s not entirely painting an accurate picture: protected funding has been provided previously, but has been withdrawn (I think, since 2009) .  Would Maths, as a curricular area, be treated in the same way? What if English as a curricular area was left to local authority discretion, and they could choose to provide training for teachers to teach it, or maybe not? And the training that was carried out wouldn’t really be verified or monitored by anyone? And if they decided not to do any training at all, no-one would ask any questions or bother terribly much because there are no national standards for achieving what you need to demonstrate to teach this particular curriculum area. Which is in fact, one of the eight curriculum areas that form part of a learner’s broad and general education, to which EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM HAS AN ENTITLEMENT up until the end of s3. Does anyone else care about this as much as I do? I’d love to hear from you if you do.

So, whichever way you look at it, the Donaldson Review has loads of challenges to offer us, and if the recommendations are to be acknowleged and not ignored, the prognosis is generally good, if challenging and demanding,  for teacher education in Scotland.