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from Charlie Love @ Charlie Love.org
from Charlie Love @ Charlie Love.org
from Engage for Education
A message for Scotland’s teachers for World Teachers’ Day from Mike Russell, Cabinet Secretary for Education
On World Teachers’ Day I want to pay homage to the wonderful work that teachers, support staff and other educators in Scotland do on a daily basis.
Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) represents a decisive shift for the better in Scottish education, with deeper learning and a greater emphasis on analysis, engagement and understanding. I’ve been enormously impressed by the motivation, energy and creativity that I have seen in schools across the country. This has been a challenging year for teachers and their resilience and commitment has been evident. It is to their credit that the new exams diet went well.
Poverty has a profound effect on educational attainment and future life chances of children and young people in all countries. CfE has raised the bar in terms of attainment but we need to address the inequalities that still exist within our system and I want to work jointly with the teaching profession to increase awareness of this important issue.
The foundations of successful education systems lie in the quality of teachers and their leadership. We have thousands of excellent hard working teachers throughout Scotland who are a credit to our country and play a pivotal role in guiding and inspiring our young people to be the best they can be.
The post Paying homage to Scotland’s teachers appeared first on Engage for Education.
from Engage for Education
Minister for Learning Alasdair Allan today congratulated 349 school pupils from across Scotland who have graduated from the University of Strathclyde’s Accelerate Programme.
Now in its fifth year the programme offers a one-week course for pupils at the end of S4, S5 and S6, aiming to give participants an opportunity to focus on a chosen area of potential academic study.
The programme features 10 subject areas for pupils to choose from; including physics, law and business and enterprise.
Led by undergraduate and postgraduate student mentors from the relevant departments and participants from previous years, pupils undertake a variety of interactive group challenges, culminating in a presentation of their work to a panel of industry and academic experts. The programme develops core skills of communication and leadership and helps prepare young people for the important decisions related to their future.
Over five years more than 1400 students have graduated from the programme,
Dr Allan said:
“Scottish education is going through a period of transformation. Approaches to the curriculum, learning, teaching, assessment, awards and qualifications are all changing. Part of our new approach is centred on encouraging senior learners to explore specialisations with depth and rigour.
“The Accelerate Programme is a great example of how students can benefit from a subject-specific focus that allows them to become more confident and informed within their area of academic interest. It is also an opportunity for learners to experience a university environment and to build relationships with academic specialists.
“These relationships between the University and senior pupils over a sustained induction process are helping to produce informed and engaged students of the future.
“I congratulate all the students graduating this week on what they have achieved, and hope that their exam results together with what they have learned through the Programme have set them on a path of continued learning and curiosity.”
Iain Mitchell, Director of the Accelerate Programme said:
“The Accelerate programme gives pupils valuable subject-specific information on courses and careers, improves their personal and professional skills and allows them to make informed choices about their future. We challenge pupils to work at a higher level, allowing them to see what University study is like, and set this learning within engaging contexts, be it making paracetamol in the Chemistry labs, designing MP3 players in the Engineering department or taking part in a formal court case in the Law Challenge.
“Our Strathclyde student mentors act as inspirational role models, supporting the pupils through their challenges while creating a relaxed learning environment in which pupils feel able to take on these challenges without fear of failure. We see the Accelerate programme as the beginning of a relationship between the University and these pupils and we have a variety of initiatives, such as Junior Mentoring, to offer them sustained support moving forwards.”
Nicola Seaman just completed S6 at Auchenharvie Academy, she was a 2013 Chemistry Challenge participant and this year she was Junior Mentor for the programme.
She said: “Last year’s programme gave me the opportunity to experience University life, meet people of similar interests and opened my eyes to the various career prospects of a degree in Chemistry. Coming back as a Junior Mentor has been really beneficial. I am able to use the skills and knowledge I picked up last year to help this year’s group and, being of a similar age to them, I can answer questions from a different perspective than the senior mentors on the programme. It has also been excellent for me personally as I have gained so much confidence in talking to larger groups and interacting with people my age and adults alike.”
from fearghal @ Fearghal Kelly
In my last post, I suggested that the future of CfE lay in the profession taking hold of it and leading the direction of travel. I titled the post CfE2.0 but never really explained why I did so. I think in my geekiness I had assumed everyone would get the analogy, but apparently that’s not the case…thanks @aileendunbar!
I’ve tried to make this clearer with the image above. The analogy I’m using here is the web. In it’s early days, a very small number of people contributed to the web and most people were consumers of this content. We might’ve read the BBC website but most of us would never have actually put anything onto the internet ourselves. Many folks now refer to this as Web 1.0 to distinguish it from our current use of the web. In Web 2.0 most users are producers as well as consumers. Through blogs, twitter, facebook, youtube, flickr and many many other such tools, most people who are online are contributing content to the web as well as reading and watching other people’s content. Web 1.0 is sometimes referred to as the “read” web, whereas web 2.0 is the “read/write” web.
So, what has all this got to do with Curriculum for Excellence? Well we could liken CfE, and all previous curricula, up to now to the early iteration of the internet. A small number of people produce it for a large number of people to “consume” – i.e. deliver to their classes. So, I’m suggesting that the future of CfE lies in becoming a read/write curriculum, or CfE2.0. We should be aiming for teachers, and students, to become collaborators in the development of the curriculum.
But, what would be our tools to achieve this? What would be the equivalent of our twitter? There may be a number of answers to this, but practitioner enquiry seems to be a key one to me. If teachers across the country were engaging in an enquiry approach to developing the curriculum with their classes, based on literature and feeding out into the system, we could begin to make this shift. But what about consistency I hear you ask? Obviously there needs to be some level of consistency and we’ll need to decide where to draw this line. There is a delicate balance to be struck between having a consistent curriculum and one which overly restricts teachers and learners, thus stifling creativity and personalisation. I personally think we possibly need to trim back the experiences and outcomes to allow more freedom…but not bin them altogether. Imagine rather than continuing to moan about this, I was encouraged to research into this with my classes in collaboration with teachers in other schools?
In order for this to happen, there needs to be a few changes in mindset across the system:
I’m aware that in these posts I’m perhaps sounding a little bit idealistic and not plugged into reality…perhaps I am. But I would suggest that many of the above are actually happening already through the implementation of the Donaldson report, the new standards and professional update. All that’s really missing I think is the explicit linking of these professional learning initiatives to a vision for how the curriculum will be developed in the future – however, the principles of the CLTA forums overlap with this view somewhat.
So, in actual fact we could be closer than we might think to this vision of a read/write curriculum…or CfE2.0.
from fearghal @ Fearghal Kelly
Curriculum for Excellence will be ten years old this coming November. This is if we count its date of birth as the publication of the report of the Curriculum Review Group in November 2004 which was titled ‘A Curriculum for Excellence‘ – which is as good a time as any to measure its age by I think. There are many interesting issues which arise from this policy process reaching double figures…firstly, for some in Secondaries, CfE is only two months old – i.e. it only really started in May of this year when students sat the new exams for the first time! For others, a ten year old policy would imply that we must surely have got to grips with it by now and it must surely be fully implemented – how though do you ever fully implement excellence? For many however, the growing suspicion might be that a ten year old policy is surely in its dying days. Don’t we do big bang reform every 10-15 years or so?
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m pleased to learn that there is an effort being made by SG/ES to avoid further big bang reforms through the new CLTA forums and I really hope these are successful in this endeavour. However, are the winds of change already amongst us? As David Cameron mentioned at #PedagooGlasgow, the focus seems to be shifting back to attainment – which is evident from the theme of this year’s SLF. Also, has anyone else noticed that the term ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ seems to be being slowly played down on the Education Scotland website?
Change, I suppose, is inevitable and desirable. This can be hard for many teachers to hear after having lived through the last ten years, but it’s the reality of modern life. The real question therefore should probably be about what sort of change we want and for what purpose? The assumption I was alluding to above is that Government at some point in the coming years replaces CfE with something else. My personal fear in this scenario is that it takes the form of a pendulum swing back towards a focus purely on attainment, testing and rote learning. But perhaps this isn’t the way the change needs to happen?
I’ve long felt that CfE was implemented the wrong way round. To put autonomy onto teachers who have not experienced autonomy for years, does not necessarily feel like a good thing! I’ve argued on a few occasions in the past that we should’ve started with skilling up and reprofessionalising the profession before attempting to implement a new curriculum. I always felt that trying to achieve transformational change through giving out folders and subjecting teachers to powerpoints was unlikely to be successful. But we are where we are, so where do we go from here? Well, we now have in place a relatively future-proof set of policies at their core which we’re all relatively familiar with on some level. At the same time, we’re now in the process of implementing some visionary new professional standards from the GTCS which, I think, up the game in terms of what this job of ours involves – particularly in relation to engaging with, and contributing to, research. As a result, we’re beginning to see an increasing engagement with enquiry and research across the profession. This is more like the form of professional learning which is likely to bring about real change in classrooms I think.
Perhaps, therefore, the time is right for us as a profession to shape the direction of the curriculum in the future. As an engaged and researching profession, we can have the confidence to argue the case for change and make sure the curriculum continues to evolve in the way that we think it should and make it what it should be for our young people. I once wrote a fictional history post which suggested that this is the way it should’ve been the first time, which was always a bit far fetched…but perhaps it’s less so this time round?
So rather than fearing possible further changes to the curriculum in the future, let’s engage in enquiry, debate and policy forums and make sure that change does indeed happen for the benefit of our future learners. Perhaps that’s what CfE2.0 could and should be?
EDIT
I’ve expanded on this post here.
from Charlie Love @ Charlie Love.org
from James McEnaney @ I've Been Thinking
from James McEnaney @ I've Been Thinking