foolfillment: the blog

I’m looking for your ideas in this post.

A quick summary first: Today saw the final training session for this year’s probationers in East Lothian. Training really isn’t the right word for it as it was more an informal afternoon with the focus being on sharing and exploring our ideas about the Learning and Teaching that is going on in East Lothian. There was another focus - recently all the probationers took part in a sector shadow where secondary teachers watched primary classes for a day then swapped over - so this gave a lead to the discussions.

The final activity we took part in was particularly useful - both for sharing ideas but also to justify what we do to other professionals. This is where I’d really appreciate your comments.

There were two headings under which we had to describe something that we think is great practice and we want to implement or continue to do when we take up our next jobs. We then mingled and shared ideas with each other. It opened up my eyes (even further) as to the variety of things that are going on in Primary schools that are just fantastic.

The first heading was Formative Assessment/Learning Strategies.
I wrote something along the lines of: Peer Assessment - evaluating each others work, pupils are much better at praising/criticising each other’s work than their own.

The second header was Management of Learning.
For this I wrote Starter questions/exercises at start of every lesson.

I’d love to hear you share anything that you consider to be essential to good learning and teaching so please leave a comment. It needn’t be much just a few words describing something that you think works.

( I toyed with the idea of writing this as a meme, so feel free to write up on your own blog and link here, or even to tag someone else.)

I’m pleased to let you know that on Monday I was interviewed for a position at Hawick High School, and subsequently offered the job which I accepted.

I’ll take up my new position in August for the new term, with my own classroom and possibly a workshop to call my very own too, unheard of delights for a techy teacher :-).

I’ll be very sad to leave Ross High as my time there has been very positive and it is a very busy department with a lot of great staff, and a lot of fantastic classes that I will be feeling very guilty about leaving behind. However this is the way things go in the current system.

The situation for probationers this year is looking pretty grim and there aren’t many jobs coming up for teachers of my subjects anywhere in Scotland so I am absolutely delighted to have secured a full-time permanent contract, with the added bonus that this is a school and department that I am really looking forward to working in. It’s a huge relief.

I came across this image via the logoblog today. See how many brands you can identify from just the initial. It’s quite striking how many of these are brands that don’t use the initial as their brand logo, yet are instantly recognisable.

The Brand Alphabet by InThePictureDesign.co.uk

One thing I like my pupils to think about when presenting folios is
consistency throughout the pages with something like this sort of
‘house style’, and this I think shows the impact and penetration that a
strong brand can have upon users/consumers mindset.

Monday the 14th of April sees the publication of the draft outcomes for Technologies. I’m really looking forward to seeing what is in them and where we may be going, Technologies is such a broad name and it could cover anything we wanted it to, hopefully there won’t be a trap of covering everything - and in the end nothing to a reasonable depth. At the same time I hope we will not be sticking too closely to the ‘traditional’ view of technical where all we teach is how to make sawdust and filings, and instead we are able to position ourselves so we can teach at the forefront of advancing technologies and keep up with the demands of industry - whichever industry that may be at the time.

I also hope deep down that design will feature heavily in a way that will embed design into everything that we as technology teachers do, and also into what every other teacher does.

Awkwardly that date coincides with something else which you may, or may not hear more about later - although that may actually save my skin a little (anyone worked out what I’m on about?)

Image credit: Red Bridge - Originally uploaded by El Fotopakismo