foolfillment: the blog

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

“We learn from our experience…..if we reflect upon our experience” - John Dewey.

I have never been one for doing an end of year, navel gazing post,* instead I tend to be pretty reflective all the time, but now that the new term has begun I’ve found myself thinking more about how things have changed since August. There have of course been huge changes in myself professionally, I have gained a huge amount of curricular knowledge from teaching subjects I’ve not taught before, but it’s all the other areas that have changed the most (as an aside I wonder how many teachers well out of probation ever look at their practice compared to the Standard for Full Registration…) like classroom/workshop management, managing pupil behaviour, and short/medium/long term planning.

It’s the last one I want to pick up on. Last term the only constant was change, and things are continuing to change this term. It’s no doubt the same in every school: staff come and go; people get promotions; but it feels like there has been more upheaval than is normal. We are about to start with a new timetable on Monday and I will be losing a couple of periods a week with 2 of my classes. This means I’m going to have to plan out material for those periods for the foreseeable future. This would be quite a big task normally but this time it’s made more difficult by the fact that it is classes sitting our 2 year Highers - the first time we’ve run them. It means that while we have plans for the courses both long term and short term the classes are still being ironed out as we go to an extent.

I’ll try to let you know how things go, though hopefully you’ll be able to track the progress on the RHSCDT edubuzz blog.

*In fact I always find the New Year quite a bizarre idea, an enjoyable, but bizarre nonetheless. After all it’s just a moment in time, man just happens to have picked this day as the start/end of a cycle he has noticed. Nature itself makes nothing of the date - waves continue to come crashing in, the moon does it’s own thing.