Nick Hood's CPD Log

I was invited, along with my good friend Sinclair Mackenzie of Thurso fame, to put on a little workshop for the ASE Science Teachers’ conference, held this morning. We put on a joint presentation / demo of blogs and blogging, RSS, twitter, video / audio podcasting and provided information via a wiki for the delegates to enable them to follow up any of the ideas we were talking about.

Prior to the conference, I had set up some timed tweets using hootsuite asking for people to say, “Hi” and to tell the delegates how twitter is useful. We ran the responses as a backchannel using twitterfall and had messages from Scottish Educators around the country as well as friends and followers around the world from Greece, New York and Japan.

Tweets for us from around the world

After our presentation, there were a number of “while I’m there” jobs to do, including picking up some kit for another school from Professor Shanks of the Optoelectronics College,  having a chat with the lab rats of SSERC on a problem I’ve been having with Millikan’s Oil Drop experiment, and getting some guidance and support from the IoP cognoscenti on resource sharing. These done, I also had time and opportunity (isn’t it what conferences are for?) to network with other friends old and new, from colleagues on the Education Committee, to the internet famous like Danny Mallon, podcaster and alter ego of Granny Physics of helpmyphysics.

IoP Rocket launcher kit

I enjoyed being in the audience of the “Question Time” forum which tackled some of the trickier questions surrounding the state of Scottish Education in general, and Science in particular. Not least, I got along to Tom Clark’s rocket workshop, where, I am afraid, my own effort resulted in the “phut” to everyone else’s “whoosh!”. As for all delegates to this brilliant workshop, I walked away with my own kit.

It was an excellent conference: I was very well looked after from the moment I got to Dunblane until the moment I left. It is unfortunate that many people who would liked to have gone have been denied the opportunity by a failure of their schools to prioritise correctly. Good financial management is about spending intelligently, not cutting stupidly.

A very valuable day out: 2 hours preparation; 1 hour presentation; 3 hours on the rest.

Yesterday morning, I was interviewed by David Noble as part of his research for the edonis project, which David describes in his tagline as, “an interpretive study of the social web and PLNs”, in which “PLN” is the TLA* for “personal learning network”.

David is the consummate interviewer: he offered a good deal of flexibility in the logistics and sufficient information and reassurance before the interview proper to allow me to be relaxed, focused and hopefully sufficiently forthcoming for his purposes.

The finished interview may well finish up as one of his already fascinating series of professional interviews, which he publishes via iTunes and the edonis ning. We touched upon several areas, including what my experience of online learning has been as a student and as a teacher, and online relationships, including how I have evolved my use of things like social media and other channels to meet the needs of my students.

I found answering David’s questions fruitful for me as a review of what it is that I have managed to do in the few years since I became a secondary school teacher in the Scottish State school system, and to see clearly the varying degrees of success I have had with this. I’m looking forward to hearing the editorial cut and am glad to have been able to participate in this important research project.

1 hour

* three-letter acronym

Today, I attended my first ever meeting of the Institute of Physics in Scotland Education committee at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. From the committee website:

The IOP Education Committee for Scotland is a sub-committee of the Education Board and has a formal reporting channel via the Board to Council. The Chair of the Committee is a member of the Education Board and the Committee advises the Education Board in the areas of Education and Higher Education at school, college and university level in Scotland. The Committee takes specific responsibility for monitoring the Institute’s programmes of activity relating to education and, where appropriate, advising the Education Board.

It’s not appropriate to post details of the discussion but the topics ranged from the new curriculum (for Excellence and the new Higher) to the work of the Education Department in London; Teacher training and supply; CPD; and Physics in Higher Education. As you would expect, the debate was rich, informed, frank and enlightening. I was pleased that I was able to contribute to the discussion on the new talkphysics website as well as the general matters in hand.

There are three things to follow up: the first is the Government’s Review of Teacher Education in Scotland being conducted by Graham Donaldson, former HM Chief Inspector of Education. It will be important to take the opportunity to contribute to this review at the appropriate time. The second  is to acknowledge that times are about to get hard – somebody suggested for about ten years – in education as much as anywhere. This is underlined by the increasing competitiveness in entering undergraduate education: the entry requirements must be considered to be necessary but not sufficient to gain entry to a degree course.

Finally, it is clear that for some time now that pupils obtaining unconditional offers based upon their Highers at the end of S5 will often cruise the final year of school. This tends to make them unprepared for the first year of university, but hey, it’s actually not that hard in Scotland because it’s directed at those who haven’t been exposed to Advanced Higher. So, they enjoy another relatively easy ride, when along comes second year when – crash and burn – they are unable to study sufficiently hard with new and unfamiliar material, having cruised for effectively two years, and drop out. Now, there are a lot of sweeping generalisations in there but it may be an indicator as to why drop-out rates in second year in Scotland are higher than elsewhere. I will be warning my students about this trap in no uncertain terms to ensure they are not contributing to the drop-out statistics.

Needless to say, what is written here is not endorsed by the IoP, the committee, nor anyone else; it represents a view attributable only to me personally and not my employer, associates, colleagues or even my dog. Act on anything you read here and you do so at entirely your own risk.

4 hours in and after the meeting, plus 3 hours preparation

Our good friend, Nickki Young popped into school this afternoon to visit. Nickki was a probationer at Glenwood before moving to the Cramlington Learning Village in Northumberland. This is a big step for anyone to take, with the changes required to move from the SQA system to OCR. She seems to be thriving on the challenge and took the opportunity to show off some of her school’s excellent ICT resources, including their VLE based on the Frog platform. There is a great deal of resource available to support staff in the school, including some very extensive planning templates (lesson plans). Such is the reputation of the school, that a number of the staff spend time in other schools providing CPD. Nickki gave us an impressive insight into what is possible with appropriate, well resourced ICT facilities. We anticipate GLOW in Scotland. Will the centralistic public sector approach outclass devolved opportunity? Time will tell.

1 hour

Dr. Helen Gorman

I attended TeachmeetCfE this evening for a couple of hours of excellent sharing of great ideas around Curriculum for Excellence: meeting with educators prepared to stand up and share, informally but under time constraint. I particularly enjoyed Dr. Gorman’s Prezi on homework and the focus on choice in CfE and Ian Stewart’s run through some of the fantastic open source or free software out in use at Islay. There’s much talk of GLOW and the expectation that it will turn out to be fantastically useful in the new curriculum for sharing resources, and especially developing the new literacies.

2 hours, not including the curry

This post follows on from the last, in which I described the results of a survey of colleagues as I approach the end of my time at Glenwood High School in Fife. Here, I present a summary of the responses from the survey of pupils: the questions were quite different because the purpose is different. I am looking for clues about what kind of teacher I am, with questions designed to probe the experience of children in my teaching laboratory (including some in response to certain issues I am aware of). Each experience of the collection of a little over 50 were ratings from 1 to 6 of how often the experience was had in my classroom.

About 50 pupils responded to the call. Experiences were grouped by (i) Classroom environment, (ii) Lessons, (iii), Activities, and (iv) the Teacher, with the opportunity for comment after each group and again at the end of the survey. It is clear that senior pupils – 19 responded – have a different experience to those in the SCQF levels 3 – 5  (11 responses) and yet different from the mainly S2 respondents (17). A further 5 respondents are in the “none of the above” category, and will include pupils I have met in my duties around the school and as a first line guidance (form class) teacher. Continue reading

As I am approaching the end of my 23-month tenure as Principal Teacher of Physics at Glenwood High School, I have had cause to take stock of myself as a teacher. Partly, because I am disappointed that the acting Head Teacher couldn’t see the advantage in keeping or renewing my contract (even until the exams in late May) and partly because I was rather severely taken to task by and on behalf of the former Head Teacher in response to (untrue) allegations made by a parent about what I was teaching. I do not believe these two things are related but I do believe they come about because I am not one to tacitly endure what I see as unreasonableness: I rather enjoy the freedoms teachers in Scottish Secondary Education are burdened with to develop the children we engage with, and I am blessed (or cursed) with the ability to see through much bushllit. This, in no small measure, is heaped upon us by those who speak the long words of Education today when talking about the endless change suffered by the State Educators in the name of “Inclusion”, “Raising Attainment”, “Building the Curriculum”, “Excellence for All”, and so on.

My friends counsel caution. Others openly roll their eyes or slip, “oh, here we go” off the tongue in stage whispers when I contribute in collegiate forums in school. So, I thought I’d solicit some feedback: I set up two anonymous surveys using surveymonkey.com – one for the pupils I teach and the other for the staff at Glenwood. The latter survey was based upon the SQH 360 degree review but was not targeted to “known” respondents: rather, I thought I’d invite assessment from all who might have come into contact with me professionally. Here’s what I got. Continue reading

We were given a specific task to do for the in-service day: namely, to cross-check the outcomes for level three of the new Curriculum for Excellence against the current S1/2 courses and identify the development work required to bring us into line with the expectations that we will meet the entitlements in the session beginning August this year, for S1 at least. The additional task of linking in the Health & Well-being, Numeracy and Literacy outcomes was expected too.

This was done, just within the time allowed. We were also given the mandatory update on Child Protection and a treat of Bacon Rolls and coffee to start the day.

7 hours

We had another curry night at the Amritsar in Kirkcaldy tonight and as usual, there was much discussion of topical issues. Not least of these was the consideration of whether the iPhone “Pressure at a Depth” application was any good once the iPhone had been dropped down the toilet (Sean Duffy’s investigation). We also talked about the cost of combining the Advanced Higher Physics investigation into the charge-to-mass ratio of an electron with measuring g. The scope for repeat measurements was considered to be limited (again, thanks to Sean for the practical report).

Dave Spittal was there also, as well as MPhys student Claire Motion from St. Andrews University, Claire Robinson, and the juggling PT, Sean Duffy.

2 hours

Our school operates a system of sharing good practice through after-hours CPD sessions which are put on by members of staff. The idea is that good practice, new ideas, technology and the like are shared – but not only that, those that attend the sessions get the opportunity to discuss, question, challenge and develop these ideas and experiences. The result is a rich development.

Tomorrow, I have the opportunity to share some of the development I have been doing in my own classroom since September, when I had the good luck to attend Carol Dweck’s keynote at the Scottish Learning Festival. I followed that up by reading her book and making connections with the work of Alfie Kohn on praise, rewards and motivation. I hope my colleagues find this interesting and anyone else who wishes to may access the notes from the session. It is a coincidence that Douglas Blane has written an article in the TESS this week on developing growth mindsets: there’s a link in the notes.

I’d welcome your comments and feedback.

3 hours preparation, 1 hour twilight session.