Nick Hood's CPD Log

My school has had its bandwidth increased in order to facilitate the adoption of GLOW, the Scottish Schools Digital Network. GLOW is intended to provide a secure online learning environment to support the raising of attainment in Scotland and represents a massive investment in technology for education.

There are issues of principle and execution which have caused GLOW to be at once evangelised and pilloried but the simple fact is that it is here and we teachers should try to use the features it offers to support our work.

There was a one-hour CPD session arranged by the school last night which I trotted along to. I was quickly thrown out of the beginner session and found myself in a small group creating webparts, surveys, groups, Glowmeets and chats in my brand new GLOW space. I’ve actually been playing with GLOW for about four years now, thanks to a couple of back-door passes, and can say that it has improved massively since Andrew Brown has taken over as the GLOW Chief at LTS. The interface, whilst still a long way from the slick beauty and fit-for-purposeness of your average MacBook, is a lot better than the clunky junk that it was, as is often made by IT companies that land Public Sector IT contracts.

A good informal session, well tailored to our specific needs by the presenter, Jim Birney, which has certainly set me up to give it a try with my classes.

1 hour

There is always an element of CPD to the INSET days, and the return to school after the long break started with the statutory CPD sessions on Fire procedures and Child Protection. Both were given just enough to tick the box, but not enough for me to attribute it to my professional development.

An impromptu (set up via Twitter – the power of it!) meeting of teachers from the new media crowd was called and executed in short form last night, at the Three Judges in Partick, followed by a curry at Ashoka along near the Western Infirmary. There was a good turnout, with teachers from Primary and Secondary as well as the SQA. My own development during the evening was in being able to articulate and discuss the characteristics of a good education as distinct from outcomes, assessment and evidence-based controls. I enjoyed the reminder of my critical thinking task from last year and the impact it had. For this alone, I may postpone the planned pulling of my online content.

The evening was powerful in the reminders it gave me of the passion and commitment that exists in teachers to keep turning up despite the best efforts of those whose intention seems to be to eliminate education from the school system in Scotland. A prompt for this was John Connell’s blog post and the commentary.

Some of those attending were @drewburrett, @islayian (and Caroline), @joecar, @gbrown057, @krysiaS (and Stu), @mvass and @missbrannan.

4 hours of rich professional development

A slack handful of Physics teachers met for a final curry of the session and shared some great ideas, as usual. Topics ranged from using tracker.jar with Flip Video cameras (other cameras are available) to rotational motion in Advanced Higher.

Not least of the table talk, however, was the departure for the middle east of one of our physics curry night founders, Dave Spittal. We all wish him and Mrs. Spittal the very best on their big adventure. Dave has promised to remain active in our network through SPUTNIK, the Physics Teacher’s forum operated by the Institute.

In the picture, from the left: John Lovell, Dave Spittal, Gordon MacGregor, Martin Cunningham, Dr. Colin Oates, Tom Dickson and Dr. John Emeleus.

2 hours of priceless exchange

I travelled to Rednal, near Birmingham on Friday for the one-day annual Health and Safety seminar held by my union, the NASUWT. I am the Fife Health and Safety rep for the union and although I have extensive experience in industry of managing risk, with executive responsibility for Health and Safety in aerospace, it struck me as a good opportunity to bring myself up to speed with these matters in the context of Education.

Building and refurbishing schools

After an address by Paula Roe, Junior Vice President and Mick Lyons, Chair of the Health and Safety Committee, we heard from two keynote speakers on “Health and Safety considerations when building and refurbishing schools”. Although Health and Safety legislation is UK-wide, the speakers were very much involved in English Programmes for new buildings and what seems to me to be massive outsourcing of educational provision in Birmingham. This part of the seminar, interesting as it was, was of little relevance to Scotland: despite that, most of the questions from the floor were from the Scottish reps! It was worth picking up the links to Learning Through Landscapes, a charity which helps schools make the most of outdoor spaces. The Scottish equivalent is called Grounds for Learning.

Risk Assessment of Disruptive Pupils

The first of two good practice seminars was led by Mick Lyons and Jim Quigley of the union’s excellent legal team. We were given an overview of the principal legal framework, which is the same Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 (as amended) with which I have become closely acquainted in industry and as an employer, together with the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, which is a little less familiar. Key elements of the legislation in context of education are worth highlighting:

• Staff obligations – incidents involving verbal and physical violence must be reported
• Schools must have a written Health and Safety policy which includes risk assessment procedures
• Schools must have a written behaviour management policy which includes clear and detailed procedures for pupils and staff
• Risk assessment of specific pupils, once requested, must be completed correctly by a competent person
• Where schools fail to have due regard for the health and safety of members, a ballot for a “refusal to teach” certain pupils may be taken

There is extremely helpful guidance for school leaders and staff published by the DfES (remember this is UK law, so applies in Scotland, just read “Local Authority” instead of “LEA” for State Schools), in particular the Guidance document DfES/0803/2001 (57kB MS Word). A good example of an incident reporting system is operated by Essex County Council. The NASUWT publishes a useful and relevant guide to risk assessment of violent and abusive behaviour. The Health and Safety Executive publish their own guide, “Five steps to risk assessment” (pdf).

Teachers’ Mental Health

After lunch, we were given an overview of the results of a study into teachers’ mental health by Gerard Leavey, who conducted the research on behalf of Compass. The report of the findings can be found here. The delegates heard from NASUWT Deputy General Secretary Dr Patrick Roach, who also spoke about the case of Peter Harvey: whose highly publicized attack on a pupil with a 2kg weight resulted in his spending 18 months in custody awaiting trial for attempted murder. This charge was dismissed and Peter ended up with 2 years conditional community service and his career and life in ruins, resulting from (this is my interpretation, not an official pronouncement):

• systematic failure of the school to deal with poor behaviour by pupils
• video recording equipment including mobile phones being available by prior arrangement of the pupils involved in the provocation of the teacher
• failure of management to support teachers’ wellbeing

Dr. Roach reminded us that the HSE has identified teaching as one of the most stressful occupations.

Banning mobile phones in school

In the questions that followed the presentation, there was a repeat of the call for a banning of mobile phones in school, which I did not have the opportunity to address at the time, but which I spoke with Dr. Roach about afterwards. It is my view that such a call would be damaging to the union and its members as an extreme and unreasonable knee-jerk reaction to situations such as Mr. Harvey’s. We should be supporting the use of new technology in teaching and learning and mobile phones have a place: I frequently use them in teaching my subject and do so in a controlled exemplification of responsible use. Where they are not appropriate, their use is managed using school discipline procedures including confiscation and sanction. this is a more intelligent call: that the union expects schools to have appropriate processes and support from managers in place to mitigate risk at the same time as embracing the advances in technology which pervade pupils’ lives to their better education and engagement. I offered Dr. Roach my support in helping the union support teachers intelligently in this regard.

Management of Health & Safety in Schools

The final seminar of the day for me was led by Jo Crickson, who again set out the legislative framework within which H&S should be managed in schools in the UK. Her panel offered useful advice and discussion on how to develop appropriate management of health and safety in schools, including:

• ensuring that there is an active health & safety committee
• conduct audits every term
• include pupils
• conduct appropriate risk assessments

Most useful is her reference to the so-called “six-pack” of UK Health and Safety regulations which all schools must comply with (including in Scotland). The interesting thing about the Wikipedia entry for these regulations is this:

“Breach of the regulations is a crime, punishable on summary conviction with a fine of up to £400. If convicted [...] an offender can be sentenced to an unlimited fine.”

These regulations are made under the Health and Safety at Work Act, 1974.

Conclusion

There’s a lot to keeping yourself healthy and safe as a teacher: the most important thing is to be aware of your duties to yourself; to report relevant incidents properly; and to be aware of what you can expect your employers – i.e. your school management team in the first instance – to be doing under the law.

Finally, notice that the law treats pupils as visitors to the premises as far as the Health and Safety legislation is concerned. If one abuses you then you are entitled to the same recourse as if it were any other visitor to the school.

A whole day of excellent education and development. 12 hours including review and write-up. Further follow up may be required.

I was glad to have the opportunity to attend the Fife Physics QIN (Quality Improvement Network) meeting today at the University of St Andrews, Hosted by Dr. Bruce Sinclair and the Physics Department at St Andrews. The day was split into two parts: the morning was a busy programme of information and experience for the teachers attending; the afternoon the business meeting of the QIN proper.

Douglas Sinclair and Sean Duffy in the labs

After a coffee and biscuits welcome (and they were) we were given a presentation by Dr. Sinclair, with input from Professor Andy MacKenzie (inter alia, admissions officer), on the innovative Gateway Programme, run by St Andrews with Heriot Watt University to give supported access to degree courses for those who otherwise might be denied it. Further information was provided by Dr Lucy Hadfield and Sean Duffy, PT Physics at Madras College. A former pupil of one of the local schools, now completing the third year of a Physics Masters degree, gave us an excellent talk on studying Physics at St Andrews: this went a long way to help dispel the stereotypes (“it doesn’t matter where you’re from“) and to acknowledge her passionate Physics teacher from school. She also made reference to an important mantra:

“Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Let me do and I understand” – Confucius

This resonated with one of Dr. Sinclair’s pictures from his presentation in which students in a Physics lecture were handling lenses: the point he was making is that keeping students active in class – doing something, not just listening, is a key feature of good teaching. For my own personal development, this is an area I could certainly improve in my teaching practice.

We were given a short tour of the facilities and some of the research taking place in the University. The Physics and teaching we were exposed to was stunning: including ultra-short (femtosecond) pulse lasers; “thinking like a physicist” in the Gateway programme; public outreach; student use of telescopes (and the “driving test”); EPR research lab; cleanroom; cryogenics; inverted pendulum; library; and my favourite, the superconducting magnets which defy gravity – but not the laws of Physics, Captain. Click the video:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

I was quite taken with the fast pulsing lasers, which can be operated in very short bursts, time intervals measured in femtoseconds. Dr. Christopher Leburn described this with an analogy: if a femtosecond were the diameter of a golf ball, then a second would be from here to Mars and back – 400 times. Here, the main laser bench (with analogical golf balls) and Dr Leburn with a portable femtosecond laser.

After a decent lunch, we reconvened for the main business meeting of the QIN, which seemed to be mostly spent in discussing the QIN itself*; a little consideration of another survey on a Curriculum for Excellence; and sharing good practice ideas, with contributions from several around the table, including:

• The Science Enhancement Programme (SEP) has a new booklet on sound available to order for associates
• Peltier Cells from MUTR
• Museum of Flight worth a visit
• Planet Sci-Cast now has support from the IoP

It was noted that the latest draft – final, bar a technical edit – of the new Higher Arrangements document set has appeared on the SQA website.

6 hours of good CPD, and much food for thought and a *response to be completed. More pictures over on Flickr.

The in-service days in June are largely given over for CfE development, which is a good thing. There were a couple of useful presentations by the Senior Managers in the school at the start of this day: reports from working groups as well as some dialogue about Building the Curriculum 5. Most useful from this was Kenny Bease’s guidance on how this should work, although he referred to a “backward” design model which seems geared towards evidence. I’m not sure I agree with the principle of this but I understand that we are likely to be required to be able to show how we are meeting the assessment criteria and this method will be helpful for that.

I signed up to run sessions for the “Learning Club”: this will be for S1/2 pupils and will be three 10-week blocks of 1 period a week (Wednesday 6) covering off-subject areas. I’ll be running a Media Skills workshop, further details over at the wiki.

1 hour

Another IoP Committee meeting, this time not so crowded but no less busy an agenda. Major items for discussion included the Donaldson Review of Teacher Education; the new Higher; Curriculum for Excellence and Physics in Higher Education. Appropriate responses are being made on behalf of the Institute in each of these areas subject to the usual protocols.

3 hours at the meeting plus 2 hours preparation and post-meeting contributions.

I followed the required procedure and had my meeting with my line manager at school. It followed the agenda in outline and included filling in a “Professional Development Plan”. The meeting focused heavily on a development task for S1/S2 which itself linked into the department development plan: this seems to be the focus of the meeting, to bend the process to require staff to work on school development tasks (cf. professional development tasks). Here’s what was recorded as the agreed plan:

*Department/School/Service Improvement Plans, HMIe Action Plan, National Priorities, HGIOS3

You’ll notice the main non-personal task looks a bit standardised: it is. The rest of the staff in the department have very similar development tasks to do in their PDPs. This is not relevant or useful for my professional development, considering what I normally do, although if I get the time, I’ll enjoy the task and do it as well as I can. For personal and professional development, I’ll be keeping my own counsel as usual, guided by those that provide that support for me. What we’ve identified through this process is my part in the department development plan: what it fails to do is to contribute in any meaningful way to my professional development. I wonder how typical the experience is: is it normal for the professional development process to be so clumsily hijacked for the sake of ticking a few boxes?

Tony Finn, please take note of this example when considering the re-accreditation process.

After Doug Belshaw’s example, I thought I’d reflect on some of the things I’ve learned recently. I’m not going to attempt to match Doug’s discipline of a weekly post, or even a regular one, but the process of reflecting on things is a massively important one if anything is to be learned from them. It’s also time for my Professional Review and Development meeting with my line manager, so this will serve as a prompt for that process, which suggests:

“In order to prepare meaningfully for the review meeting it is recommended that you take time to reflect on your current practice in order to identify areas of strength and development needs.”

1. Things are not always what they seem to be

There are a lot of frameworks, standards and other documents against which I might conduct this review but I am not going to do that: one of the things I learned in industry from schemes like Investors in People, AQAP13, ISO9000 and other “Quality Control” systems is that they have little to do with quality, least of all control. The major term itself, such as “quality” is hijacked in these schemes to fool the layman (by which I mean the persons responsible: too far away to understand the detail) into believing that the system delivers or guarantees that thing, mostly by providing mountains of documents, with ticks. In education, “Enterprise” is such a term (look for the word “empower” on your bullshit bingo play-along card): other examples are “Inclusion” (which in practice means allowing any child to permanently damage the education of his peers instead of tossing him out on the street), Active Learning and the enigmatic Curriculum for Excellence.

2. Teaching comes at an emotional cost

My current practice is a highly personal one. I remember having a conversation some time ago with Bob Kibble, the man who makes Physics Teachers out of ordinary mortals at Moray House, about the one thing I felt underprepared for when I started teaching and that is the emotional aspect of the job. I learned a great deal during my probation year at Buckhaven in Fife but the greatest thing of all was that teaching for me is a highly emotional thing to do. Nobody prepared me for the sense of loss a teacher can feel when his children are wrenched away from him as they or he moves on. They may never know it but pupils I have had the privilege of teaching have filled me with pride, awe, dismay, despair, anger and hope. All of these carry the danger of making connections with pupils that can be seen as inappropriate. (The GTCS Code of Professionalism and Conduct is rightly non-specific about maintaining “appropriate professional boundaries”, especially in regard to the internet. I have been careful in this regard and see it as my duty to model appropriate use of the internet as a tool to engage with and support pupils when they are studying, although this tends to be restricted in the main to those over 16 years old, the age of majority in Scotland.)

3. Hilda Peers is muddled (10)

It’s there somewhere, but it’s hard to see. It’s certainly a damned sight rarer than the managers of education seem to think. They mistake the managing of expedient for it. They most certainly seem to have no concept of how to get the best out of their only resource of any value – their people. Time and time again I have seen the most insensitive and incompetent handling of the affairs of people by the managers of education – most often when trying in a cack-handed manner to be effective managers of finance.

“Treat your men as you would your own beloved sons. And they will follow you into the deepest valley.” – Sun Tzu

Not unrelated – in fact possibly at the heart of the deficiency – is the concept of vision. Only once have I ever heard somebody in education clearly state what their vision of education, and specifically a school, ought to be. I can’t give her credit for it here, because she is, in fact, still a pupil at the school I work in, but get this for a vision of what a school is all about:

“Everyone who leaves a school should feel better about themselves than when they entered it.” – a pupil

If only the leaders of education could see things so clearly.

4. Principle is all you need

I admire greatly the lone voice of dissent: he who speaks out against the majority, the norm, the convention. He who has principle has more than all of the power-holders, the run-of-the-mill, the rolling eyes, the “here we go”. I have always tried to be that person although I’m hardly doing so from a position of authority. One who is, gave me some encouragement recently in a correspondence about the current train-crash that is Scottish Curriculum Reform:

“I wish I could think of something worthwhile to suggest to you: the problem is an overwhelming sense of decline, in which resistance can do no more than stem the tide, or keep open spaces for good teaching and learning to which able students respond, as they always have done and always will. So my sense is that the most effective resistance is actually only for the lone (sic) term: preserving in our own practice an education that is worthy of the name.”

I’ll take his advice.