The School Improvement Partnership Programme: Sustaining Collaboration and Enquiry to Tackle Educational Inequity

No abstract available

The School Improvement Partnership Programme: Using Collaboration and Enquiry to tackle Educational Inequity

No abstract available

Developing teachers’ capacities in assessment through career-long professional learning

In a context of increasing demand for quality and equity in education and a sharp focus on accountability, classroom teachers are also expected to support and improve learning outcomes for pupils in response to their individual needs. This paper explores three issues: how teachers understand assessment in relation to their students’ learning, the curriculum and their pedagogical choices; how teachers’ capacity to use assessment to improve students’ learning can be developed through career-long professional learning (CLPL); and how teachers’ learning can be implemented and sustained in schools, both locally and nationally. In considering these issues, recent thinking about learning and assessment and CLPL are considered alongside empirical evidence from the development and implementation of assessment processes and approaches to professional development in Scotland. The paper emphasises the importance of a dynamic framework of CLPL that recognises the individuality of teachers’ learning needs and the consequent need for tailored professional learning opportunities with different combinations of support and challenge at school, local and national levels

Dialogue on Campus: An Overview of Promising Practices

Higher education institutions are recognizing the value of dialogue in engaging diverse perspectives and experiences while providing the necessary skills and knowledge for students to become effective citizens. Colleges and universities are incorporating the theory and practice of dialogue across different dimensions of the curriculum, co-curriculum, pedagogy, and administration and governance. Examples include nation-wide intergroup dialogue programs, community standards processes in residence halls, and institution-wide decision making on curricula. Seen as a whole, these and other examples provide a vision for a comprehensive approach to integrating dialogue on campuses

"Challenge Current Practice and Assumptions! Make waves!!” : What Works Scotland Collaborative Learning Event 23 & 24 February 2016 Queens Hotel, Perth

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Who you’re gonna call? The development of university digital leaders

In our hyper-connected digitised educational world, university tutors are interested in capitalising on affordances of digital trends in teaching and learning. Students, under the alias of preservice- teachers, walk among them equipped with digital skills in areas of their interest. How can we encourage collaboration between tutors and students that can promote the use of the digital force wisely, support the development of students’ professional identities further and extend tutors’ digital competences? The story of nine tutors and eleven undergraduate pre-service-teachers working together on digital partnerships is set against discussions around digital leadership and citizenship. This case study aims to highlight how universities can respond to technology-driven change by engaging students further and support their awareness of digital citizenship. The overall results showed that the informal learning that students have capitalised outside the classroom can be used to scaffold their development of digital citizenship through offline community engagement. It demonstrates the advantage of using such opportunities as a means to encourage citizenship practices among university student communities and the positive impact that such synergies can have on all the participants

What constitutes 'peer support' within peer supported development?

Purpose: Peer supported schemes are replacing traditional Peer Observation of Teaching (PoT) programmes within some Higher Education Institutions. Peer supported schemes, whilst similar in philosophy to PoT, enable academic and academic related staff to support each other in non-teaching related activities. The purpose of this paper is to explore, therefore, the role of peer support in comparison with that of coaching and mentoring to clearly differentiate the activity. Design/methodology/approach: In 2010, one UK HEI appointed two Academic Fellows to implement and embed a 'Peer supported Development Scheme' (PSDS) within the institution. Through analysing the implementation process and drawing on activity conducted under such a scheme, this article examines the notion of 'peer support' in comparison to mentoring and coaching. The purpose of this will enable Academic Fellows to be able to better advise 'Supporters' how to work with colleagues and engage in structured dialogue to improve teaching and learning practice. Findings: The findings highlight that Peer support schemes are tangentially different to mentoring and coaching, however some activity undertaken as part of our peer supported scheme was actually mentoring and coaching. Therefore clearer guidance needs to be given to colleagues in order to steer the process towards 'peer support'. Originality/value: The PSDS discussed within this paper is only one of a few established within the UK and therefore findings from such schemes and how they are established are still emerging and will benefit other HEIs moving from PoT towards peer supported development

What Does “Peer” Mean in Teaching Observation for the Professional Development of Higher Education Lecturers?

The observation of teaching remains an integral process for the enhancement of practice as part of academic continuing professional development in higher education in the UK. This paper argues that failure to recognise the potential for peer-orientated development to reinforce restrictive norms of practice will be detrimental to the project of continuing professional development for learning and teaching. It is suggested that teaching observation schemes grounded in a peer model of observation within a reflective practitioner paradigm are potentially reinforcing parochial and performative constructions of teacher professionalism that ultimately enable resistance to changes to practice. It argues that for teaching observation to contribute to legitimate enhancement of teaching practice, such processes must be underpinned by pluralistic models of professional development that tolerate,and indeed require, critical differences of perspective that challenge rather than affirm the existing professional “self-concept” of experienced practitioners as it is enacted within current peer models of development in higher education

Imagining inclusive teachers: contesting policy assumptions in relation to the development of inclusive practice in schools

In this paper we reflect on data from two research projects in which inclusive practice in schools is at issue, in the light of wider field experience (our own and others’) of school and teacher development. We question what we understand to be relatively common, implicit policy assumptions about how teachers develop, by examining the way in which teachers are portrayed and located in these projects. The examples discussed in this paper draw on experience in Lao PDR and Bangladesh, critically exploring teachers’ roles, position and agency in practice. Similarities and differences rooted in cultural, political and institutional contexts highlight in a very productive way the significance and potential dangers of policy assumptions about teachers within the process of development. In Bangladesh, a success story is presented: the case of a group of schools in which an institutional context for learning appears to sustain teachers’ commitment and motivation, with the effect of creating meaningful outcomes for young people who were previously outside the education system. These data raise questions about the significance of institutional context to teachers’ practices, and questions about approaches to teacher development which omit consideration of that context by, for example, focusing inadvertently on features of individual teachers. We then consider teachers’ responses to the movement for inclusive education in a school in the Lao PDR since 2004. Inclusion here was understood to require a significant shift in teacher identity and a movement away from authoritative pedagogy towards the facilitation of a pedagogy which aimed to encourage the active participation of all students. Through a longitudinal study of teachers in one school, the conditions for such change were identified and again cast doubt on some of the assumptions behind large-scale attempts at teacher development. Reflecting on these experiences and the evidence they provide, we suggest that teacher development programmes are more likely to be effective where teachers are considered not as individuals subject to training but as agents located in an influential institutional context