Although I’m not yet at the end of my Secondment (it’s recently been extended to the end of March 2011) I thought I should do myself a favour and try to reflect on this session before the summer holidays. I think this will hopefully help me to reflect more fully come next April, much like the ever inspiring Margaret Vass.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of this job has been the incredible variety it has involved so far. Many of the day to day conversations, meetings and seminars become a little lost in the relentless march of time – so I’ve tried to pick out five of the major pieces of work from the year to focus on…

Communication

One of my first jobs on arrival in the office was to sort out a way of communicating information, practice and documents with colleagues in schools. Given my previous experience with blogs (such as this one) I decided that this would be the way to go so set up the CfE in East Lothian blog.

I’m quite pleased with the blog, although if I had the time I would’ve liked to done some work to find out just how useful it is and how it could be made more useful. I’m really pleased to see that this blog has recently been expanded with lots of resources by my colleagues – it’s so much better when a blog like this is added to by more than one/two people.

Subject Learning Communities

One of the major challenges facing me this year was to launch a model for collaborative working between East Lothian’s secondary subject teachers. There’s a bit of history here with funding having been removed from the previous system, so anything new had to take note of this.

I’ve written before about the approach we decided to take, and you can check up on our progress here.

This process has been an amazing challenge for me. I remember talking about the idea of professional learning communities in my interview, but was quite shocked to find myself actually working to implement them. Meeting with the teachers at the 11 subject seminars was fascinating. Working so closely with Don was very interesting. And developing & delivering the training to facilitators was both daunting and exhilarating.

Assessment

I’ve been involved with assessment in a number of ways this year, but the example that jumps out to me is the work to produce exemplars for the National Assessment Resource. This didn’t actually involve much work on my part, the teachers did all the work. My role was to coordinate the East Lothian schools and support them as appropriate. I learnt a lot from this role, both in terms of coordinating this sort of activity, but also in terms of my own understanding of assessment. I feel that this involvement was a fantastic opportunity for me to come to grips with what Building the Curriculum 5 means and how it should be implemented.

CPD

I’ve worked to provide a variety of CPD this year, but it was always a bit “on the hoof” as these sorts of things are sorted out in the previous session before I was appointed. The sorts of CPD which I have offered have included the TeachMeet, twilight sessions for NQTs, CfE updates for various groups of colleagues and two Sciences LTS Engagement events.

More recently I’ve been trying to change the focus of the CPD to make it more sustainable and less time consuming for schools. This has involved going into the secondary schools for two days and offering “CfE drop in” sessions which seemed to prove useful for many staff. I’ve also been working to put together resources on BtC4 & BtC5 which leaders in schools could use to deliver in-service.

Planning

The final theme I’ve chosen to focus on briefly is Local Authority CfE planning for next session. I’ve been heavily involved in planning for CfE implementation in East Lothian broadley, and also developing a system for moderation in Literacy & English and Numeracy & Mathematics more specifically.

This process has been quite demanding. For me, being able to contribute substantially to these sorts of discussions demonstrated to myself the progress I’ve made this session. I feel I now have a much deeper understanding of CfE, but also a more developed awareness of the strategic issues involved in its implementation.

As I say, this is a very brief and quite superficial attempt at a reflection – but hopefully it will prove useful when I try to do something more substantial in April.

Photo from tk-link