The #nurture hashtag was inaugurated by @ChocoTzar on twitter this time of year, a couple of years ago. #nurture1415 posts have been collected here by @Sue_Cowley. The idea this time is for educators blog about five positives from the year just gone, and five wishes for the year to come.
Below are mine.
In no particular order.
2014 positives
1. Working with more even early phase primary teachers. I love the commitment and can-do attitudes shown by the student teachers we’ve worked with at the Universities of Strathclyde, Glasgow and Stirling and the NQTs in the Scottish Borders. I have blogged about it here. More of the same no doubt from NQTs in both of the Dunbartonshires and BEds at the University of Edinburgh in Spring.
2.Contributing to the development of online guidance and resources to support 1+2 Primary Language Learning (PLL) has been a fantastic experience. It has been fascinating to be a part of the Education Scotland working groups led by Louise Glen, Senior Education Officer (Languages & Literacy). More than the sun of their parts, the experience and expertise brought to the groups by practitioners from across Scotland has resulted in advice and suggestions which are grounded in classroom practice.
3.Being one of the three co-ordinators of the ‘Train the Trainer’ programme. I have already blogged about it here and here so there’s not much more to say. Except to ‘fess up to the feelings of epic levels of nervousness in the preparation and presentation of this week-long professional development. It was never going to be easy for a team of three folk, each working in a different organisation, to put together then pull off this intense learning event, all under the scrutiny of HMI, as well as the participants themselves who had been carefully selected to represent their local authorities.
Luckily, in the two outings so far, Train the Trainer has been very well received by participants. Thanks are due to Richard, JohnPaul and Shona on this one. Anyone for Summer School?
4. Wearing out my Google Maps app in finding my way about the country to the many and varied venues for the many and varied CPD sessions I’ve led over the year. I’ve worked with practitioners from Aberdeenshire to South Ayrshire via Fife, North Lanarkshire and an awful lot of other places in between. Thank goodness there is an app for that! It’s great to be in a position to help colleagues. I never wanted to say no and never had to, but I was stretched to the absolute limit there for a while earlier in the year.
5. Collaborative research. I’m in the middle of two small scale research projects at the moment, both about learner voice, each with a slightly different slant. In one, I am junior colleague to a very much more experienced researcher. We collected and analysed data from language learners in P6/7, S4 and university students. We presented a workshop at the SALT Conference in November. Hopefully a journal article will come from this collaboration. Even if it doesn’t, I have learnt a lot about the research process and collaboration from this piece of work.
In the other, I find myself in the role of (slightly) more experienced researcher. This project is focusing on attitudes to language learning before and after transition from primary to secondary school. A primary teaching colleague and I are at the point of presenting the findings from the first iteration of this research. These findings are drawn from data from last year’s P7 pupils in one particular school. We hope to collect data from the same young people now that they are in S1, and see if their attitudes to learning languages are the same or have changed in any way, and try to pin down why. We also hope to collect data from this year’s P7 pupils in the same school with a view to following them into S1 and doing some comparison. We hope that this research will inform future teaching and transition practice in this cluster.
I heart research! More please!
2015 wishes
1. Submit my Masters dissertation. My final project concerns CPD provision for primary and secondary teachers of languages. I was half way through my Masters when I took up my secondment at SCILT. I struggled very much with finding a new focus for my research once I was out of the classroom, though the project links so neatly with my SCILT role that it seems bloomin’ obvious now. At the time tears were shed and quitting was contemplated, but eventually a grip was got. Nearly there now, thanks to my wonderful OH, my fellow MTeachers and the fab tutors at Moray House, especially Dr Gillian Robinson.
2. Usefully lead SCILT’s newly expanded primary PDO team. Two more colleagues will join us in January bringing more expertise in Early Years language learning & teaching, bilingualism and primary-secondary transition. Greater capacity. Great!
3. Professional Recognition for Train the Trainer participants. I will be chuffed when (not if, think positive Jones!) the proposal I’ve put in to the GTCS is accredited. More than that though, I will be absolutely beyond thrilled when (ditto) we actually get to award actual Professional Recognition to all the Train the Trainer delegates who do the recall day thing and written submission. Dates on all that stuff to be confirmed.
4. Return visit to Corseford School in Renfrewshire. The school is run by Capability Scotland and educates young people, aged 5-18, with severe and complex needs. I visited in December and met staff and young people who were using various assistive and augmentative technologies to communicate in Spanish and English as they work towards National 1 qualifications. I’m hoping to write a newsletter article about the languages work going on at Corseford, in the meantime you can get a flavour of it here.
5. Complete my secondment on 31st March 2015 with a smile on my face.
Then what? More challenges of course, every day’s a school day!
