Tag Archives: Curriculum Development

Self-Reflection, Skills, Teaching Pedagogy, Vision and Leadership

Planning a school trip abroad – CERN Geneva

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Gerry Burns, Physics/Science Department

My recent CPD activities included taking 18 pupils to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The purpose of this trip was to allow pupils to investigate particle physics at the biggest experiment on the planet. As I hadn’t taken pupils on a trip abroad before, there was great value in understanding how to organise the event in a way that the pupils got the maximum benefit while ensuring all the health and safety needs of the group were met.

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Interdisciplinary learning, Responsibility of All, Self-Reflection, This is our Faith, Uncategorized, Vision and Leadership

R.E. Inset Day

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Frank Quinn – Principal Teacher R.E. Department

As part of the school’s plan in implementing “Shining the Light” and “This is Our Faith” (T.I.O.F.), it was decided that some time should be spent looking at part of the document “T.I.O.F.” by the whole staff during an Inset day.  The school believes the way forward with “T.I.O.F.” and the school’s Religious Education programme is to approach it as a whole-school responsibility, like Literacy, Numeracy and H&WB.  Each department should be aware where there are opportunities for them to contribute to the R.E. in the school.

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Health and wellbeing, Teaching Pedagogy, Vision and Leadership

Primary and Secondary PE Provision

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Paul Stark

November witnessed the first meeting of the PE working group at St Margaret’s Academy. The group is made up of primary and secondary PE specialists, school staff members and senior management and has been tasked with reflecting on the second and third level PE provision across the St Margaret’s cluster. The inaugural meeting was attended by 19 members of primary and secondary staff who discussed the PE provision currently on offer to P6 and P7 pupils across the associated primaries and S1 and S2 pupils within St Margaret’s.

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Self-Reflection, Teaching Pedagogy, Vision and Leadership

Working Together for Better Science Learning – a Cluster Approach to CPD

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St Margaret’s Academy Science department has been approached by SSERC to develop the transition process in science. The rationale and outline of this programme: “Working Together for Better Science Learning – a Cluster Approach to CPD programme” can be downloaded here. Myself and colleague Keith Varty along with one of our primary colleagues Jennifer Currie were invited along to the first workshop of the Armadale cluster to see how this works and if it is something that we would be interested in leading across our cluster. Each cluster primary school had sent at least two representatives to this event and Armadale Academy also had members of the science department there to help support their primary colleagues in the science tasks carried out during the workshop.

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Responsibility of All, Self-Reflection, Vision and Leadership

Assessment and Moderation – Key Messages

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IS Day presentation by Catherine Kerr (PTC Science)

To be honest I’m not really an expert on the subject. As a starting point I walked about the school asking staff what their understanding of Assessment and Moderation was. The responses were really interesting as the teachers that I put on the spot (mainly un-promoted staff) all had very similar understandings, concerns, and misconceptions. My Assessment and Moderation presentation therefore focussed on the teachers at St. Margaret’s point of view and my hope was that it would build on what was already known as well as clarify some of the key messages from educational policy and best practice.

The information provided came from several sources including the Education Scotland website which provides lots of current information on Assessment and Moderation. In addition I accessed the National Assessment Resource (NAR). As a database I think the NAR is a bit of a let down but the search facility is useful. I searched for ‘sharing the standards’, which brought up different authorities examples of moderation some of which were excellent and used throughout my presentation. All of the information I thought staff might find useful has been placed in a ring binder for each curricular area.

Further useful links include:

Responsibility of All, Vision and Leadership

Rights Respecting Schools Staff Workshop

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Gerry Burns, Physics/Science Department

This workshop aimed to generate discussion of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) with staff to raise awareness of what it means.  This also allowed staff the CPD opportunity to gain an insight into the forthcoming RRSA project. In addition, this was used to test this activity before it is used with pupils.

From a selected number of articles printed on card from the UNCRC, staff were asked to pick the three most important articles relating to pupils within the school.  They were asked to discuss each and provide an insight into why they thought their selection was important.  The Specific instructions for these tasks can be found on the powerpoint located here.  The responses from this were collated from a plenary session at the end of the workshop.

On the whole, staff commented that they enjoyed this task and thought it was an effective way to generate discussion of the needs of the pupils within the school and also in a wider context for young people around the world.  For the most part, groups in each workshop picked different articles which again led to discussion of the thinking behind the selection.  Staff commented that they believed that this would be an effective tool to use with pupils to raise awareness of UNCRC and RRSA.

In the future pupils will undertake the same task in PSE or during a dedicated period.  This will also be used as a survey and the results collated to gauge the overall opinion of the pupils within the school.  An additional task will be undertaken whereby pupils will use the same articles to place them into the categories of rights (survival, protection, development and participation)