Following the rant in my last post, which seemed to cause a bit of a stir out on Twitter, there were some great ideas for sharing good practice bouncing around in the Edtechroundup meeting on Sunday night. The podcast will be out shortly and will be well worth listening to if you’ve got an interest in leading or developing CDP / Inset in your school.
I want to leave the theme of inset on a more positive note, so below is an outline for my ‘fantasy inset’ for next years Transition Day, which I’ll be emailing to the key people in school when we return.
Session 1 – Welcome and Keynote (30 mins-ish)
The transition plan – what it is, what’s happened over the last few years, successes (both in terms of projects and impact) and ideas for the future.
Session 2 – Breakouts (1 hour?)
In classrooms, groups of teachers will come together from various schools to discuss practice in their schools. If practical it might be nice to arrange these roughly in subject areas, to allow non core subject teachers to get some ideas about how ‘their’ subjects are taught in the previous / next Key Stage. Guiding questions can be provided, but the chat should be informal and practice-based
Coffee
Session 3 – Show & Tell / Teachmeet – (90 mins?)
Before and during the morning sessions, individuals would be encouraged to put themselves forward to talk about one specific thing they do in their classrooms. It might be a particular technique, use of a particular tool, website, approach anything. Names would be drawn at random and everyone would have up to 5(?) minutes to talk. A projector will be available but Powerpoint will be banned.The idea would be to create a more ‘informal’ atmosphere than is normally the cases at these kind of events.
If you wanted to go v.high tech, questions could be texted during the talk, a few put to the speaker at the end, and the rest posted on a follow up website which could also contain a video or audio recording of each of the talks. However, if this was percieved as a barrier, it could be dropped.
This approach has been used with great sucess at events such as the Scottish Learning Festival and BETT, and at schools such as Rickmandsworth School.
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For my money that would tick all the boxes. Staff would be brought up to date with the ‘big picture’ as it applied to our school, would have time to talk through ideas with colleagues from other schools / key stages, would have a chance to share and learn about good practice and above all have fun in a positive and supportive environment. And the whole thing would be topped off by a really nice lunch in which the food suitable for vegetarians would be clearly identified (!)