InTuition Winter 2012/13

in at rs or rp tte co a in w No DM CP

g

Benefits Status Voice Issue 11 Winter 2012/13

The journal for professional teachers and trainers in the further education and skills sector

InTuition John Hattie, master of the quantitative universe in teaching and learning, talks to Geoff Petty.

Interview p10

Please give us your feedback on our new issue – see page 3

IfL launches a professional register for teachers and trainers News p4

The pros and cons of part-time working Features p12

Is research the missing ingredient in your teaching practice?

Coffee breaks and safety nets can deliver for learners

CPD Matters p18

Geoff Petty p30 www.i.ac.uk

1_Cover.indd 3

06/12/2012 14:26

IfL: Supporting you throughout your career IfL’s purpose is to support individuals in their practice and to raise the status of the teaching and training profession.

We believe that too often teachers and trainers in the sector are not supported well enough and that more needs to be done to create conditions that enable great teaching and learning to flourish.

Benefits of IfL membership IfL membership offers a range of benefits designed to meet the needs and aspirations of individual members at every stage in their careers and whatever their specialism or work context.

IfL supports members in their professional practice through: Assisting career development including individuals’ continuing professional development (CPD) Giving the latest information including fortnightly newsletters, policy updates, case studies and trend analysis and IfL’s professional journal, InTuition IfL’s network of regional advisers and online communities Providing recognition through enhanced professional status An influential voice within the sector giving members the opportunity to contribute and be heard IfL is a key partner to the FE guild, with other independent membership bodies including the 157 Group, land-based colleges, and trade unions, and will influence its development.

We are working collectively to support the Association of Colleges (AoC) and the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) who are the two lead partners.

Find out more at www.ifl.ac.uk or contact us anytime on 0844 815 3202 or at enquiries@ifl.ac.uk INT.12.12.002.indd 2

06/12/2012 12:33

Welcome

Celebrating a decade of brilliant teaching and commitment

Contents News There is much to reflect upon from the events and achievements of 2012. In IfL’s 10th year, the organisation has come full circle,

4

Letters 6 Your views on the last issue Opinion 8 Competition boosts learning

returning to its roots as an independent, voluntary, professional body. Last month, a gathering with some of IfL’s founder members was held at the House of Commons. Listening to the discussions at the event (see page 4), there was so much passion and commitment to teaching and learning as well as the status of the profession and FE and skills.

As the professional body for the sector, we see many examples of the passion that underpins brilliant teaching

Interview 10 The celebrated John Hattie Feature 12 The lot of part-timers in FE CPD Matters Volunteer tutors Practitioner research Computational thinking

15

InFocus Apprenticeships

23

and, while there are many challenges, there are also many positives that should be recognised and celebrated.

In this edition we take stock of, and celebrate, the contribution of part-time teachers and trainers. Some 40 per

Give us your feedback on our latest issue

cent of IfL members work part time and these individuals are

InSight 26 Specialist colleges under fire

essential to the success of the sector (page 12).

The annual Ofsted chief inspector’s report has hit all

For more information visit www.ifl.ac.uk Or follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter

education sectors hard, but in his article on page 9, Matthew Coffey, national director for learning and skills at Ofsted, writes about the positive impact of collaborative working and CPD and their importance. The impact of excellent teaching on learning is explored further in Geoff Petty’s insightful interview with John Hattie (page 10), whose exhaustive quantitative analyses of the effects of teaching practices on learner outcomes challenge many educational orthodoxies.

IfL continues to work as a key partner to the new FE Guild,

Books

32

Research

34

Noticeboard

35

Editorial board John Gannon, The Skills and Development Agency; Dr Maggie Gregson, University of Sunderland; Professor Yvonne Hillier, University of Brighton; Jacquie Higgs-Howson, Barnet College; Professor Ann Hodgson, Institute of Education; Ian Nash, Nash & Jones Partnership; Gemma Painter, National Union of Students; Marion Plant OBE, North Warwickshire and Hinckley College; James Noble Rogers, Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers; Geoffrey Stanton, Educational Consultant; Sheila Thorpe, Chichester College; Bobby Singh Upple, Network of Black Professionals; John Webber, Sussex Downs College; Tom Wilson, Unionlearn

at editor@ifl.ac.uk, sharing on Twitter using #IfL_InTuition of the issues raised in this edition. Finally, on behalf of all of us at IfL, I would like to wish you all the very best for the festive season and the new year.

Marie Ashton Managing Editor

InTuition EDITORIAL

Geoff Petty 30 First, pass the ‘coffee test’

trade unions. We will keep members updated.

or on IfL’s LinkedIn group where I hope we can discuss some

editor@ifl .ac.uk InTuition , Institute for Learning, 49 – 51 East Road, London, N1 6AH www.ifl .ac.uk/intuition

Training 29 Signing for trainee teachers

along with other partners such as Niace, the 157 group and Please continue to share your thoughts by emailing me

Contacts

InPractice 24 The magic of San Patrignano

Managing Editor: Marie Ashton Editor CPD Matters: Jean Kelly Writer: Patricia McHugo Editorial support: Julie O’Donnell, Michelle Charles Publishing and Editorial Adviser: Alan Thomson

ADVERTISING

Divisional Sales Director: Steve Grice Sales Executive : Edward Taylor 020 7880 6200 SUBSCRIPTIONS

InTuition and CPD Matters are sent to all current

members of the Institute for Learning (IfL) and are also available on subscription to non-members. For non-member subscription enquiries, or to purchase single copies, contact IfL on 0844 815 3202 or email editor@ifl .ac.uk

Annual subscription rate for four issues: £50 (UK); £60 (rest of the world).

IfL is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee. Registered in England and Wales No. 4346361.

InTuition

3_Welcome.indd 3

The views expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of IfL or members of the editorial board.

Registered offi ce: First Floor, 49 – 51 East Road, London N1 6AH Published: Sept 2012 ISSN: 2050-8950

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

3

06/12/2012 16:02

News

IfL launches professional status register for public IfL has launched a Professional Status Register for teachers and trainers in response to requests from members for more public recognition of their professional achievements and status.

The voluntary opt-in register is exclusively for IfL members who have successfully completed professional formation and achieved Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills (QTLS) or Associate Teacher Learning and Skills (ATLS) and have remained in good standing by registering their continuing professional development (CPD) annually with IfL. More than 10,000 IfL members have gained QTLS or ATLS status since 2009.

The register, which will be open to the public, embodies the professional expertise, dedication and high status of the FE teachers and trainers it lists. The aim is to provide a service that benefits IfL members, their employers and potential employers and the further education and skills sector as a whole.

The Professional Status Register will be similar to registers held by other professional bodies, for

example, the General Medical Council’s list of registered medical practitioners and the Association of Accounting Technicians’ directory of members in practice.

The register will contain a summary of people’s membership record, limited to the following information: • Name and designation, eg QTLS • Membership number • Membership status, eg fellow or member • Confirmation that a CPD declaration has been made in the current year • That the individual has made a declaration of suitability (a self-evaluation that you are fit to practise).

The professional status register can be found on IfL’s website and is currently offered as part of members’ annual membership fees.

IfL’s Professional Status Register was launched in December and only lists IfL members with QTLS or ATLS. To add your details to the register please go to www.ifl.ac.uk/PSregister And if you would like to know more, please email enquiries@ifl.ac.uk

Survey shows rema

Teachers and trainers deliver remarkable levels of personalised attention to their learners, according to a detailed survey of the effective teaching and learning practices of more than 2,500 IfL members.

More than 90 per cent of the 2,583 IfL members surveyed in October said that they had a person-centred approach to teaching and training that includes knowing the motivations, worries and ambitions of all their learners, enabling them to oversee the progress of each person in their charge.

More than eight out of 10 respondents (81 per cent) said they routinely gave feedback to learners about what and how they are learning and what kinds and approaches to learning seem to work best for them.

Almost two thirds (63 per cent) said they often or almost always took the time to help learners develop a conceptual understanding of how and what they are learning, helping them test their ideas by weighing up arguments for and against and then asking them to reflect on how they are using these thinking skills.

Initial findings from IfL’s survey Teachers and trainers make a difference coincided with publication, in late November, of the latest chief inspector’s report from the standards watchdog Ofsted which criticised the overall quality of teaching and learning in publicly-funded FE providers.

IfL’s survey, which based many of its questions on the work of work of professor John Hattie (see page 10), whose exhaustive quantitative analyses measure the effect of teaching practices on learning outcomes, does reveal areas of concern among teachers and trainers.

For example, just 42 per cent of IfL members responding spent a large

Commons touch for founders of IfL

Afternoon tea in the Houses of Parliament brought some of IfL’s founder members together to celebrate and reflect on their first decade as members.

The event, which was held on 1 November, included speeches by IfL patron Lord Boswell of Aynho, IfL’s elected chair of governors Sue Crowley and founder member and former trade union leader Derek Betts. It was sponsored by another of IfL’s patrons, Labour MP Barry Sheerman.

Lord Boswell said: “Further education has the Heineken effect: catching the bits that others cannot reach. But to do this you need professionalism.

“I think learners and the country will benefit greatly

Survey of IfL members contrasts with Ofsted’s criticism of the profession

Largest subject areas in IfL’s membership IfL membership reflects the great diversity of education and training that takes place across the FE and skills sector Preparation for life and work Business administration and law Health, public services and care Arts, media and publishing Information and communications technology Languages, literature and culture Retail and commercial enterprise Education and training Engineering and manufacturing technologies Science and mathematics Construction, planning and the built environment Leisure, travel and tourism No Group Adult and community learning History, philosophy and theology Agriculture, horticulture and animal care General interest in the sector NULL Total

4

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

4_5_News.indd 4

16% 11% 10% 7% 7% 6% 6% 6% 5% 5% 5% 4% 3% 2% 2% 2% 1% 1% 100%

InTuition

06/12/2012 17:31

www.ifl.ac.uk

markable professionalism

amount of time with employers from their vocational or subject area, something that is seen as helpful in keeping practitioners up to speed with latest practices and developments.

Survey responses suggest that time and resources may be a factor, with one member saying: “I would like to spend time with employers and several years ago I was able to. However, financial pressures now mean that there is less space in my timetable for me to be able to visit employers.”

from the professionalism of the services [IfL] offers.”

Sue Crowley told guests: “When we first sat down as a range of stakeholders and forward-thinking and visionary teachers and trainers and said we need to get together as a professional body, to be honest, I didn’t think we’d manage it.

“So, it is a joy for me to be able to stand here 10 years on and see that IfL is not only still here but that membership is more than 77,000. We could not have done it without the people who showed such commitment to a professional body for FE teachers and trainers early on.”

Derek Betts said: “We got it right when we set up IfL.

The survey also revealed that just 27 per cent said they benefited routinely from coaching to support their teaching and training, something that professor Hattie advocates, with just over a third saying they sometimes received coaching and 37 per cent saying they were rarely or never coached.

But, despite the pressures, the survey reveals that most teachers and trainers are highly engaged professionals who are committed to many of the practices highlighted by professor Hattie and IfL as having significant positive effects on professional practice and learning.

Even though many respondents felt they lacked the time or opportunity to meet with employers to update their knowledge and skills, 80 per cent said that they focused frequently on the development of their vocational or subject knowledge and professional development.

Just under three quarters (73 per cent) said that they engaged frequently in professional development

Things have changed but I believe it was the right time then to support a professional body in further education and I believe it is still the right time.”

Member poll

relating to their teaching and training methods and practices.

The chief inspector’s report from Ofsted said that the overall quality of FE provision had failed to improve and that almost 1.5 million learners were being supported by providers whose provision was graded below “good”. The overall inspection results for general FE colleges had worsened, it said, adding that the quality of teaching was insufficiently high.

Toni Fazaeli, chief executive of IfL, said: “No education system can be better than the quality of its teachers.

“Practitioners can and do thrive in colleges and providers, and yes, excellence abounds in some places.

IfL works with our large membership to support and build on this, complementing in different ways the work that the best leaders do in their organisations, just as the royal medical colleges support the health of the nation and expert practitioners.” For more information, see www. ifl.ac.uk/makeadifference

Founder members then discussed what had motivated them to join IfL eliciting a range of comments in feedback including:

What impact do you think the introduction of the English Baccalaureate will have on future learners in FE?

% 30 % 45 Positive Unsure yet

25%

Negative

Next issue Ofsted says FE must try harder in teaching and learning but how should the sector respond?

Learning with the dual professionals.

Upskill your practice with WorldSkills.

Please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences on these or any other issues by emailing editor@ifl.ac.uk

• “When you form a club it is not so much about what you get out of it but what you put into it” • “IfL showed a commitment to the sector and, as a result, we have made gains that had eluded us for so long like parity of status with QTS” • “It gave me the opportunity to have validation by my peers” • “We have a professional voice that we did not have before” IfL members are celebrating their 10th anniversary and IfL and InTuition send their warmest congratulations as we toast their professional achievements and look forward to the next decade.

You can see the names of the first 102 members online at www.ifl.ac.uk

InTuition

4_5_News.indd 5

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

5

07/12/2012 08:06

News & Views

• Your views

• Ear to the ground

Annette West IfL’s Initial Teacher Training Project Officer Almost 70 IfL members arrived amid a buzz of apprehension and excitement for the launch of the Practitioner Researcher Programme at the University of Oxford’s Examination Schools centre on 29 September.

We listened to opening presentations made by leading academics from the research centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (Skope) which is working with IfL to deliver the programme. Presentations were made by Skope’s director Ken Mayhew; assistant director Susan James and research fellow Craig Holmes, all three of whom are based at the University of Oxford, and by Ewart Keep, Skope’s deputy director, who is based at Cardiff University.

Speakers introduced participants to various types and ways of researching and offered plenty of ideas for starting a research project.

Tim Lynch, a teacher at Aylesbury College, admitted that he was nervous to start with but was inspired by the speech by Professor Mayhew, who told participants “the difficult thing is finding what to research”. After

listening to him, Tim worked out what his research subject would be: outputs, the economic value of FE students and how equipped are they for their job roles.

Khadijah Amani, an ESOL advice coordinator at The Learning Trust, told me that the programme was exactly what she had been looking for and the presentation on quantitative research by Craig Holmes would help her to get the hang of research methodology.

For Rebecca Foley, a tutor in workbased learning, it proved a positive day with professional presentations.

Karen Weldon, a tutor at Milton Keynes College, said that tutors rarely had the opportunity to learn about research and to use it to improve their professional practice.

She said that this was a process which would deliver benefits for employers too.

Stephanie de la Haye, a self-employed trainer with Business Boosters Network CIC, hoped for tangible benefits to her professional practice and was excited about the ‘synergy between research and education and how it can affect policy’.

What I, along with the many participants I spoke with, experienced at the September launch of the programme was dynamic and transformational. Many participants began with little or no research experience and by listening to the presentations and then discussing and reflecting upon what they’d heard, they left bursting with ideas and ready to create their practice-based research projects.

IfL is planning to run further Practitioner Researcher Programmes from summer 2013, the details of which will be published on the website in due course.

Why do research? See CPD Matters, page 18

Breaking down the class barriers While I agree with the viewpoint of Maurice Glasman (InTuition, Issue 10, Opinion; pictured below) regarding the denigration of certain jobs in our society, his categorisation of “working class vocations and middle class professions” is actually a large part of the problem. To constantly ally jobs to a certain class, a traditional sociological viewpoint, is a serious mistake in today’s world and will do nothing to change perceptions.

Linda Miller

Opinion: Baron Maurice Glasman

Pick of the Tweets Anna Ball @atwaite Pleased with my interview in IFL intuition magazine on teaching vocational in a school @victoryoak TemperVox Ltd @TemperVox @IFL_Members @IOE_ London just reading Janet Broad’s article on CPD in the latest InTuition... very interesting stuff...

6

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

6_7_News_Letters_newer.indd 6

InTuition

06/12/2012 16:07

www.ifl.ac.uk

News in Brief n ati rs or rp tte co a in DM CP

w No

g

Benefits Status Voice Issue 10 Autumn 2012

The journal for professional teachers and trainers in the further education and skills sector

InTuition Career paths: What awaits those taking the QTLS route into school teaching?

Feature p12 Please give us your feedback on our new issue – see page 3

Discover what makes Swiss vocational training tick

Where now for initial teacher education in further education?

Technology can enhance Feel like experimenting learning but make sure with your teaching? Try you’re in control formative assessment

Interview p10

CPD Matters p18

InSight p26

Geoff Petty p30 www.ifl.ac.uk

1_Cover.indd 3

13/09/2012 15:37

Grammar schooling With regard to the autumn edition (InTuition issue 10, pictured above), in my experience of tutoring, simplicity is always the key to learning.

We know of the stages covering input, process, competence and performance. But, as a greenhorn, teaching grammar presented a problem as arcane, formalised methods prevented the learner from being able to use language.

Fortunately, l had a number of gifted teachers around me.

To this day, when someone tells me they find grammar complicated l point out that colours are all adjectives, all we see and touch are nouns and how we do something describes a verb. It worked instantly for me.

My learners blink when they realise how much they know. An engineer may well be established in their own field but l have met many similar professionals who respond to uncluttered teaching.

Stephen Archer

Send us your views Email us at editor@ifl.ac.uk or tweet us at twitter.com/ IfL_Members #IfL_InTuition.

Please note that letters may be edited for publication.

Up-skill with WorldSkills The IfL is offering WorldSkills Vocational Masterclass programmes, giving FE providers the chance to improve their teaching and learning.

The masterclasses, offered in partnership with WorldSkills UK and funded by the National Apprenticeship Service, provide an opportunity for staff and students to take part in mini skills competitions using modified WorldSkills competition briefs and assessment criteria.

There are three different events available to suit provider and teacher needs.

In each case staff and students will work with the IfL team and WorldSkills trainers and coaches to develop the programmes which are tailored to suit the level of experience and competence of participating learners. Staff have the chance to complete a short online module on vocational updating and events are filmed for further review and skill development.

Last year’s WorldSkills event in London saw Team UK win five gold, two silver and seven bronze medals to come fifth in the international rankings. Next year’s competition will be held in Leipzig from 2-7 July.

Masterclasses will run until March. If you are interested in hosting a WorldSkills Vocational Masterclass please contact Michelle Jennings at michelle.jennings@ifl.ac.uk See ‘Education can benefit from competition’, Opinion p8 Festival time The annual Show & Tell FEstival, a celebration of the best of FE, will be held in Nottingham in February.

The event is aimed at anyone interested in 14+ and further education and offers the chance to meet

like-minded people, attend debates and practical workshops, watch live interviews and meet inspiring guests. Fun is high on the agenda and Show & Tell also offers theatre, film and music events.

IfL is supporting Show & Tell and has negotiated a 50 per cent discount for members. Key IfL personnel are due to speak at the event. Further details will be posted on IfL’s website in due course at www.ifl.ac.uk/ newsandevents/events FE winner at TES Awards Many congratulations to BSix Brooke House Sixth Form College which won the Outstanding Innovation in Teaching, Training or Learning Provision category in the TES FE Awards.

Judges, including IfL’s director of professional development Jean Kelly, said that the London college had “broken the mould” in terms of teaching and learning, helping it secure top spot in this hard-fought category which was sponsored by IfL. The award was presented to BSix by Sue Rhodes, an elected member of IfL’s non-executive board.

Among the many innovative approaches adopted by BSix is its partnership with Pembroke College, University of Oxford, giving innercity teenagers a taste of university.

Toni Fazaeli, IfL’s chief executive, said: “This bears testament to the outstanding teaching at the college, which draws on the proven effectiveness of ‘assessment for learning’ methods.”

Duly elected Tutor and teacher-trainer Beatrix E Groves has been re-elected as IfL president.

Bea, who began her second term on 11 October, has more than 32 years’ experience of working and

teaching in all areas of the post-compulsory education sector. She teaches history, philosophy, science, politics, management, music history and gender issues. She has considerable experience in teacher education, from pre-entry to master’s level, as well as in curriculum design and accreditation.

Bea’s second-term theme is ‘member voice’.

She said: “I am very much looking forward to my second year, as IfL re-establishes itself as the professional body with voluntary membership, and as thousands of teachers, trainers and tutors across the diverse sector choose to engage with IfL and with their fellow professionals, for the benefit of learners.”

Clarification In the introduction to the CPD Matters section (InTuition issue 10, page 15) we spoke of a “binary divide” between expansive organisations and behaviours that are supportive of learning and restrictive ones that tend to be unsupportive of learning.

We referenced Professor Lorna Unwin, Institute of Education, and Professor Alison Fuller, University of Southampton, who developed the expansive and restrictive framework as a tool for analysing organisations, such as workplaces, in relation to their predisposition to and capacities for supporting learning.

InTuition would like to make it clear that Professors Unwin and Fuller base their expansive-restrictive model on the concept of a continuum of expansiverestrictive systems and practices as opposed to a binary divide between expansive and restrictive poles. We are very happy to make this clear.

InTuition

6_7_News_Letters_newer.indd 7

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

7

06/12/2012 17:23

News & Views

Opinion Education can benefit from competition

By Jenny Shackleton The UK is performing well in international skills competitions and this success should inform teaching and learning strategies For most of the past decade I’ve been helping UK Skills to raise the UK’s performance at the WorldSkills Competition from a paltry 18th place in 2003 to fifth at WorldSkills London 2011.

Yet I have to bite my tongue when the current enthusiasm for skills competitions is positively contrasted with a past world in which competition was ‘wrongly’ rejected as an educational measure.

As a product of that past world, whether as pupil, student, teacher or manager, I believe it is absolutely right to reject competitive activities that merely reinforce hierarchies of school attainment.

While school attainment is an essential foundation for careers, it is not a predictor of vocational performance. The range of attributes and forms of intelligence that underpin technical and vocational mastery are generally unrecognised, unsupported and uncelebrated by schools, which have many other purposes, priorities and pressures. While pinnacles of academic achievement drive the education system (currently to an unwarranted extent), the high peaks of technical and vocational attainment, as found within the UK and global economy, do not.

It is natural for young people to look for role models and it is little wonder that they turn to vacuous ‘celebrities’ when they are given few worthwhile vocational alternatives that they can connect with in any kind of straight-forward way.

There are three main reasons why I strongly support technical and vocational skills competitions. First, they enable young people and adults to identify and develop their talents. Skills give everyone

8

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

8_9_Opinion.indd 8

the opportunity to exercise mastery: to generate something of value, and to create both positive identity and a sense of community.

Skills teach essential lessons for life: that success can follow effort; that one can exercise control of one’s environment; that problems can be faced and overcome. For teachers, trainers and employers there are complementary rewards in demonstrating that skills and vocational attributes can be taught and learned. There are also rewards in the strong relationships that stem from mutual passion for a skill and in developing skills for new opportunities and applications.

Done well, competitions transfer the dynamism and pluralism of working life to the college and training environment; they add authenticity, pace and maturity to teaching and learning.

Second, technical and vocational skills are built through challenge and problem solving; they are responsive to need and decline with under-use. Few workplaces can offer continuous challenge and problem solving in any dependable way.

Skills competitions help to fill the gap and also provide stimulus and visibility to a technical and vocational education and training system. They can define standards and provide objective feedback against those standards. This represents a significant contribution to business and industry, with much untapped potential.

They enable us all: learners, teachers, trainers and employers, to witness quality and to learn from it. They remind us that the true value of technical and vocational education and training is proven in the

economy. We should take this as our benchmark and stand tall.

Third, skills competitions offer a means to connect the UK’s technical and vocational standards and practices with the movement of the world’s economy. WorldSkills is more than a global skills competition. It is the sole repository of global technical and vocational standards as defined through the active participation of more than 50 national economies and societies.

Increasingly it is the place to go for global standards across more than 40 key occupational roles. As the biennial host to around 1,800 competitors and experts, the WorldSkills Competition offers an unparalleled research site for highly respected international researchers.

Continental skills competitions now offer crucial intermediate steps between national and world standards. To have worth, competitions have to be part of teaching and learning strategies that have developmental purposes for all. Without these, competitions may well generate false and unhelpful perceptions of worth and value, both of oneself and of the world at large.

Last month we saw the welcome return of a UK-wide Skills Show. Now we have the showcase and the opportunity, let’s have a world-class technical and vocational education and training system too.

Jenny Shackleton was head of skills for UK Skills, 2003-11. She is currently the assessment advisor for WorldSkills International. The views expressed in this article are her own.

InTuition

06/12/2012 16:03

www.ifl.ac.uk

Opinion Professional development and self-assessment ‘critical’ for quality

By Matthew Coffey

SHUTTERSTOCK

In a piece written ahead of the Chief Inspector’s report on further education, Ofsted argues that FE teachers and leaders working together holds the key to success In October, the Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS) published a report, carried out on its behalf by Ofsted, to promote and further accelerate improvement in the college sector.

How Colleges Improve found that three key features were consistent in good and outstanding colleges as well as those that had improved their grade for overall effectiveness since their previous inspection. These were: drive and ambition from leaders and governors; robust and self-critical self-assessment; and high-quality and effective continuing professional development (CPD).

Evidence clearly showed successful leaders had the drive and determination to make sure their very clear vision and values became the culture and ethos of their college. Critically, their approach was a collaborative one, in which all staff felt involved. Staff felt empowered and proud to work at these colleges, describing it as hard work but rewarding. Alongside this, effective governance provided vigorous challenge and ambition for senior managers and indeed all staff.

The most critical aspect included being well informed about all aspects of the college’s performance and knowing what questions to ask to continually set challenging targets to drive performance. We found that leading providers had robust systems for evaluating the effectiveness and quality of teaching, learning and assessment, and for making further improvements.

When self-assessment was integral to the work of the college rather than a ‘bolton’ there was also improvement in all key areas. College staff and managers told inspectors that being self-critical in selfassessment was not something that always came naturally. However, only by being accurate in the analysis of performance data and in judgements

about every aspect of learners’ programmes, could the colleges move forward and improve their provision.

This is especially so in the judgements on the quality of teaching, learning and assessment. Unrealistic or overgenerous grading of teaching and learning in selfassessment and at observations of learning sessions can be a stumbling block to further improvement. It can also lead to complacency by the colleges as a whole. Where teachers do not get honest feedback on the quality of their teaching, it is likely that they will be more reluctant to take part in CPD. All the visits to colleges and the reviews of reports pointed to the critical role of CPD. It was most successful when clearly linked to performance management of individuals, course reviews at subject level and self-assessment at curriculum and whole college level. Successful approaches included a ‘grow your own’ policy for recruiting and developing staff.

This allowed staff to develop their

Working together will provide the key to success

potential and identify and plan career paths within the organisation, or in FE as a whole. However, inspectors found that CPD needed to be managed very effectively to have a true impact on inspection.

The report describes a college where staff felt there were no restrictions on the courses or training they could attend – the list given to inspectors seemed endless – training in using data, funding, self-assessment, and the use of information learning technologies.

However, when questioned further, the staff were unable to identify how this training related to the college’s priorities in their improvement or personal development plans. Every member of staff taking part in training and staff development needs to be very clear how this learning will: a) support their own development, b) contribute to the college’s priorities for improvement, and c) make a significant difference to the quality of provision for learners.

The report led to a number of recommendations for both colleges and government and focused on promoting the benefits of robust, accurate and open self-assessment in improving quality within the context of local accountability.

I would like to add that it is likely that every single college, even those that we have judged to be inadequate, has outstanding practice somewhere, be it teaching and learning, individual support or monitoring learners’ progress to prevent them from falling behind.

Identifying outstanding practice is critical in self-assessment and quality assurance; sharing it has been seen to be central to providers that have made significant improvement.

Matthew Coffey is national director for learning and skills at Ofsted.

InTuition

8_9_Opinion.indd 9

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

9

06/12/2012 16:03

Interview

The first and only commandment is ‘know thy impact’

Standing on his mountain of research, John Hattie can see a very long way. He is a master of the universe of quantitative educational research and, surely, knows more about what affects learning than anyone else, alive or dead.

The ebullient, New Zealand-born academic has spent his career assembling the largest ever database of educational studies, involving 240 million students, and has used it to compute the relative effectiveness of all the factors known to affect achievement.

His books – including Visible learning: a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement and Visible learning for teachers – will be core works for decades. His findings apply across the educational spectrum and many FE teachers and trainers, IfL members, are already devotees of Hattie’s work and apply his research to their practice.

John, director of the Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, works with up to 10,000 schools using his ‘visible-learning’ model.

He provides effect-size information on how classes and individuals in them are doing. John tells me: “Effect-sizes put factors all on the same scale and have the wonderful property that they allow us to compare one factor with another.”

In Visible learning for teachers, John outlines how a teacher can measure their impact on learner achievement, typically

10

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

10_11_Interview.indd 10

measuring the size of its effect every seven to 12 weeks. He says: “Very rarely in education do we know when we are successful. I’ve got a metric that tells us – and it requires an effect size of 0.4.

“When I look at the standards that you have in the UK for teachers at the moment, there is very little in it about the impact of the teacher on the learning.”

John doesn’t want to prescribe how we teach, even though his work has identified some teaching methods that work exceptionally well on average, and others that do not. He sees teaching as a means to an end, so it is not teaching but achievement that matters, and that is where our focus should be.

John comes down from his mountain of research with just one commandment on his tablet: ‘know thy impact.’

“I’m getting grey hair, and long in the tooth, so this is probably too strong a statement, but I’ve given up on teaching.

I don’t care a damn about teaching any more,” he says to my consternation.

“Geoff,” he says, “in your career, you must have gone into a classroom and seen some crusty bugger who sits in the corner and has been teaching this way for years, and it’s not the dominant style, but they have incredibly positive impacts on kids. Why would you change them?

“Our debates are too concentrated on how we teach, whereas all the visible learning work tells me it needs to be about

ARUNAS KACINCAS

John Hattie is a fearless truth-teller – controversial and brilliant in equal measure – whose inspired and exhaustive research into teaching and learning speaks equally to FE, skills and schools. IfL patron and InTuition columnist Geoff Petty spoke to him ahead of a rare visit to the UK

the impact of how we teach. Observe the impact. Wow, is that powerful.”

As achievement is his focus, not teaching, he is not keen on conventional observation systems. “It is a sin for a teacher to observe another teaching in the act. All they do is tell them (nicely and subtly) that they should teach more like them. The only reason for observing is to observe learning – observe how students react, interact, or not, with the teaching.”

In some of the schools he works with he gets teachers to video their lessons by wearing ‘video spectacles’ with inbuilt cameras over the bridge of the nose. The teacher wears one pair, and a couple of students wear pairs too so the teacher can see their lessons from the learners’ perspective. “It’s frighteningly powerful,” says John. “That’s where micro-teaching really pays off. And I’ve never seen a teacher yet, who, having seen the lesson through the kid’s eyes, goes back and does the same again if it’s the traditional 80 per cent teacher talking.”

The teacher watches the video with a coach who acts as an additional pair of

InTuition

06/12/2012 14:24

www.ifl.ac.uk

eyes. “You can’t do it by yourself: it’s like playing golf, if you play golf by yourself you never improve.”

There are some real surprises when it comes to impact as measured by effect size: his findings on praising learners for example. “Every study that has been done: praise has a zero to negative effect,” he says. “My argument is simple.

For goodness sake praise them. But don’t mix up praise with feedback. What’s the point of praise? It helps a sense of trust, helps a sense of safety, helps a sense of understanding. That’s a really helpful reason for it – but it doesn’t help learning.”

He advocates giving learners feedback on the extent to which they have met assessment criteria. “Most kids are very clear that feedback that doesn’t tell them where to go next is pretty useless,” he says.

John is frustrated that we know how to improve achievement but that governments don’t make use of this information. “About 30 years ago we ran schools to improve kids’ education.

Now we run schools to appease the parents, to get them to vote and

give the resources,” he says.

In the UK we’ve spent more than £50 billion in the past few years on new schools and colleges. I ask what effect does a new building have on the quality of learning. “None,” is John’s answer.

Visible learning has two main ideas: teachers should become more like learners studying their own impact, and learners should become more like teachers – teachers of themselves and others. I ask him about the latter.

“We want students to be life-long learners, we want them to regulate their own learning better, have better cognitive skills,” he says. “In the visible-learning table of effect sizes, self-regulation, metacognition and awareness of your own learning is way up there near the top.

“When you’re able to do those sorts of things you’re able to know what you don’t know, you have the skill to decide what to do next, you have an understanding about when to ask for help and how to get it, isn’t that what teaching is?

“The incredible thing is that five-yearolds are incredibly good teachers of

themselves and others, but by the age eight they’ve learned that in schools they are to be passive.”

John would like to see more peer explaining, more peer assessment, more structured group work such as ‘cooperative learning’. His work with thousands of schools generates effectsize information on how classes and individuals are doing. And he believes the main issue is how schools create a ‘mind frame’ about their work, on the basis of this information.

“Teachers who walk in the room believing they can change the learners are more likely to be successful. They are change agents. We need to separate the problem from the people and create a collective sense of improvement.

“I love the notion of ‘collective impact’ and how teachers can collaborate to improve – which means having quality evidence about their current status, clear agreements about what they wish then to improve, a prior understanding of what it would look like when successful, then working together to evaluate the impact of the innovations intended to impact on the current status, and to move them to their targets. This is the power of formative interpretations.”

John may have given up on teaching, but certainly not on teachers.

“There’s some incredible success out there,” he says with a passion. “We attribute students’ good work to effort or ability, and we attribute success in teaching always to the students or the structure. I want people to attribute success in schools to great teaching.

“Your government is very good at bashing up bad teaching and the only place they see good teaching is in their precious few schools (favourite academies). Now the cold hard reality is that the variability is within schools not between them. But within schools there is a conspiracy of silence about excellence.

“I ask governments, including the UK’s, do they have a responsibility to fund, seed and listen to a professional body of teachers? They do for law, architecture, engineering and dentistry.”

Still at the top of his game, John has more projects in the pipeline. He has the international guide to student achievement, which is due out next month and he is finishing a book with Greg Yates, at the University of South Australia, looking at turning evidence into action on learning. He is also looking to build an evidence-based model using progress testing to evaluate the impact of teacher-education programmes.

And, in case this isn’t enough, John adds: “I’m learning to play the ukulele, too”

InTuition

10_11_Interview.indd 11

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

11

06/12/2012 14:24

Feature

FE part-timers being made to feel small

GILES MEAD/EASTWING

English further education relies heavily on its part-time teachers and trainers, but how does it show its gratitude to these hard-working multi-taskers? Sarah Simons reports Part-time teachers and trainers are a force to be reckoned within further education (FE), allowing providers to adapt quickly to meet the needs of the market by offering a wide range of industry-standard courses that give learners the best possible chance of employment.

With 40 per cent of IfL’s 77,000 members and, according to the latest staff individualised record (SIR) data, around 60 per cent of the UK’s FE and skills system comprising, mainly female, staff on parttime, fixed-term or sessional contracts, it is hardly surprising that they are often called the backbone of the FE and skills system.

Why then, when the system is so reliant on the knowledge and skills of its part-time teachers and trainers, are those valuable members of staff so often exploited, excluded and treated with disrespect?

Rebecca* works in a large, multicampus college in the north of England.

Though she values greatly the opportunity to continue her career as an author and supplement her income by teaching, she encounters inconsistencies in the esteem with which staff on parttime contracts are held.

“I teach the same subject at two separate campuses of the same college.

One of my contracts is as a permanent part-time member of staff and the other is as a sessional lecturer,” she explains.

“In the team where I’m permanent parttime, I’m kept up to date with any student concerns, resources are shared and I am regarded as part of a team who happens to work fewer hours than full-time staff.”

However, Rebecca’s experience in her permanent role provides a stark contrast to her treatment in the area where she works sessionally for one day a week.

“I don’t have a desk or anywhere to store my resources, so have to transport

12

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

12_14_parttimers.indd 12

them with me. I have no idea what’s going on within the team and I’m not invited to team meetings, in fact I haven’t been introduced to anyone else in the department over the 18 months in which I’ve worked there.”

Issues relating to the exclusion of parttime staff are recurring themes. Dawud Marsh is a part-time lecturer and director of Core News, a community learning project, in north London. He has more than 25 years’ teaching experience and has strong views on the management of part-time staff from both an operational and organisational perspective.

“As a department manager at Tower Hamlets College I worked hard to ensure that everyone felt included as part of the team. I sent a weekly email newsletter to all staff, ensuring everyone was kept up to date with issues and developments. We rotated the days when team meetings were held, so everyone had a chance to be involved on their work day and feel like they were being kept in the loop,” he says.

However, things were different when Dawud worked as a sessional member of staff at a different college.

“I’m a very experienced teacher but felt undervalued and treated as though I was new to the profession,” he says, explaining

Almost 71 per cent of part-time staff are women, compared with 52.9 per cent of full-time staff (2010/11 SIR)

how he lost confidence as a result of feeling isolated from the team.

“I felt like my skills were diminishing.

It was assumed that I knew of any departmental alterations while no one made any effort to communicate them to me. There were so many assumptions.”

One of those assumptions was that Dawud would attend meetings unpaid and take on additional tasks for free.

“People who are on part-time contracts can have commitments to a number of different organisations,” he says.

Rebecca agrees: “Managers sometimes fail to appreciate that we have other places to work and different days for rest. Would they expect a full-time member of staff to attend a meeting, unpaid, on a Saturday?”

There are obvious negatives to longterm, part-time work, but it remains the preferred, sometimes only, option for many. Practitioners who have part-time teaching positions can continue working professionally in their trades, teach over a number of settings and curricula which, in many cases, allows them to choose their hours to fit their personal schedules.

InTuition

06/12/2012 14:06

www.ifl.ac.uk

More than 13 per cent of part-time staff are aged 60 and over, compared with less than 8 per cent of full-timers (2010/11 SIR)

The dual professionalism of many part-time practitioners also gives learners and providers access to stateof-the-art levels of expertise.

Chris Cooke is an accomplished film maker who teaches part-time at the Confetti Institute of Creative Technologies, a specialist FE and higher education college in Nottingham. He credits his academic work with sharpening his vocational skills.

He says: “There is substantial synergy between my two jobs. While my continued involvement in the profession allows me to offer the students genuine industry experience, I am learning a great deal from them. My own exposure to new ways of generating ideas, developing concepts and the energy that students bring to their projects certainly inspires me to improve my own performance in the industry.”

While Chris derives considerable benefit from part-time teaching, he does occasionally feel he could have greater involvement in the day-to-day running of the department. “Being in college for three days per week I do occasionally

miss emails and discussions that have an impact on my teaching,” he says.

“There never seems to be enough time to give either my professional or teaching work the attention I would ideally like. That can be frustrating but I fully recognise that I chose to work in this way.”

Deborah Hastings left the security of a full-time position for sessional teaching in adult and community learning which fitted around her childcare requirements.

Though she is well aware of the financial restrictions and disparities in esteem that sessional work can entail, 17 years later she cannot imagine working another way.

“To survive and make a basic living wage as a part-time tutor in adult education, you need to be prepared to work 24/7, to have multiple skills, be qualified in several areas and be happy to travel long distances,” she says. Despite these challenges, Deborah values the professional development opportunities that her varied part-time work brings and the difference she can make to people across a wide spectrum of ages and settings.

“I consider myself very fortunate to

work in all sorts of different places and spend time with a diverse range of people which I could only do over a number of part-time jobs. The range of experience enables me to adapt to any teaching situation,” she says.

However, Deborah wishes that her work was held in greater esteem. “Compared with other areas of teaching, I find parttime work in adult and community learning to be viewed patronisingly by some as a ‘hobby job’. Maybe this is due to some courses being non-accredited and geared towards creative practices,” she says. “But I am a professional specialising in teaching adults, frequently at the frontline of society.

This work is often a valuable gateway in to those hoping to return to education.”

Though common grievances are echoed by part-time practitioners in every area of the FE system, some providers are undoubtedly better than others at dealing with issues, including access to professional support and development.

Julia* currently works in community learning, having previously spent many years as a part-time trainer for a commercial training provider.

“I found there was a much higher expectation regarding professionalism when working part-time for a private company,” she reveals. “As a trainer, my position was seen as higher status than the same role which I now take in community education. Though I worked part-time, the company deemed it essential that all staff received extensive ongoing training, ensuring our knowledge and skills were up to industry standard.”

Amanda* enjoyed a long career at an FE college before taking on a part-time role in a leading private training provider.

Her experience in terms of the level of professional expectation of part-time staff was the opposite of Julia’s.

Amanda explained that there was a high turnover of part-time staff at the private training provider. “Many part-time trainers had no teaching qualifications or experience and there was no attempt to improve the quality.”

She felt that there was a production-line

InTuition

12_14_parttimers.indd 13

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

13

06/12/2012 10:44

Feature

business model in which part-time staff were viewed as disposable and sales took precedence over teaching and learning.

“The remit was to recruit as many students as possible, rush them through the test and get them out. For those committed teachers, the corporate strategy, which paid little attention to the needs of the learner or the development of the teacher, was unacceptable and many left. There was zero accountability.”

Amanda left the role after a year and returned to a part-time position in a college.

In order to keep subject knowledge up to date and to refresh pedagogical practices it is essential that continuing professional development is easily accessible for parttime teachers and trainers.

Paula Jones is the chief executive of Learning South West an independent charity which works with post-16 and adult learning organisations. Paula, who is also a member of IfL’s non-executive board, says that the skills of staff in middle management are integral to the inclusion of part-time teachers and trainers.

“The management of a team of practitioners with diversity of contractual obligations necessitates a strong strategic base,” she says.

“If there is a lack of focus, the part-time and sessional staff end up filling gaps in timetables, rather than being part of a whole. Middle management is under pressure to improve targets and fulfill corporate requirements as well as many having their own teaching workload. This leaves little time to negotiate a plan of continuing professional development (CPD) to meet the complexity of individual needs.”

Despite the enormous challenges that middle management face, Paula suggests that facilitating development opportunities that recognise and progress the talents of part-time staff is a priority.

“There are part-time and sessional practitioners with amazing strengths, whose expertise inspire learners,” she says.

“Development of these staff not only ensures vocational currency but allows them to feel part of something. If CPD and

appraisals for part-time staff are overlooked it puts them at a huge disadvantage.”

The University and College Union (UCU) campaign, ‘Stamp Out Casual Contracts’, tackles issues like the lack of basic tools, ineffective communication and inappropriate access to CPD for part-time staff. Andrew Harden, a UCU national official, says: “Sessional staff are often expected to attend CPD either unpaid or on a much lower rate of pay than people on full-time contracts. There is an assumption that sessional staff will do a lot of extra work in their own time and many do, as they are committed professionals who are passionate about their work. These assumptions constitute an exploitation of that commitment.”

The management and treatment of parttime and temporary staff has been linked to the overall performance of FE providers.

The September 2012 Ofsted report, How colleges improve, said that colleges in which performance had declined or was not improving shared a number of characteristics, including a large proportion of temporary staff who were not properly managed. The report said that poor performance management was also associated with ‘lines of accountability for staff employed through external agencies’ which were ‘unclear or absent’.

Yet the link between underperforming

Nearly 71 per cent of teaching staff in the southwest of England work part-time, compared with less than 49 per cent in the north east. The southwest also has the lowest average full-time teaching pay of any English region at £27,812 compared (2010/11 SIR) with a national average of £29,733 14

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

12_14_parttimers.indd 14

colleges and a greater number of temporary staff is not representative of the commitment of the majority of part-time teachers and trainers.

IfL’s president Beatrix Groves has worked as a part-time tutor for more than 25 years and is general secretary of the Association of Part Time Tutors (APTT).

She says: “I prefer to teach in a number of learning environments so I can control when and how I work. The work is unpredictable and it can be difficult to sustain an income, but I fear that if I took a permanent position I would end up being stuck behind a desk,” she says.

“Though there are universal worries relating to part-time practitioners, such as an inappropriate amount of administration, inconsistent management and generic approaches to CPD, it would be a huge disappointment to forego the opportunity to teach at a range of different organisations.

Toni Fazaeli, chief executive of the IfL, says: “IfL celebrates the massive contribution that part-time teachers and trainers make and we recognise the particular challenges they face.

“Part-time staff often feel isolated and as the professional body for FE teachers and trainers we are here to provide ongoing support which some of our parttime members have described as a lifeline for professionals in their position.”

Part-time, fixed-term and sessionally contracted members of staff bring immense benefits to learners and providers. Improved strategies for their management, better communication and a greater emphasis on supporting professional development would be an appropriate reward for the benefits that they bring. * not her real name.

Sarah Simons is a writer and lecturer and a member of IfL.

InTuition

06/12/2012 14:06

Benefits Status Voice Issue 6 Winter 2012/13

Promoting ideas to teachers and trainers in the further education and skills sector

CPDMatters Is your professional learning visible?

Dr Jean Kelly Director of professional development John Hattie, one of the foremost thinkers about professional development for teachers, claims ‘the greatest effects on student learning occur when teachers become learners of their own teaching and when students become their own teachers’ (Visible Learning for Teachers, 2012 Routledge p14). Our articles focus on different aspects of making professional learning visible and thus available to all.

Professional conversations, computational thinking and asking fundamental questions about research all play a part in making learning visible and available to all

Sandra Rennie and Denise Robinson turned their email exchanges about a research project on teaching practice into a transparent framework for a professional conversation as they began to explore the political and pedagogical implications of the research for themselves and those they call the ‘edge-of-service’ trainees.

This kind of professional dialogue was the obvious starting point for Susan James and Craig Holmes in returning to fundamental questions about research – why should teachers and trainers bother to do it at all? As a tool to develop critical

thinking and evaluation skills, research can be a visible and public record of gaining an understanding of your own practice and sharing this with others. The participants on the IfL/Skope practitioner researcher programme will be producing their research articles for publication in April next year and you can read about their experiences in the spring.

Maren Deepwell would argue that both of these examples of learning rely on problem-solving skills and techniques that software engineers would use to underpin everyday applications such as email. They are using the principles of computational thinking. The majority of our learners are ahead of us with the use of technology and fast becoming their own teachers, as Hattie would say, but together with our learners we can make sense of how the world is shaping our lives and really use it to make an impact on our practice.

We hope that you enjoy reading this issue of CPD Matters and tell us more about your professional learning in the new year.

If you would like to contribute to or ask a question for a future edition of CPD Matters, please email us at editor@ifl.ac.uk for further details.

CPDMatters

15_22_CPDM.indd 15

Issue 6 | Winter 2012/13

15

06/12/2012 10:45

Volunteer trainee tutors: opportunity or exploitation?

By Sandra Rennie and Denise Robinson A professional email conversation about the use (and abuse) of volunteer tutors from the twin perspectives of higher education and an independent training provider In 2011, Sandra Rennie and Denise Robinson collaborated on a research project that investigated the practice of allowing unpaid teaching work to be presented as teaching practice during teacher training courses.

They interviewed people involved with volunteer trainee tutors in several colleges across the North of England including centre managers, teacher mentors, teacher educators and trainee teachers working as volunteer tutors.

What follows is a professional email conversation between the pair about economic, organisational and political issues concerning the use of volunteer tutors. Their conversation was inspired

by Stephen Brookfield’s critical lenses model of professional reflection (1995).

Both researchers share similar values and a belief in the importance of equality of access and good quality professional teacher training but their viewpoints are different; Denise viewing issues from a higher education and a large institution perspective and Sandra seeing issues from her standpoint working as an independent training provider within adult and community education and the voluntary sector.

Sandra Rennie (SR) My first thoughts on hearing about the proposed research project was that voluntary teaching practice would provide opportunities for those people who wanted a career as a part-time further education (FE) teacher but wished to remain as a ‘dual professional’ (dual professionalism was first proposed as a model for the FE system in the paper A profession in crisis by Jocelyn Robson in 1997 and adopted soon after by IfL. Also, Lucas and Nasta 2010; Orr and

16

Issue 6 | Winter 2012/13

15_22_CPDM.indd 16

Simmons 2010) and continue to work at their trade. I suspected there would be many people who could not undertake the in-service teaching qualification that required them to have 75 hours per year paid teaching work at the point of enrolment; either because of lack of job opportunities at a time of recession or because large, mainstream, publiclyfunded institutions preferred to employ fully qualified teachers. Full-time, preservice teacher training courses would not be an option for these people if they had other paid work or domestic responsibilities and could not afford the time to study. In the course of my daily work I encountered scores of people who wanted to move on from their Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector (PTLLS) qualification to become fully qualified teachers and yet found they were stuck on the periphery of a teaching career, teaching for a few hours per month on an irregular basis as a work-based trainer or in the voluntary sector. These were not so much a typical ‘in-service trainee’, they were more an ‘edge-ofservice’ trainee; portfolio workers with contracts that were temporary and work patterns that were irregular and diverse.

I expected that voluntary teaching practice would provide new opportunities for these groups of people.

Denise Robinson (DR) My interest in volunteer trainee tutors sprang from a concern in the seeming increase in numbers of trainee tutors who were losing their teaching as a result of cuts in expenditure, resulting in closure of classes. Furthermore, it was anticipated that there could be a gap between those who wished to enter teaching in the lifelong learning sector (LLS) and the availability of paid teaching employment.

This would result in a drop in the supply of suitably qualified teachers (many of whom brought recent, up-to-date experience in their vocation or profession) in the future as well as depleting the number of trainees on the courses across the colleges who delivered the teacher training courses.

Offering voluntary teaching opportunities to serve the purpose of fulfilment of the course and ultimately the qualification seemed to be a way forward.

SR We found there was little hard data available publicly about the total numbers of teachers in the various skill sectors in FE and no data at all on the number of volunteer teachers. Acquiring the appropriate figures would be difficult as I realised people’s requirement for voluntary teaching practice as an access opportunity must vary according to the general labour market situation and that in turn also varied according to which skill sector was involved. For example, there may be more demand for health and social care teachers than hairdressing teachers and so it may be easier for them to find paid teaching work and less need for them to acquire voluntary teaching practice when compared with the hairdressing teachers. When we interviewed a trainee who had worked unpaid as an art teacher 20 hours per week for 14 months I began to question whether the voluntary teaching practice was offering new opportunities to parttime workers to access a teaching career or giving employers permission to exploit volunteers.

DR I had similar concerns. I have been involved in the provision of voluntary

CPDMatters

06/12/2012 10:45

www.ifl.ac.uk

teaching experience for those who were entering the profession via shorter training courses and who taught in adult education. Many of these trainees went on (often during the course itself) to become paid teachers and were happy to undertake teaching on an unpaid basis as long as it served the purpose of the teaching qualification course.

However, while volunteers in other services or industries might be working on an ad-hoc and open-ended basis, I was concerned that the voluntary element was clearly related to the teacher training and that there could be a danger that such volunteers, keen to become employed now or in the future, might result in a situation where trainees were expected to continue work for nothing, rather than as an element of the teaching qualification.

SR If I understand rightly, your interest was based in a feeling of responsibility to ensure the supply of properly trained teachers for the future? Do you think that individual teachers and teacher educators should take on personal responsibility for ensuring a new, replacement workforce to replace the aging current workforce rather than leaving it to market forces or the varying responses of politicians? Like you, I have helped people to set up volunteer teaching opportunities to ensure they can complete a teacher training course.

However, I wonder whether individual action is the right thing to do. Does doing this mean that we, as a profession, are avoiding confronting the political issue of patchy or limited paid teaching opportunities available in a particular region, skill sector or for a particular group of trainees? Is this something in which we should be taking more of an interest as profession, rather than providing ad-hoc solutions that smooth over problems temporarily?

DR There are some pertinent issues here.

These may reflect the disjuncture and tension between those who aspire to develop a fully professionalised workforce and the pressure that organisations confront in meeting the demands of government agencies and cost-cutting while maintaining the best service to learners. A major concern was to ensure that the initial selection and recruitment of volunteer trainee tutors

and their support was at least equivalent to that of other trainees on the courses.

We are all familiar with the difficulties of employers providing suitable mentors for trainees (particularly those outside FE colleges). Would volunteer trainees face additional barriers in this respect? Would they find suitable support in ‘communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991) within their workplace? Or would they be isolated and perhaps feared by other tutors as a potential, cheaper replacement?

SR Access to communities of practice, onsite support networks for trainees and supportive mentors can be difficult, particularly for those in smaller organisations. Some of the volunteer tutors that I encountered working for larger voluntary organisations could access existing formal networks of support in the voluntary sector but some were left to sort out their own mentors and develop their own support networks.

Volunteer tutors working in public-service organisations or with private training providers felt they were in an ambiguous position; as teachers they expected to be able to participate in staff meetings and internal staff development sessions but as volunteers found that they were not always included. This may be judged inevitable by the organisation or the volunteers themselves because of the part-time nature of their work but it is not ideal as it restricts the quality of their learning from the teaching practice.

One approach to tackle this lack of involvement could be the provision of training, advice or other support to provide volunteers with skills and confi dence to negotiate their terms and conditions themselves for their unpaid “employment”.

DR The way to approach this is to regard the volunteer trainee the same as any other trainee in terms of mentoring and other support systems. The opportunities offered, via volunteer teaching hours, for both the trainee and the employing institution are considerable; the trainee can access training and the employer can improve the supply of ‘new blood’ teachers with experience and expertise of vocations and professions. Both sides need to be aware of the pitfalls and the potential remedies and often these lie in the induction and support systems that

are the norm in many institutions. As long as volunteer trainee tutors are provided with similar support as other trainees, they should present opportunities for the institution as well as a basis for themselves for a new career in teaching.

SR Anything that improves access to training for talented teachers is to be welcomed.

However, I remain concerned about the lack of hard data and the potential lack of consistency of teaching practice experience if teacher training should become more unregulated in the future.

This conversation needs to continue.

References • Brookfield, S. D. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass • Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: legitimate peripheral participation.

London: Cambridge University Press.

• Lucas, N. and Nasta, T. (2010). State regulation and the professionalisation of further education teachers: a comparison with schools and HE. Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 62, (4) 441-454.

• Orr, K. and Simmons, R. (2010). Dual identities: the in-service trainee teacher experience in the English FE sector, Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 62(1) 75-88.

• Rennie, S. and Robinson, D. (2011).

Volunteer Tutors, Unpaid teaching practice in the Consortium for PCET initial teacher training provision, University of Huddersfield http://consortium.hud.ac.uk/projects/ latestprojects/volunteertraineetutors/ • Robinson, D. and Rennie, S. (Forthcoming) Volunteer teachers: testing the professionalisation agenda in the lifelong learning sector, Journal of Further and Higher Education.

• Robson, J (1997). A profession in crisis: status, culture and identity in the further education college. Journal of Vocational Education and Training 50, (4) 585-607.

Sandra Rennie Sandra Rennie is a consultant and independent training provider of PTLLS and the Certificate in Teaching in the Lifelong Learning Sector.

Denise Robinson Denise Robinson is director of the consortium for post-compulsory education and training based at the University of Huddersfield.

CPDMatters

15_22_CPDM.indd 17

Issue 6 | Winter 2012/13

17

06/12/2012 10:45

Why do research? It’s a fundamental question for practitioner researchers

By Craig Holmes and Susan James What happened when IfL asked researchers at the ESRC’s Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (Skope), which is based at Oxford and Cardiff Universities, to lead a pilot practitioner researcher programme for its members?

As academics at Oxford University, we are no strangers to diffi cult questions.

Yet there are certain questions that are perhaps so fundamental that, without prompting, we may never think to ask, let alone answer. On 29 September, we were given the opportunity to discuss one such question with IfL members: “why do research?”

This is how the situation came about.

Early in 2012, IfL approached the ESRC’s Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (Skope) to assist in developing a pilot practitioner researcher programme for IfL members.

The aim of this course is for participants to develop the skills necessary to become practitioner researchers. As part of this programme, Skope planned two sessions in Oxford for the first cohort to attend. The first was intended to be an introductory session for participants to learn about how to do research projects.

The aim was that between this session in September and the second session in November, the participants would use what they had learned and discussed to plan their own research project which they would then conduct and write up in time for the end of the course in February next year.

One part of the day asked: “how do you do research?” Susan James talked through numerous qualitative approaches to research, not least as part of her own doctoral research project when she worked in a kitchen in order to study learning environments in the workplace. Craig Holmes then gave

18

Issue 6 | Winter 2012/13

15_22_CPDM.indd 18

a brief overview of more quantitative or statistical approaches to research, or what he likes to think of as the fun a person can have playing around with numbers.

However, perhaps the most striking part of the session came when Skope director Ken Mayhew answered the question posed at the top of this article.

There are, of course, many reasons to do research. Policy makers, it is rumoured, are very keen on evidence to help inform their decisions, and in the world of education policy, there has maybe never been a more important time for this to be the case. However, as Ken pointed out, the one reason that may perhaps prove to matter most to practitioner-researchers in further education (FE) is this: it is only by doing your own research that you can learn to understand what is really being said in all the other research.

The amount of data, reports, analyses and information that is publicly available to anyone interested in anything related to public policy is, frankly, terrifying.

As Skope senior research fellow Ewart Keep noted during his talk, it is practically impossible for academic researchers to keep up with this persistent flood of newly generated research – and they are people whose work often requires them to do so.

It is inevitable, Ewart continued, that policy makers will be selective in what they use to inform their decisions and recommendations. They are liable to focus on the results that either confirm earlier perspectives or align best with

the status quo. This is sometimes referred to as “confi rmation bias”, and many people are susceptible to it.

Meanwhile, the results which contradict these positions can easily be seen as outliers. Perhaps they are. However, without an understanding of research methodologies, of the assumptions that lie behind any research project and the limitations found in the data or analysis, it will be difficult to make this distinction in an appropriate way.

The same must surely be true of a practitioner in FE who wants their work to reflect the state-of-the-art research in the field. A research paper may claim to have definitive evidence about the effectiveness of a particular pedagogical approach to the teaching of a particular subject. Part of the role of the researcher is, after all, to make the case (or perhaps the sales pitch) that the work is defi nitely making huge and important breakthroughs. But the question then becomes, “why should I believe you?”

An active practitioner researcher has a better chance than most of being able to answer that question. Through engaging in their own research, they will learn how certain approaches face particular issues, and through that, be able to tell when something is sound and credible, and when something else is less so.

For example, suppose there is a piece of research using data from a survey that claims to be representative. The researcher notes that the survey was conducted online and that participation was voluntary. For many, this may all seem perfectly reasonable, but the

CPDMatters

06/12/2012 10:45

www.ifl.ac.uk

“Frustratingly, practitioner research isn’t automatically more valid – being too close to something can also be a challenge to objectivity”

experienced practitioner researcher might have some concerns. They may have learned, from their own work and engaging with the work of others, that online surveys tend to attract particular types of participants – the technological-literate, or perhaps the young. These raise questions about validity of findings that can supposedly be generalised and might help you to better understand why so much research produces conflicting findings.

Of course, having assessed what information and data is out there and informing both practice and policy, researchers then want to be able to add to this debate. In this situation, the practitioner researcher is in a unique position. So much research takes place on the outside, looking in. As much as it attempts to understand and appreciate the world in which data and conclusions are drawn, it is always possible to miss that crucial bit of context which proves to be vital. The practitioner researcher is able to draw on all of their experience to make sense of their findings.

Frustratingly, this doesn’t automatically make practitioner research more valid – being too close to something can also be a challenge to objectivity. But it is a resource and a strength that can, and should, be exploited.

In the afternoon of the September session, we set teams of the participants a task of designing a research project.

The brief was that the government had proposed the introduction of a vocational baccalaureate qualification that included, as well as technical

vocational training, elements of maths, science and English (it should be noted that the subsequent proposal by Labour to introduce a technical baccalaureate was a coincidence that caused some amusement at the Skope offices).

The planned research into this qualification needed to be designed in such a way that it could feed into a public consultation on the issue. As we walked between the groups and listened to the discussion, it was obvious how much individual experiences could be harnessed to produce interesting research. One group discussed the specifi c problems in the teaching of numeracy skills that differed in two regions of the country. A second group spent some time with the issue of what this qualification would mean for ESOL teaching. Both issues, and the many others we heard that day, would have made good research projects. Crucially, they were the sorts of ideas that may never have been considered by outsiders.

Craig Holmes Craig Holmes is an economist at the University of Oxford, working as a research fellow at Skope, and a lecturer at St Anne’s College.

His main areas of interest are labour economics, the economics of education and behavioural economics, particularly looking at the economics of retirement.

Susan James Susan James is the assistant director of Skope at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include: VET systems, apprenticeship, work-based learning, on-the-job and off-thejob training, theories of learning, school-to-work transitions, and low skill/low wage work.

We at Skope were very pleased with how this pilot went. We are looking forward to seeing how the individual research projects of the 67 participants from the September session develop.

We are also looking forward to continuing to work with IfL in taking this programme forward, and we hope that many of you reading this will consider signing up in the future.

CPDMatters

15_22_CPDM.indd 19

Issue 6 | Winter 2012/13

19

06/12/2012 16:17

Computational thinking goes beyond programming with its impact on practice

By Maren Deepwell, IfL advisory council member Working out how technology can be implemented or developed by teachers and trainers is not easy, but it is of the utmost importance

In a recent talk at the annual conference of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), Aaron Sloman, honorary professor of artifi cial intelligence and cognitive science, at the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, spoke about computational thinking.

His argument is that “computational thinking goes beyond programming and can help us understand natural and artifi cial information-processing systems, including human minds.”

He spoke about why computational thinking is important not just for IT professionals, but also others trying to understand our world.

Given the recent debate by government and professional organisations alike about information and communications technology (ICT) in the national curriculum and the Royal Society’s call for views on its vision for science and mathematics education from 5-19, one may consider these issues as focused on learners and learning outcomes.

In short, it seems to focus on the education system’s ability to teach young people skills which may prepare them for the environment that they will work and live in.

However, in the context of professional practice and development in further education there are two key issues that focus on practitioners and on teaching.

First, teachers need to be supported in their professional practice and development in order to be able to deliver teaching in a very broad range of subjects which increasingly include and

20

Issue 6 | Winter 2012/13

15_22_CPDM.indd 20

rely upon skills in digital technology.

This is no small task as the brisk pace of technological development and the growing skills of learners pose a challenge in themselves. Furthermore, changing institutional cultures to reflect the growing importance of computational thinking is a gradual process.

Second, we need to consider what the importance of computational thinking, in its broadest form, is to practitioners more generally and how it can improve learning and teaching across subjects and across sectors.

In order to be able to think about the second of these questions, we fi rst need to understand what Sloman means when he speaks about computational thinking which goes beyond programming. Sloman’s understanding of the term computation thinking builds on the work of Jeanette Wing, the president’s professor of computer science and department head at the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University.

Wing conceptualises computation thinking as “a universally applicable attitude and skill set everyone, not just computer scientists, would be eager to learn and use”. In her 2006 article on the subject, Wing explains how computational thinking teaches analytical problem solving skills, the ability to understand abstract concepts and processes, reasoning skills that enable you to solve complex problems.

She argues that the skills and concepts that computational thinking entails

are applicable to a broad range of situations and subjects. These skills are important for everyone, enabling us to better make sense of how the world works and how we can shape it or equally importantly how the world is shaping our lives.

Wing also gives us a sense of how more specifi c components of computational thinking can be translated into commonplace activities, such as: • When your daughter goes to school in the morning, she puts in her backpack the things she needs for the day; that’s prefetching and caching • When your son loses his gloves, and you suggest that he retrace his steps; that’s backtracking • At what point do you stop renting a pair of skis each year and buy some?

That’s online algorithms • Which queue do you stand in at the supermarket? That’s performance modelling for multi-server systems • Why does your telephone still work during a power outage?

That’s independence of failure and redundancy in design.

Wing’s perspective is that computational thinking is becoming so ingrained in our lives that “ubiquitous computing is today as computational thinking is to tomorrow.”

Can we recognise this perspective as our own? Does this way of looking at

CPDMatters

06/12/2012 10:45

www.ifl.ac.uk

“There is no quick answer to how teachers and trainers might go about incorporating computational thinking in their practice”

things seem similar to your own? I can hardly claim that I stand in supermarket queues thinking about performance modelling for multi-server systems.

And yet our lives are governed by the concepts that Wing and Sloman describe: search algorithms determine to a large extend how and what information we can access easily.

Information devices, such as cookies, not only change our experience of websites but also allow all manner of organisations to collect signifi cant amounts of information. Similarly, the devices we use in everyday life for communication, research and writing let alone taking photos, blogging and tweeting, function according to the principles of computational thinking.

But although I think of myself as digitally literate, I do not view the digital world as seamlessly connected to the material one, as people who are younger than me do. The generations for whom the national curriculum is being re-written to include computer science, digital literacy and information technology often do not differentiate between digital content or processes and those facilitated in a different method. Their ability to make their way in the world will depend to a far larger degree than ever before on how they can use, understand, make and relate to technology.

The success of the Raspberry Pi, a robust mini-computer than can be programmed (and costs about £25) is one example of how very tangible computational thinking skills are being gained by users all over the world

starting at a very young age. While the focus of many initiatives is around teaching programming skills and computer science, the broader skills of computational thinking are foundational.

Beyond any concerns for stimulating economic growth, international competition, intellectual advancement and so forth, lies the reality that with the increasing importance of technology in all aspects of life computational thinking becomes more important too. Like the printing press or the steam engine, technologies in the digital age are changing the way things are.

If we broadly accept this and return to our earlier question, we must consider not only how we can support teachers but also teaching.

Thus, we have a challenge to meet: we understand that computation thinking is important beyond subjects like computer science. We further recognise that, in order to teach about technology and computational thinking, we need to use appropriate technology and use it well. We also need to use technology to promote professional development and communities of practice supporting practitioners and their professional recognition.

We have complex ideas, broadranging concepts and fast-developing technology to contend with, as well as a community of learners at varying stages in their learning journey, let alone different levels of computational competency and digital literacy.

All of these factors have an impact upon how we can translate the signifi cance of computational thinking into daily practice.

The Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) research programme has conducted much research into the role of technology in learning and has produced strong evidence around themes such as inclusion, fl exibility, productivity and personalisation.

In a joint response to the Royal Society’s call, TEL and ALT stated that “learning technologies need to be introduced to all teachers along with an increased focus on pedagogies that exploit digital tools and resources for active learning… Such technologies are also effective for supporting communities of practitioners and CPD.” Asking how any of this can be implemented or developed – by no means an easy feat – however, is not of utmost importance. What is important is beginning to understand why thinking about computational thinking is so signifi cant at this point in time.

It is always easier to say that something is important, that something ought to be taught than to implement training, write guidance or set consistent standards.

In my view there is no quick answer to how teachers and trainers might go about incorporating computational thinking in their practice.

Its importance goes beyond subjects, beyond sectors. Every context, every learner, is unique and the challenges

CPDMatters

15_22_CPDM.indd 21

Issue 6 | Winter 2012/13

21

06/12/2012 10:46

“Young learners learn at a pace that we cannot match in isolation. But maybe we can consider how we can work together to improve learning”

that practitioners have to meet vary accordingly. Yet the importance of understanding, of being able to navigate the way in which digital technology shapes our future, is the same for us all.

A fi rst step might be for us to become more knowledgeable about the technology we use to enhance learning and teaching and to encourage a conversation on some of the most relevant ideas in computational thinking.

Maybe the solution to effective provision of support and development for all who teach lies in the same direction.

Can computational thinking help us analyse needs across subjects and sectors and enable us to provide what is needed for all? Young learners cross boundaries of all sorts every day, using the internet and digital devices/tools to communicate, question, collaborate and fi nd information. They learn at a pace that we cannot match in isolation. But maybe we can consider how we can work together to improve learning and teaching with technology.

This article set out to examine why computational thinking is important for professional practice and development for all who teach. What I propose is that it is important to all because what it can teach us is important in many areas of life. I also suggest that computational thinking in itself provides ways of approaching the challenge of providing all who teach, regardless of setting, with opportunities to develop their abilities in computational thinking.

22

Issue 6 | Winter 2012/13

15_22_CPDM.indd 22

Further reading and references • TEL, ALT (2012). Joint response to the Royal Society’s call for views: Vision for science and mathematics education 5-19 http://repository.alt.ac.uk/2214 • ALT (2011). The place of Computer Science in the National Curriculum for England http://repository.alt.ac.uk/2200/ • BCS (2012). Draft ICT Programme of Study http://academy.bcs.org/content/ draft-ict-programme-study • Centre for Computational Thinking http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~CompThink/ • Department for Education (2012).

‘Harmful’ ICT curriculum set to be dropped this September to make way for rigorous Computer Science http://www.education. gov.uk/inthenews/inthenews/a00201864/ harmful-ict-curriculum-set-to-be-droppedthis-september-to-make-way-for-rigorouscomputer-science • Raspberry Pi http://www.raspberrypi.org/ Sawyer, Miranda (2012). Everyone wants a slice of Raspberry Pi, The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ technology/2012/nov/04/raspberry-piprogramming-jam-cern • Sloman, Aaron (2012). In ALT-C 2012.

A confrontation with reality. Conference guide: ALT http://repository.alt.ac.uk/2223 Technology Enhanced Learning http://tel.ioe.ac.uk/ • Wing. Jeanette M. (2006). A vision for the 21st century: computational thinking, CACM vol. 49, no. 3, March 2006, pp. 33-35 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/wing/ www/publications/Wing06.pdf • Wing, Jeanette M. (2008). Scientific questions in computing our field’s drivers come from science, technology, and society. Here is a start of a list of scientific questions in computing. Five deep questions in computing, CACM vol.

51, no. 1, January 2008, pp. 58-60. Talk: computational thinking and thinking about computing http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/ usr/wing/www/publications/Wing08.pdf

Maren Deepwell Dr Maren Deepwell is the chief executive of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT). Maren has worked for the association for more than four years and has an active interest in new technological developments, information management and theoretical approaches to learning and teaching.

ALT is the UK’s leading membership organisation in the learning technology field and works to improve practice, promote research, and influence policy across sectors.

CPDMatters

06/12/2012 10:46

InFocus

www.ifl.ac.uk

Testing times for assessors IfL’s policy officer Shane Chowen reports on the issues facing assessors of apprenticeships In carrying out research for IfL’s submission of evidence to Doug Richard’s review of apprenticeships, I and colleagues spoke with members working in a range of different providers in order to gain a sense of their experiences of assessing apprenticeships. We uncovered a number of largely unreported areas around their changing roles and responsibilities.

Increasingly, assessors have a higher profile in the FE sector. According to House of Commons Library figures, there was an 80 per cent increase in the number of apprenticeships between the academic years 2009/10 and 2011/12.

With more skilled individuals entering the FE teaching and training profession to meet the changing demands, it is important the sector keeps on top of how the roles, responsibilities and relationships of groups like assessors are evolving.

The requirement to deliver functional skills is an area where policy influences the evolution of practitioner’s roles and responsibilities and policy seems to change frequently. We saw a varied picture in the support given to trainers and assessors in this area. At one end of the spectrum, we visited providers that offered subject-specific training days for staff on embedding and assessing functional skills. At the other, we saw trainers and assessors grading work at level 2 while lacking that level of English and maths themselves.

Doug Richard’s review ● www.ifl.ac.uk/newsandevents/ press-releases/ifl-comments-onrichard-review-of-apprenticeships

Competition between providers for contracts able to deliver apprenticeships with employers is set to become more intense in the coming years and so now would be a good time to examine the role of assessors.

From a college or learning provider’s perspective, assessors are the face of the provider and so are responsible for maintaining these important and lucrative relationships with employer partners.

This can become particularly challenging should tensions arise between skills that employers are asking for and what is available through awarding body or SASE (Specification of Apprenticeship Standards for England) requirements.

Even before the delivery stage, practitioners are tested against what can sometimes be rigid and unhelpful obstacles in designing responsive programmes for employers who can pose challenges such as demanding training programmes that cut across different awarding body specifications, different skills sectors and sometimes at different levels.

We saw examples of the significant challenges faced when employers, particularly small- and medium-sized enterprises, were more interested in multi-disciplinary apprenticeships rather than specific and specialist programmes.

It was widely felt that more freedoms for assessors and employers to work together to input their own learning outcomes would be beneficial.

Importantly, it emerged that the relationship between assessor and apprentice is not as dissimilar to that between teacher and learner as might previously have been thought.

We were given a vivid example from a management assessor in an east

midlands college which places great store in providing pastoral support as this can make the difference between a learner successfully completing their apprenticeship or dropping out of learning and employment.

The assessor explained that this pastoral care was delivered with little institutional support and led the assessor to question what was professionally acceptable. Coming to terms with where pastoral responsibilities lie between an apprentice as a learner and an apprentice as an employee, may become a crucial topic for the profession to examine.

These issues demonstrate the importance understanding the dayto-day realities of all teaching and learning practitioners and providing support structures that evolve as roles, responsibilities and relationships do too.

Some parts of the FE sector, large institutions in particular, have demonstrated their ability to do this effectively through, for example, timetabled professional development hours and through providing administrative support to teachers.

Should we also examine the language we use when talking about supporting teaching and learning practitioners like assessors? Many assessors told us that they do not selfdefine as teachers and so can regard some discussions and debates in the sector as distant or irrelevant.

IfL’s online communities and LinkedIn page provide a space for all practitioners to share and discuss experiences and we encourage members to participate. This provides us with the evidence needed to influence policy and help to share best practice.

InTuition

23_infocus.indd Sec1:23

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

23

06/12/2012 16:04

InPractice

The hills are alive with the sound of teaching and learning In the Italian hills near Rimini and San Marino, lies the world-famous drug-rehabilitation centre of San Patrignano. To a large extent, its survival rests on the transformative powers of vocational education and training.

IfL’s Shane Chowen reports

24

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

24_25_In_Practice.indd 24

With a population of just over 1,500, San Patrignano would be forgiven for being a quiet and reserved sort of place with a village-like atmosphere, keeping itself to itself and suspicious of the rest of the world. The reality is quite different.

It’s not the stunning landscapes and cloudless skies that attract more than 50,000 visitors to this rural Italian community each year, but its people, its values and the ethos that is embodied in its residents.

These are individuals who arrive broken, their lives devastated by the social, emotional and sometimes physical effects of drug addiction. They leave clean, skilled, highly employable and, perhaps most importantly, as happier people.

San Patrignano is famous for many reasons. In Italy, it is famous for being the largest centre for drug rehabilitation in the country. Since 1978, it has taken in more than 18,000 people, offering them a home, healthcare, legal assistance, and the opportunity to study, learn a job, change their lives and regain their status as full members of society. Worldwide, it is famous for being the most successful centre of its kind and for providing highquality products and commercial services.

Studies by the universities of Bologna, Urbino and Pavia have consistently measured San Patrignano’s success rate

at more than 70 per cent. To qualify, individuals must remain drug-free and also be fully reintegrated into society.

Such success is not achieved overnight and it takes residents more than four years to complete their journey, during which they undertake intensive vocational training as well as working to sustain the entire community.

“The understanding that their community couldn’t function without their contribution is a powerful emotional force that helps them to persevere through the personal challenges that come with coming off drugs and learning how to live again,” says Scott Forbes, co-director of the San Patrignano UK Association.

“San Patrignano embodies the most basic definition of community,” he adds.

Education and training are commonplace to a greater or lesser degree in most approaches to rehabilitation found throughout the world and there are varying degrees of success.

How this works in practice at San Patrignano is a fascinating story but, to begin with, it’s important to know that the community receives no funding from the Italian government. In fact, the community is reckoned to have saved the state more than €30million annually by being entirely self-sustaining.

For example, ingredients for the 2,600

InTuition

06/12/2012 16:23

www.ifl.ac.uk

meals that are served every day are all reared, grown and harvested by the community’s agriculture team before finding their way to the trainee chefs and then the hospitality team, from where they are served in the vast, communal dining room. Even the washing up liquid has been designed and manufactured on site.

Describing what it’s like to walk around San Patrignano is hard, given the sheer scale and breadth of activity. Perhaps the best way to describe it is that it’s like walking around a giant vocational theme park. One minute you’ve discovered the underground vaults where hundreds of barrels of wine are stored before being bottled and exported globally, which raises funds for the community: it’s on the menu at Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen restaurants and on sale at Selfridges, for example.

The next minute you’re in a high-tech e-marketing studio where residents are busy fulfilling contracts for large commercial organisations and bringing in funds to keep the community going.

A quick stop for lunch in the renowned and resident-run ‘Sp.Accio’ (‘dealing’ in English) precedes a visit to the furnituremaking workshop which has its obvious benefits for a self-supporting community but is also a highly commercial operation.

Approximately a third of San Patrignano’s income, around €14million,

comes from the sale of products and services, be that the sale of cheese, wine, wood, metalwork, textiles, furniture and so forth to the public or to businesses.

The residents even manufacture teddy bears for Dior.

Another third comes from donations, accepted from anyone but members of the community or their families, because San Patrignano believes that they have “already been damaged economically by their loved one’s drug addiction”.

The final third is raised through goods and services provided by businesses in the Province of Rimini.

Car manufacturer Renault provides the community with a fleet of vehicles which enables goods and people to move around with greater ease. Italian bank Fondazione BNL invested in upgrading the community’s medical centre which provides all the day-to-day healthcare services you’d expect, as well as specialist provision for residents with conditions such as hepatitis, HIV and Aids.

Training is delivered with the support of local industries both in terms of providing capital and providing guest trainers. Employers tend to regard it as a privilege to give their support.

Many of the trainers, and indeed the other staff, are former residents. The admissions department for example

includes a team of former residents who make judgements on applications against a rigorous set of criteria which includes being clean for a minimum of two weeks and demonstrating a clear commitment to the community. Who better to assess the suitability of applicants?

The vocational trainers almost form a community among themselves, constantly sharing practices and talking about their experiences. Teachers and trainers in the UK will be familiar with the feeling that they are not only delivering a curriculum leading to a certificate for the learner but that they are very often liberating individuals from disadvantage through education and training. This ethos underpins all that San Patrignano’s teachers and trainers do.

San Patrignano challenges the narrative that vocational education and training lies solely in the domain of the world of business. It is a living and breathing example of how the commercial world, vocational education and training and community learning are not isolated or even opposing points on the spectrum of further education but that all have an equally important stake.

Shane Chowen is policy officer for IfL and was on a study trip to San Patrignano, funded by San Patrignano UK

InTuition

24_25_In_Practice.indd 25

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

25

06/12/2012 16:23

Ensuring CPD in specialist colleges Political and financial pressures need to be overcome if specialist colleges staff are to stay up to date with their learning and skills. By Ian Nash When Cheshire East Council proposed a new school for autistic children as part of the wider special-needs strategy for young people and adults, education secretary Michael Gove insisted it could only open as a sponsored academy.

There were immediate concerns about how this could be done without undermining a burgeoning local authoritywide partnership approach for those with learning difficulties and disabilities. Then, the directors at David Lewis College, a residential specialist centre, had a brainwave. “We decided to sponsor it ourselves,” explains Anne Price, director of education and lifeskills at the college.

This was no act of subversion but a move to protect and build on quality learning and a continuing professional development (CPD) programme seen as essential for special educational needs (SEN) staff at schools and colleges within the authority.

Changes were also coming in the national funding methodology, curriculum and accreditation, through deregulation and May’s policy paper, Support and aspiration: a new approach to SEN and disability – progress and next steps.

There were mixed blessings: the paper signalled an opportunity to improve initial teacher training (ITT) and CPD, but deregulation, recommended in the Lingfield review of professionalism in FE, could mean a scaling-back in demand and financial support for teacher training.

For the 61 specialist residential colleges

26

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

26_27_Insight.indd 26

PERFORMING ARTS/HEREWARD COLLEGE, COVENTRY

InSight

How to measure learner progress and attainment An issue common to all SEN providers is the inadequacy of conventional qualifications and accreditation schemes for measuring learner progress and attainment. It is being explored by Natspec, in conjunction with the Policy Consortium, through a project to develop a system to ‘quality assure’ provision for learners with learning difficulties that uses the ‘Recognising and recording progress and achievement’ (Rarpa) process through some form of external moderation.

The five steps of the Rarpa process • Set aims appropriate to the individual learner or groups of learners • Complete initial assessment to set the learner’s starting point • Identify appropriately challenging learning objectives (initial, negotiated and revised) • Do formative assessment - recognise and record progress and achievement made, including tutor feedback and learner reflection • Carry out end-of-programme learner self-assessment, tutor summative assessment, review of overall progress and achievement in relation to learning objectives in the Association of National Specialist Colleges (Natspec), the moves to devolve funding to 150 local authorities posed particular threats and uncertainties.

It costs £68,000 a year for each learner in a residential college (£150,000 for those with complex needs) and many local authorities (LAs) are eyeing cost savings.

Alison Boulton, Natspec’s chief executive, says: “There are huge concerns about the changes in learner funding in 2013 and 2014. On the ITT and CPD side, people need to mitigate the effects, which means delivering the best, even when LAs say: ‘we don’t want the best, we want the cheapest.’”

Anne Price, who is also chair of Natspec, points to David Lewis College’s approach to

ITT and CPD as a potential model for local and national development. The college is a partner within a local teaching alliance delivering the School Direct programme, a new teacher-training scheme that offers an alternative to the university route.

“We are looking at the provision for learning difficulties and disabilities in a more coherent way and we often have people on placement from the university here,” says Anne. “Whenever we have vacancies we advertise, but applicants are often not sufficiently skilled.”

The route from learning support staff to fully fledged teacher is common in residential colleges and is growing, with sophisticated progressive CPD

InTuition

06/12/2012 16:04

www.ifl.ac.uk Moving with the times: local authorities are looking to save money, but CPD is essential within specialist colleges

programmes around the PTLLS, CTLLS and DTLLS qualifications.

Fairfield Farm College, a residential centre in Wiltshire, employs a mix of fully trained teachers and learning support staff with NVQ Level 3 in health and social care. Janet Kenward, the principal, says: “We do so on the understanding that they will take teaching qualifications. The NVQ doesn’t help them deliver structured learning, so all do PTLLS.” A small college with a limited budget, Fairfield displays the cost-effectiveness that LAs could be seeking. It commissions bespoke PTLLS courses for staff, as an Open College Network-registered college, and uses mainstream provision for DTLLS, to ensure all staff are qualified.

Resources to train and develop learning support assistants were produced in 2011

by Natspec and the Association of Colleges with support from the Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS).

Twenty general FE and specialist colleges teamed up to produce materials, now available at www.excellencegateway.org.uk The need for such support was identified subsequently in Support and aspiration, says Jane Griffiths, PTLLS director at of National Star College in Cheltenham. The three-stage ITT/CPD programme in operation at her college is similar to the one being considered for inclusion in the SEN bill due early next year.

National Star won the National Training Award 2011 (south-west region) for its tool

Fast facts: Natspec • Natspec has 77 full members across England, Wales and Northern Ireland • More than 10,000 staff work within Natspec colleges, including teachers, learning support staff, care staff and therapists • Natspec colleges cater for 3,800 learners with a wide range of disabilities and learning difficulties • Two thirds of Natspec colleges are residential kit of CPD and has been judged ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted and the Quality Care Commission in recent inspections.

With 24-hour provision for 250 students and 650 staff, the college has a huge CPD programme that stretches across the learning and skills sector to include the prison service at HMP Long Lartin.

Using the new suite of City & Guilds programmes, the college can also offer standalone units for teachers in mainstream colleges. Jane says: “It’s not a secret simply because it’s specialist education. Whether general FE or specialist, we all should use differential learning and be inclusive.”

Far from seeing a falling off in demand for training, she has seen an increase from external candidates, not least private training providers bidding for work. She

says: “It’s encouraging because a lot of organisations will see the need to raise the professional status of their staff if they are to succeed.”

Natspec has also seen steady growth in ‘dual-role staff’, teachers who do additional care support and care workers who do learning support. Derwen College in Shropshire builds this approach into its CPD structures to maximise its effectiveness as a vocational college. It recruits many staff from the trades and offer conversion courses to trained teacher status. Meryl Green, head of CPD, says: “We take them as learning support assistants, if not qualified, on the understanding that they will train as full teachers when posts become available.

“It’s hard work with assignments and the like, but it enables them to apply it in context and makes them think about its meaning and relevance – this is experiential learning, or this is situational learning.”

In December 2011, IfL produced a report, in collaboration with the LSIS, based on a survey of 2,300 teachers’ and trainers’ views on new accredited professional development opportunities. It sought to move forward the recommendations in the original Support and aspiration green paper. Members can read the paper at www.ifl.ac.uk/publications

Ian Nash is co-owner of Nash&Jones Partnership media consultancy. Ian was the founding editor of FE Focus

InTuition

26_27_Insight.indd 27

Issue 11| Winter 2012/13

27

06/12/2012 16:05

QTLS: Gain recognition through enhanced professional status Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills (QTLS) is a professional status that is conferred by IfL for teachers and trainers who have successfully completed the professional formation process.

The next window to declare your intention to apply to gain QTLS status is open from now until 31 January 2013.

Why should I gain QTLS? 78 per cent of those gaining QTLS said that it increased their confidence in their teaching practice, from a sample of some 2,500 IfL members Since 1 April 2012 IfL members with QTLS status are also recognised as qualified to teach in schools, as well as in further education and skills. This parity of status has been fought for by IfL and hard won.

IfL members who have achieved or are working towards QTLS should be reassured of the value of this professional status following recent regulatory changes, making it optional, not compulsory, for new entrants More than 10,000 members have achieved QTLS status since its introduction in 2008 Introducing IfL’s recognition route to QTLS IfL is committed to supporting and enhancing the professional development of its members.

There is a new recognition route with IfL, developed for those with substantial experience in teaching and training but without teacher qualifications, to gain QTLS status. If your employment commenced before 2007, and you have significant teaching experience of at least five years, you are likely to be able to use this route. Further details about how to apply are available on the IfL website.

Find out more about QTLS at www.ifl.ac.uk/pf or call us on 0844 815 3202 INT.12.12.028.indd 2

06/12/2012 12:33

Training

www.ifl.ac.uk

The signs are good for BSL trainers and teachers Imagine being in a classroom where everyone wants to speak at the same time but most people cannot hear a word.

That was the situation that confronted six teachers of British Sign Language (BSL) and tutor Mel Willcocks earlier this year during a ground-breaking teacher-training course for profoundly deaf people that was delivered, and assessed, through signing.

Frank Sly, who has been a BSL teacher for 27 years, relished the opportunity to gain the Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector (PTLLS) qualification through Leicestershire Adult Learning Service. But, at times, he felt slightly sorry for the tutors and the two interpreters.

“All those deaf hands waving around,” he recalls with amusement. “Three or four conversations could be going on. The interpreters tried their best to keep up.”

For Mr Sly, gaining PTLLS means he is no longer just a teacher of BSL, but holds a nationally-recognised qualification and can teach subjects such as media and ICT through BSL. During the course, he delivered a ‘micro-teach’ to the rest of the class in video editing. “The challenge was to think outside the box of teaching BSL,” he explains. “It was inspiring to think that there was potential for me to become a tutor to deaf people in other subjects.”

The PTLLS course, at Longslade Community College, in Birstall, consisted of eight one-day workshops, held on Saturdays over six months from August 2011. The words of tutors were translated into BSL by interpreters, who translated what learners said for the benefit of tutors.

Ms Willcocks understands BSL but needed interpreters present to teach to the level required for teacher training. As she signs herself, it did not faze her to see her words translated into BSL, but she recognised that the process takes time.

“Hearing people can take notes while you speak,” she says. “You need to give BSL learners a lot more time as they have to look at the interpreter and then take notes.”

Recent efforts to professionalise staff in the post-16 sector have largely overlooked people who are profoundly deaf. It does not help that awarding bodies insist staff

SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Neil Merrick reports on a welcome initiative by Leicestershire Adult Learning Service that enables profoundly deaf people to gain the PTLLS qualification

“BSL learners need more time. They have to look at the interpreter and then take notes” studying for higher-level teacher training qualifications achieve level 2 in English, although this is not necessary for PTLLS. The course in Leicestershire stemmed from work led by East Midlands Centre for Excellence in Teacher Training (Emcett), including the translating of teacher training materials into BSL. According to Emcett executive director Ian Grayling, people with regular hearing are often “clueless” about the problems facing those who were born deaf or lost their hearing at an early age.

“Profoundly deaf people are largely excluded from hearing society,” he says.

“They’re a culture and community apart, sharing a language very different to English.”

For Jason Bell, chief interpreter on the PTLLS course, it was first time working in a classroom where BSL was the main means of communication for all learners.

The greatest challenge was finger spelling a word such as ‘syllabus’, so that it was

not confused with ‘curriculum’, for which there is a recognised sign in BSL. “It took time to unpack the language,” he adds. “You have to look at what something means and look at the context.”

Assignments that would be delivered elsewhere in written form were recorded on video in BSL and translated into English by an interpreter. The qualification was awarded by OCR, with two staff gaining level 4, and the others level 3.

Programme director Andy Gibson, who also worked as a tutor, hopes all six staff will go on to teach other subjects and possibly broaden their horizons further.

“The deaf community needs a bank of tutors that it can draw on for subjects beyond BSL,” he says. “We also tried to get people to think about teaching others that aren’t deaf. If it’s a practical skill, it can be taught to hearing people.”

Neil Merrick is a journalist and teacher of English for speakers of other languages.

IfL is working with the British Deaf Association and the charity Signature on ways to support BSL teachers.

Further information www.emcett.com/teaching/index.html www.emcett.com/deaf_voices/index.html

InTuition

29_Training.indd Sec1:29

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/2013

29

06/12/2012 16:23

Geoff Petty

How to get that safety-net bounce

Does your department have the ability to organise coffee at break times? If yes, then Geoff Petty thinks you’re ready to try to ‘catch them before they fall’. Geoff is the author of Teaching Today and Evidenced Based Teaching, and has trained staff in more than 300 colleges and schools.

Geoff is a patron of IfL.

Further information IfL members can access the full version of Geoff’s article and download the diagrams by logging into the website the normal way via www.ifl.ac.uk

30

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

30_31_Ask_Geoff ss.indd 30

Hurworth School, near Darlington in County Durham, saw 38 per cent of its pupils get five good GCSEs in 1997, but 10 years later it was 96 per cent. These were real GCSEs - not ‘equivalents’ and there was plenty of social and economic deprivation – not just leafy suburbs. No data fiddling either.

A near tripling of the pass-rates defies both sociology and normal teacher expectations. How on earth did they do it?

No, they didn’t shoot the weaker students and bury them behind the goalposts. Nor did they spike the water with Ritalin. They improved teaching and learning to a very high standard, using a strategy called ‘assertive mentoring’ or ‘catch them before they fall’ (see Teaching Today – a practical guide by Geoff Petty, chapters 47-48).

In order to use this strategy, your team must pass the ‘coffee test’. For example, if your department has trouble providing coffee and milk at break times (including spoons), then you may need an armed coup before embarking on this approach.

Have a look at the flow diagram (right), and if you think ‘we do that already’ prepare for some surprises. Most departments/ colleges do something like this, but it only happens once every six weeks and the arrows can be missing. Student selfassessment is often missing too, and students are not usually offered support and monitoring with their action plan.

Also, students can get away with failing to complete the action plan. Impressive colleges and their teachers and trainers, however, do what Hurworth School does.

Take this example. Jake has already tried to grasp percentages unaided and failed.

So, he’s likely to need support. Here’s a cheap mode of support that raises students’ morale and leaves you to put your feet up.

You find another student, Bracha. She is not a close friend of his, but is good at percentages and agrees to help. You should emphasise the difference between helping and copying at this point. But students get this so you don’t need to explain much.

You explain Bracha’s role to Jake, and the pair meet outside class time to resolve the difficulties. Jake knows that Bracha will report his progress

and effort, or lack of it, back to you.

You might formalise this agreement with ground rules and a process. Or, you might leave it informal and fluid. But, a week later, as agreed, Bracha reports progress. Often it’s good news, but suppose it isn’t….

In this instance, you require Jake to attend your weekly departmental workshop. Any student from any course at any level can attend this, but Jake must attend if his action plan requires it (he agreed to abide by this before enrolment).

You get weekly reports on his progress; Bracha might still be helping, by the way.

Three weeks later the problem is fixed.

(Learning teams are worth trying too, see InTuition, issue 8).

Do you see what I mean about the arrows in the diagram (below right)?

A weakness, picked up at the beginning of the course, is discussed in a one-to-one tutorial, addressed with support, progress is monitored, and support increased until the problem is fixed. Jake went twice round this cycle in three weeks.

Unlike in most colleges, the cycle in the diagram goes round once a day, week, fortnight, or month, depending on the needs of the student. Hurworth School believes that if every student is given support in proportion to their needs, then all will be successful. This is 96 per cent true, after all.

The support system is rather like a series of safety nets (see above right). Or like an inflatable buoyancy aid, where we keep pumping in support until the student floats.

If you have been teaching for more than 25 minutes you will realise this isn’t easy to organise. It took Hurworth 10 years to go from a 38 per cent to a 96 per cent success rate. The support provided by teachers in the workshops is a brilliant investment – so that it is fully funded and properly time-tabled. This just can’t be done in corridors with a sandwich in one hand and a coffee in the other.

It’s important to recognise that this is not just a controlling, disciplinary system.

There is a philosophy to it, which is: ‘if we give the help they need, every student will succeed.’ It’s formative assessment. So if you pass the coffee test, try it.

InTuition

06/12/2012 12:30

www.ifl.ac.uk

Safety nets: monitoring with consequences start

finish

Study buddies

Workshop

Vacation support

Make sure support is proportional to need

Catch them before they fall Assess learner’s needs

The student works on the action plan

Identify their aspirations and needs

Learner may get support from: Peers such as ‘study buddies’ or learning teams College or specialist services

An action plan is set Targets The support needed to meet the target is identified

Do an on-programme assessment

Do Apply

Identify any additional needs eg course-specific screening questionnaire ‘What is 27 as a percentage of 159?’

Review Learn

Self-assessment: Students self assess their work-rate, attendance, punctuality, strengths and weaknesses etc Teacher assessments: teachers report on student’s progress, marks, grades and attendance etc

Tutor has a ‘one-to-one’ review with the student Was the previous action plan completed?

Medals: “What are your strengths?”

“What has gone well?”

Facilitation: “What do you find difficult?”

“What could you do about that?”

Missions:

Tough love:

High regard High expectations High support

“What needs to go on your action plan?”

InTuition

30_31_Ask_Geoff ss.indd 31

Negotiate an individual learning plan (ILP)

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

31

06/12/2012 10:47

Books

• Editor’s pick

A timely and accessible text that should help to demystify research Excerpt: Doing your Research Project in the Lifelong Learning Sector Evaluating your research Think about one of the journal articles that you have found to use, or have already read, for your literature review.

Make sure to choose one that has reported on a piece of empirical research.

That is to say, choose an article that describes the collection of a body of data and its subsequent analysis, together with any broader theoretical conclusions that may have been put forward.

As you look back on the article now, what is it about the article that is

Doing your Research Project in the Lifelong Learning Sector.

Jonathan Tummons and Vicky Duckworth (2012) Open University Press division of McGraw-Hill: paperback, £19.99.

(978-0-3352-4614-4).

I received this publication for review at exactly the right time: at week two of the BA module ‘Introduction to Research’. In previous years, student teachers have on occasion struggled to familiarise themselves with the more challenging philosophical concepts and terminology associated with research. This publication should remedy all such anxieties.

The text is well written in a friendly and accessible language. Even the more complex ideas are explained in such a manner that they become transparent and

• Other new

publications

easy to understand, thus demystifying ‘research’.

The authors have drawn upon their own experiences, making use of relevant case studies, to illustrate theory.

They guide the students through every stage of the research process, from advice before the research commences and how to refine a research question, through to methodology, methods of data collection, taking ethical considerations into account, data analysis and presentation.

The authors of the work emphasise the importance of disseminating research, offering clear guidance on how to achieve this, again, underpinned by some examples from their own practice.

I would not hesitate to recommend this book

to my students as a welcome introduction to carrying out research. I would also recommend it to my colleagues as an uncomplicated refresher of aspects of the research process. My only reservation is with regard to the choice of title, which suggests that the publication is aimed at students in the lifelong learning sector only, thus restricting its potential audience.

In my opinion, the book is equally suitable for, and relevant to, students on a range of courses such as (foundation) degrees in learning support or early years, embarking on their first research project, as the logical structure of the book and its clearly presented theory will appeal to most students.

Dr Jodi Roffey-Barentsen is programme manager of education and ITT at Farnborough College of Technology and an IfL Fellow. Her research interests include the deployment of teaching assistants in primary, secondary and special schools in England, transition to higher education and reflective practice. The second edition of her book ‘Reflective Practice in the Lifelong Learning Sector’ is available in January.

Creative Educational Leadership: A practical guide to leadership as creativity.

characters, and delicious to read one whose purpose is to ensure all teachers recognise better the leadership aspects of their role. In 2009, Andrew Pollard, described the essence of professionalism as the exercise of skills, knowledge and judgement for the public good. I think we should go further and assert that

teachers and trainers also are highly creative leaders. Yet the sector’s quintessential leaders of learning remain largely unsung by leadership theorists and researchers, and teachers and trainers themselves too often under-claim their leadership role.

Each chapter in Jacquie Turnbull’s book promotes

Jacquie Turnbull (2012) Continuum (Bloomsbury): paperback £22.99 (978-1-4411-6774-3) It is certainly refreshing to read a book that has teachers in further education as central 32

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

32_33_Books.indd 32

convincing, that lets you feel confident that it’s a ‘good piece of research’ that you can take seriously, apply to your practice and that stands up to scrutiny?

Bear in mind that the fact that it has been published in a refereed journal means that the article has already been scrutinised by other members of the academic community – but they will have been assessing the quality of this article in just the same way as we are discussing research quality here.

Member offer IfL members can claim a 20 per cent discount on all McGraw-Hill education titles.

Select your book and at the checkout enter promotional code IFL2012. The offer expires on 31 December 2012. www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk

InTuition

06/12/2012 14:26

www.ifl.ac.uk

Over-theorised and remote from practitioners? Not any longer…

IfL at national policy level, since April 2012, actual equivalence is protected by legislation.

Detailed guidance on using the IfL technology REfLECT, for recording and declaring CPD, is provided together with a practical activity for the dual professional, reflecting on the areas of CPD, relating to subject specialism, teaching and learning and policy or organisational context.

The book is energising and refreshing, recognising the daily demands on teachers and trainers. It also exhorts practitioners to take responsibility for their professional choices and to be idealistic but realistic. It reminds us that research has shown that teaching quality is one of the strongest factors in learner achievement and that an integral part of securing this is through reflective practice and CPD.

Excerpt: Reflective Practice for Teaching in Lifelong Learning Collaborative reflective practice: learner experience activity

Reflective Practice for Teaching in Lifelong Learning.

Ian Rushton and Martin Sutter. (2012) Open University Press division of McGraw-Hill: paperback, £19.99.

(978-0-3352-4401-0).

In producing this book, the authors aimed to reconnect with reflective practice which they believe has become overtheorised and remote from practitioners. In doing so, they have provided a pragmatic and thoughtful work that is accessible to both trainees and more experienced teachers.

Their starting point is that individual teachers ought to define their understanding of what constitutes effective practice so that they will be able to question flawed notions of teaching and learning.

I particularly liked their critical approach which puts the teacher at the centre of their

reflection and has practical questions, tips and strategies, such as the feedback sandwich (right), to enable teachers to further develop their leadership capacity.

This is a book to support everyday leadership practice in those thousands of micro decisions that teachers make every day, every week.

Ask yourself: • Who works hardest in the sessions, me or the learners?

• How can I get them to work harder than me (or even harder if they already do)?

When you have two or three answers to the second question, ask yourself: • What would be the benefits for them?

• What could they learn from each other?

• Could they assess each other informally?

• How would motivation be affected?

• Would there be stretch and challenge for the more able?

• Would there be support of the less able?

Add two further questions of your own

“This book is energising and refreshing, recognising the daily demands on teachers and trainers” practice in taking responsibility for determining their own continuing professional development (CPD). Three levels and models of reflective practice are provided: technical, organisational and critical.

The models lead into discussions of the importance of communities of practice and then extending reflective practice through action research. Central to this is CPD for which each individual takes responsibility, reflecting on the impact that they are having on their learners.

Interestingly, in the case studies of CPD, individuals were making choices about their personal professional development needs and, in each case, had elected to undertake professional formation leading to Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills (QTLS) status as a demonstration of their professionalism. In terms of the ‘almost equivalence’ between QTLS and Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) for school teachers, mentioned on page 11 of the book, it should be noted that, after much work by

Sue Colquhoun is head of professional status at IfL. Sue has worked across schools, further and higher education and on two continents. She is co-author of Diversity and Inclusion: an FE lecturer’s guide.

Mini excerpt: The feedback sandwich Top Layer: refer to something specific that has been genuinely well done Filling: refer to an aspect of performance the person can improve Bottom layer: give a general positive comment Toni Fazaeli

Outstanding Teaching: Engaging Learners

years of research and feedback from its training programmes to deliver a practical and accessible text for educators.

Aimed at school teachers primarily, it contains practical advice and tips, empowering ideas and further reading material that should also be of use to teachers and trainers in the lifelong learning system.

Andy Griffith and Mark Burns (2012) Crown House Publishing: paperback £12.99 (978-1-8459-0797-6) This book forms part of the Outstanding Teaching series from independent teachertraining providers Osiris Education. It draws on five

Member offer IfL members can claim a 20 per cent discount on all McGraw-Hill education titles.

Select your book, and at the checkout enter promotional code IFL2012. The offer expires on 31 December 2012. www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk

InTuition

32_33_Books.indd 33

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

33

06/12/2012 14:27

ResearchDigest Liverpool Community College’s research network earns plaudits Creating and sustaining an active research culture in further education can prove a challenge. But Liverpool Community College seems to have cracked it with its longstanding research network, which recently won the college a Research Engaged Award from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER).

The network, which is now in its 11th year, encourages and supports staff wishing to carry out practice-based or action research. Over the past three years more than a quarter of LCC staff have done some sort of research or study, ranging from professional reflective practice to postgraduate study.

Programmes are designed to support staff in maintaining their continuing professional development (CPD) activities and, out of 894 staff, nearly 7,600 CPD activities were recorded in 2010-11. There are also plans for a research coaching and mentoring initiative for new staff as part of the college’s human resources strategy.

All staff have a contractual right to three days selfdirected study annually with higher education staff receiving a 1.2 hour weighting to allow time for scholarship.

In addition, there are college inset days, weekly faculty teaching and learning hours for CPD and team-specific development activities as well as area specific development days. Staff are also supported to attend local, national and international external CPD events.

Staff wishing to undertake research and scholarly activity can request guidance and

34

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

34_Research.indd 34

Frank Coffield delivered the keynote speech at the 2011 LCC research day event

mentoring from the research network via the eCPD virtual learning environment (VLE).

Staff can use the VLE to share their scholarship and best practice and have access to the college’s Learning Resource Centre. More formal research, relating to accredited study, is carried out with partner universities with mentoring and support built into the programmes.

Joel Petrie, chair of LCC’s research network, says there are clear benefits for FE teachers and trainers as dual professionals: “Many of the people who teach in FE are specialists in certain areas such as car mechanics, plumbing or electronics, and they learn to be teachers on the job. So they are teachers and students concurrently,” he says.

“Individuals contributing papers or research have reported that the opportunity to contribute and share with colleagues is very rewarding, and that their practice has shifted. The research network has given lecturers a space

to experiment with new ideas and get feedback from peers.

“Reflective practice and informal action research are widespread, and there are many colleges that hold local conferences, research days or events to share good practice. We need to celebrate this as a sector and share it across institutions.”

The college has secured funding from the Learning and Skills Improvement Service to develop a new teaching and learning strategy. Part of the project is the promotion of professional autonomy and a renewed emphasis on the leadership of learning.

Mr Petrie said that the biennial LCC research day event is a major draw for staff. Next April’s event will see Bill Williamson, emeritus professor at the School of Education at Durham University and co-author with Professor Frank Coffield of From Exam Factories to Communities of Discovery, deliver the keynote.

Professor Coffield (pictured) delivered the keynote speech at the 2011 event.

CPD Exchange CPD Exchange is a new service from IfL that offers practitioners and researchers a medium by which they can request and share information in relation to their own academic or action research and/or professional development.

To post items online please go to www.ifl.ac.uk/ cpdexchange Paul Crawford, student, West Hertfordshire College For my course, entitled Critical reflection in professional learning and practice, I must consider my development as a professional practitioner.

Could IfL members help me by highlighting some of the social, cultural and political forces that have been significant in their development? Email paul. crawford@westherts.ac.uk Andy Cobb, teacher trainer, mentor trainer and owner of teachersunzipped Can anyone offer advice and guidance, or recommend effective training provision relating to learners who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia and how best to work with them?

Email andywarthog@ yahoo.com Laura Stewart-Waring I am exploring the impact of modern apprenticeships on participating 16- to 18-year-olds. I want to see how apprenticeships are delivered in European countries and what opportunity there is for full-time employment on completion compared with the UK. Can anybody offer advice or guidance? Email laura.waring@virgin.net

InTuition

06/12/2012 16:05

www.ifl.ac.uk

NoticeBoard IfL Calendar 1

31

1

29

DECEMBER

IfL opening date for IfL CPD in the expressions of intent regions event, for QTLS and ATLS* Yorkshire and Humberside

18

IfL conferral of QTLS and ATLS status*

Queen’s New Year’s Honours announced, hopefully recognising many more teachers and trainers

AoC Teaching, Learning & Assessment Conference, Prospero House, London

29-30

31

JANUARY

5

7

15-17

Learning and Skills Closing date for exhibition, Olympia 2, expressions of intent London (meet the IfL for QTLS and ATLS* LGBT History Month team at stand 278)

Safer internet day – Connect with respect (www.saferinternet. org.uk/safer-internetday)

FE reputation and marketing conference and broadcast, Central London

IfL supports the Show and Tell Festival, Nottingham (www.showandtell festival.com)

5

6

7

8

11-15

15-24

World Literacy Day

World Maths Day

World Book Day

International Women’s Day

National National Science and Queen’s anniversary Apprenticeship Week Engineering Week prize nominations close (see below)

FEBRUARY

MARCH

28

*IfL runs regular cycles for QTLS and ALTS, from expressions of interest to application and conferral

IfL responds to the ITT consultation on qualifications Thank you to the 1,200-plus IfL members who took the time to complete our survey on the proposals to reform the current framework on initial teacher training (ITT) qualifications for the sector.

The Learning and Skills

Improvement Service (LSIS) proposes the replacement of the current PTLLS, CTLLS and DTLLS qualifications with a level 3 award, level 4 certificate and level 5 diploma in education and training respectively.

IfL members’ views will be influencing the future of our profession and you can find the consultation response at www.ifl.ac.uk/consultation.

The new qualifications are expected to be developed for delivery from September 2013.

New IfL publications directory

with EduCare to offer the programmes, comprising two bundles: one focused on duty of care and the other on business improvement. The programmes provide members with high-quality distance learning. For more information, visit www.ifl.ac.uk/educare If you have already signed up, send us your feedback. Email communications@ifl.ac.uk

Support AoC’s ‘no free lunch’ campaign

IfL has created an online resource of publications at www.ifl.ac.uk/publications Members can now login to access a library of the latest publications from IfL and other sector partner organisations in one place, including: • Back issues of InTuition and CPD Matters • IfL reviews of CPD • Great teaching and learning, produced in partnership with the 157 Group • Research on effective teaching and training Visit the IfL website to find out more. Send your feedback to communications@ifl.ac.uk

EduCare-IfL CPD benefit More than 170 IfL members have already taken up our exclusive benefit – a professional support programme at a vastly reduced cost. IfL teamed up

Teacher Expressware discounts for members IfL members can benefit from discounts of up to 90 per cent on branded software from Teacher Expressware. For a limited period, Quark is offering an exclusive free licence for educators on QuarkXPress 9, the industry-standard design and publishing software. The offer is open until 31 December 2012. Find all IfL member discounts and special offers at www.ifl.ac.uk/discounts

IfL is supporting the AoC ‘no free lunch?’ campaign, which calls on the government to extend free meals to sixthform students studying at colleges. Currently, 103,000 young people aged 16-18 who study in further education or sixth-form colleges are not able to access the free meals to which they would be entitled if they were studying in a maintained school sixth form, an academy, a free school or a university technical college.

We urgently need examples of learners’ concentration being adversely affected by lack of nutrition. Please email mailbox @ifl.ac.uk Please also sign the AoC’s government e-petition at www.aoc.co.uk

QTLS and ATLS status The window in which to declare your intention to

Season’s greetings from everyone at IfL IfL’s Advisory Council, Non-Executive Board and staff would like to wish all our members season’s greetings and a happy and fulfilling New Year.

apply for Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills (QTLS) or Associate Teacher Learning and Skills (ATLS) status is open from 1 December 2012 until 31 January 2013. You can find detailed information about this opportunity at www.ifl.ac.uk/pf

Queen’s anniversary prizes for FE and HE The Queen’s anniversary prizes for further and higher education promote worldclass excellence in UK universities and colleges.

We encourage you to think about examples of excellent practice that you are involved in or have seen at your place of work with a view to developing an entry for your college. The closing date for receipt of entries is Thursday 28 March 2013.

Find out more at www. royalanniversarytrust.org.uk

InTuition

35_Noticeboard 2.indd Sec1:35

Issue 11 | Winter 2012/13

35

06/12/2012 10:48

Do you know how to keep her safe?

New Professional Support Programme from the Institute for Learning and EduCare Jenny is 17 and attending a foundation course you’re leading. After a bright start and a promising term, her attendance begins to drop. When she does attend, she seems very quiet and withdrawn.

Would you know what to do? Is Jenny ‘just being a teenager’, or is something wrong? Could it be a safeguarding issue?

We know you take your safeguarding responsibilities seriously, so the Institute for Learning has teamed up XJUI &EV$BSF UP DSFBUF BO FYDMVTJWF OFX NFNCFS CFOFĂĽU B 1SPGFTTJPOBM 4VQQPSU 1SPHSBNNF KVTU GPS ZPV 5IF 1SPHSBNNF QSPWJEFT EVUZ PG care online learning programmes including safeguarding vulnerable BEVMUT BOE ZPVOH QFPQMF ĂĽSTU BJE FTTFOUJBMT IFBMUI BOE TBGFUZ TUSFTT NBOBHFNFOU BOE NPSF 5IFZ BSF BMM DFSUJĂĽDBUFE BOE XSJUUFO PS FOEPSTFE CZ FYQFSUT JODMVEJOH UIF /41$$ 8FTU .JEMBOET "NCVMBODF 4FSWJDF BOE 6OJUF UIF 6OJPO 8IBUnT NPSF UIFZnWF BMM CFFO JOEFQFOEFOUMZ DFSUJĂĽFE CZ UIF $1% $FSUJĂĽDBUJPO 4FSWJDF The Professional Support Programme is available at a very special price of just ÂŁ19.99*, offering signiďŹ cant savings for our members.

Get your Professional Support Programme today by visiting:

www.i.ac.uk/educare *All prices quoted are ex VAT

INT.12.12.036.indd 2

06/12/2012 12:35