Welcome
It’s lovely to welcome you all to #APConnect Constellations B. Today is when we get to know one another…relationships that we’ll take over to Slack (not email, so prepare yourself for that now). Here’s Lou with her pal The Bowerbird 🦚, of whom more later, to make sure that you get off to a flying start. We’ve got six months to really make it crack. When we say ‘Connections Day’ we really mean that. And on Friday we’ve got five hours of building community in meaningful ways together, so that we can be a strong unit till March 
(don’t worry, we won’t do any embarrassing rounds where you have to say what kind of fruit you are but if we did, Lou would be cherries 🍒).
This webpage is your ‘go to’ landing page for everything you’ll need today – and before the day – so bookmark it now! If you always come here first, you won’t get lost. You’ll meet various people throughout the day but Lou and the Bowerbird 🦚 will be here all the time. The cast of characters is US! We are literally facilitators of you, helping you not only carry out your quality improvement research project but understand, too, how you can use it as a springboard to influence change.
You’ll also meet Stef Wilkinson, Lynne Taylerson and Julie Sinclair who are supporting Constellation B throughout the year. Geraldine Burns is also joining us from ETF 😀 We know stuff, and we’ll help where we can but our real job is to get you connecting up with one another and with everything that’s happening out there in FE. Your ‘stuff’ is what the world needs to know about.
We are very open in our practices and not afraid to make mistakes and that’s the basis we’ll work with you on. It can be a bit disconcerting at first 😊 but our first mission is to develop relationships with you where we can have honest dialogue. We know that sometimes, people enrol on Constellation B because it’s an expectation in their organisation. If that’s you, don’t worry, we’ll work hard to win you over! This fabulous blog by APConnect graduate Marsida Horeshka @marsmaths might help, if you’re needing to be convinced.
We will continue to add to this landing page so that it and Slack (and the links outwards for each) are the only places you’ll need to go. To that end, we are introducing…
Monthly Monitoring
Your contractural obligation is to return the googleform below once a month, to say how many people you have reached with your quality improvement research project. Please return the form even if it’s a nil return because this is immensely helpful to our hard working Lisa. You are required to log the name, address and organisation of at least 3 indirect beneficiaries over the six months. If you reach more people, even better! Lisa will send you a nudgey email around the 15th of every month and we’d like you to make the return by the 20th of the month. This is to ensure that Joss can make her return to the Education and Training Foundation, our funders. We have a KPI (key performance indicator) around the number of indirect beneficiaries we reach, so we need your help in this.
FYI you will access this same form each month and just update it. Thank you 🙏
All About Today
Here’s Lou to tell you what’s going to be happening today:
Pre-Thinking
This will come as no surprise, because we’ve mentioned it on Slack already, but we want you to have got your thinking head on. Your role on Constellation B is to work on a (small-scale) quality improvement research project and then tell people about it. We get so busy doing stuff in FE that we rarely make the time to tell people about what we’re doing and on Constellation B we’re all about amplifying the great work of advanced practice.
Don’t forget that we also have Constellations C to help raise our voices too.
Your pre-thinking is to refine your project in your mind. We’re not looking for complex project plans and we strongly believe that many of the planning techniques we use guide us to what we already know, with no room for surprises. What we are wanting from you is clarity. In an activity later this morning we’ll challenge you to describe your project in a #hashtag, a strapline and no more than three (not rambling) sentences.
Stuff
The message of today is that professional learning* is about community, not about stuff, and that building community is about creating the conditions for trust. Nonetheless, stuff can also be good. If you’re new to the Constellations, we hope you’ve sent us your address for your gift bag of goodies (sorry if you’ve already had these in previous years we don’t have enough to send out a second pack). Polite note: this isn’t a ‘starter pack’ or anything you need for today so don’t worry if you didn’t get your address to us in time. Think of it as a gift. When we mention the APGuides and Toolkit cards you can find links to them here. Please also sign up to our newsletter here, as we’re not allowed by GDPR rules to just add you.
The only stuff you’ll need today is something to make notes with (and on) and – if you have them to hand – post it notes or similar. Torn up bits of paper will work just as well but hey, we’re all teachers so we’re sure you probably have a stationery stash 😉
(*Not parachute, drive-by or hit-and-run CPD)
Register
Registering online is like herding cats as people nip in and out, so we’d be grateful if you’d take a minute or two to fill this in – it’s very simple. Thank you! Once you’ve done it, go get a cuppa and we’ll start at 11am ☕️
UPDATE: Thanks for registering. We know it feels like an extra box to tick but it makes life so much easier for the touch team 😀
Slack
Hopefully pretty much everyone has registered for Slack now but if you haven’t, this is the link (it expires on 10th November 2020).
We won’t be using email at all and I’m asking colleagues to support me in this because if we start getting drawn into emails we lose a critical mass in Slack and this is a real missed opportunity for community building. The only emails you should receive are from Lisa Sidwells regarding the monthly monitoring or any other contractual issues.
Evaluation
touchconsulting Ltd have invested in a co-evaluation, over and above any evaluation of the programme ETF will carry out*. We want to understand why we do what we do and how it can be even better. The researchers are the lovely Dr Colin Forrest and Dr Christina Donovan from Manchester Metropolitan University. If you don’t already know Christina’s work on trust you should, because it’s got huge potential for our service. Christina is doing loads at the minute to get her trust research out there, so do follow her Twitter @drdonny_tweets
Because this is for us and about us, the research methodology is a co-evaluative one which means we really want 12 of you to be involved as co-researchers. We’ve already got some Cs signed up 😀 Have a watch of Christina’s film embedded in the form below and it would be brilliant if you’d sign up to be involved (we are still getting final ethical approval from MMU but the methodology shouldn’t change much). The closing date to sign up on the form below is 23rd October 2020, after which we’ll take it down.
Christina and I have also done a podcast about the research on the FE Research Podcast (it will appear in vlog form on the Teaching Excellence Podcast too).
*DISCLAIMER: we don’t know yet what form the ETF evaluation will take and we will be grateful for your participation, as always. The ETF evaluation carries massive weight when it comes to reapplying for funding.
Today’s Event
Took us a while to get here, eh? But once we’re together in the Zoom room, we’ll leave this landing page behind for a bit. It will remain in the background to help us all navigate our way back in. Feel free to use Slack as a back channel for conversations during the day also.
At 11am, please make your way to the Zoom Room 😀 (Zoom link now removed). We’re building community so we expect to see your (live) face and hear your voice – and see your name, so please rename your Zoom profile to your name and Twitter handle. Nobody wants to be called Samsung Galaxy X5 all day. Please also make sure that you have done the most recent Zoom update (last few days). Not only will you be able to make your own choices about breakout rooms some of the time, there are some fab new filters and reactions too 😊
The day will start with what you need to know and that’s it for structured input from us. Once you’ve understood the purpose and breadth of the programme it’s down to you to get the most out of it with our support. We won’t chase you or spoon feed you but we will be there to support you. You will totally get out of it what you put in.
The Programme
As Lou says in the welcome video, it’s all about you. You wouldn’t be on Constellation B at all if you weren’t up for driving change. This whole programme is designed to offer you a transformational opportunity and we will be co-producing that with you as far as we can. Today provides lots of opportunities for you to think through your intentions for the next six months.
11am Welcome and The Bowerbird’s🦚 Call Out
If you do one thing today take this opportunity to get to know at least 10 other people and the call out is a really great way to start (we’d love to do a Thinking Round but there are potentially 50 of us!) We’ll use the Zoom emojis – new expanded range – to start making connections. Notice what you’ve got in common with whom, take a note of their name and maybe send them a message via chat or on Slack, or tag them on Twitter. We’ll also introduce you to the Mentimeter (see below).
11.15am What’s It All About?
This is the input bit – for the rest of the day it’s over to you. We’ll embed the slides here later. Use the chat to ask any questions you may have, that need answering today. We want every one of you to go ‘home’ happy!
Here are the slides for today:
It won’t just be us talking for 45 minutes! We’ll be asking you to organise your project into one of the theme areas (see link below to a collaborative Jamboard, we’ll also post this in chat) and tell us a little about it.
12noon Your Research – The Ideas Room
Ah the Ideas Room! This is an innovation of lockdown, created by the #JoyFE💛 Movement and an application of the Thinking Environment. Lou Mycroft and Stef Wilkinson will be leading you in spaces which enable the best thinking to happen. This won’t be your last exposure to Ideas Rooms on #APConnect Year 3.
Want more of this? Come along to the public Ideas Room, every Wednesday 8pm (on the same Zoom link as today).
Click here to read more about why we believe Ideas Rooms are transformational.
1pm Break
Obviously we’d love you to stay completely focused on #APConnect all day, but we are all human beings and we are very much concerned with being kind to ourselves. We have built in a 30 minute break and we’d love to make a deal with you that we all take a proper break. Screens off, phones off, no checking emails and – if possible – at least ten minutes outside.
We’ll be doing a bit of yoga too in the privacy of our own lunchtimes – here’s a lovely, easy practice which will help you stretch out and chill out if you fancy doing it also 🧘🏽♀️ Wellbeing starts with us.
1.30pm Action Learning Sets
This is where the work starts, which will sustain us for the next six months. You have selected yourselves into themes on the Jamboard and we’ve played about with these a bit over lunchtime. Assuming you’ve got the latest Zoom update, you are invited to find your fellow travellers in one of our break out rooms for your first Action Learning Set (don’t worry if you haven’t, we can help!)
2.30pm #APConnect Online
Time for Lynne to introduce you to #APConnect Online, the modular course that will hold all of this together for you. This is a deliberately brief session because a) it’s simple and b) we want you to get a feel for the ‘whole’ experience. We realised in recent years that we are so used to formal ‘CPD’ that once we show you the ‘course’ it’s tempting to think that’s the most important part of the whole experience. It really isn’t. In fact, it’s only there at all because in Year 1, APs told us that they wanted a more formal structure to hang their learning on. What matters this year is you and the influence you have. Moving on to…
2.50pm Influence Analysis
As an AP, you are stepping up a gear (if you haven’t already). We want you to see how your small-scale project can ripple out into the organisation when accompanied by your positivity and some skill around identifying allies and blockers. The exercise we’ll do can be found in the Creating Spaces to Think Advanced Practitioner Guide.
3.30pm (approx) What’s Live in You?
As always, we start together and finish together, so please make sure you can stay until 4pm (we share responsibility for the time to make sure we don’t finish a minute later). Thinking Environment Rules (see below) apply for the final round: What’s Live in You?
The Bowerbird’s Blue Shiny Things
There’s a channel for this on Slack, but The Bowerbird wants to make sure none of those blue shiny things gets lost, so here’s our collective Padlet too (shared with Constellations C):
The Thinking Environment
We’ll be working in various ways in a Thinking Environment today. Some of you will have encountered this set of processes, one way or another. Since lockdown, Thinking Environments have been a revelation online and they are not an optional extra; they are how we encounter one another*. For why the Thinking Environment is not just another toolkit, read ab
out the Greek Cream Buns here.
Today won’t be teaching you about the Thinking Environment, you’ll just be in it for much of the time, as it’s an anti-competitive, pro-social pedagogy which builds community. Don’t forget to leave role, rank and ego at the door!
*There are plenty of outside opportunities to practice and train in Thinking Environment processes, including the professional learning strand of #APConnect (see below).
Mentimeter
We would love to know how your aspirations for Constellation B change as we go through the day. It doesn’t matter whether this is your personal professional aspiration, or your aspiration for FE as a whole (if you see what I mean). This is no time for go-backery, so be brave. Just go to www.menti.com and use the code 38 29 86 7 😀
UPDATE (Lou): So, who’s the numpty? I completely forgot to tell you about this on 16th. Many thanks to the person that found it anyway 🙏
What’s Next?
We take our communications over to the Slack workspace now. We’ll be together again in January and until then our individual projects spiral out onto public-facing media. We’ll share details of different opportunities via Slack and we hope you’ll do the same. We also expect everyone to have a Twitter account and to amplify one another’s work there. We are also running Regional AP Networks, run by yourselves as no doubt you’ll have found out about during the day. Single landing page for these to follow but in the meantime dates and links are here.
#APConnect also has a professional learning strand comprising three modules:
- Using Developmental Observations (with Joanne Miles & Matt O’Leary)
- Leading AP Teams (with Joanne Miles & Matt O’Leary)
- Using The Thinking Environment (with Lou Mycroft and Bryony Croft)
These are currently recruiting and you can find out more about them here.
Au Revoir
It really is an ‘au revoir’ not a goodbye because we can all head straight over to Slack and carry on our conversations there. The Connections day will have been a success if we’ve done just that – connected. Have a wonderful weekend and see you online soon. We cannot wait for our work together to really pick up the pace 🙌🏻🌟