AP National conference: A Story of Advanced Practice 2022 – Bookings now open! By Joss Kang

The team at touchconsulting are busy preparing for the Education and Training Foundation’s fourth national AP conference. It takes place online on Friday 25 March 2022. Wow – that’s come around fast! 130 places have already gone, so book now.

A Story of Advanced Practice  – the past, the present and the future

We will all be telling a story of advanced practice on the 25 March. That’s the project team, those who operate in AP-type roles, leaders of AP teams and you, our audience. We’ll be inviting your freshest thinking to help co-author the ‘future’ chapter! 

We start the ‘present’ chapter in 2018 when the Education and Training Foundation commissioned delivery partners touchconsulting and CETTAcademy to design and run a professional development programme for those operating in AP-type roles. We drew on what had gone before – more on the the story of the past in the Living Archive – to create something new.

#APConnect has grown and evolved with each year’s iterative focus:                                                                                          

• 2018-2019 Evaluating the AP-type role across provider types
• 2019-2020 Enhancing, extending and embedding the AP-role in organisations
• 2020-2021 Creating conditions for AP teams to support all 
• 2021-2022 Supporting organisations to create the conditions for APs to lead quality improvements. 

We’ve implemented incremental changes informed by AP feedback, evidence from research (including findings from our research with APs), AP practice and independent evaluations. But the expert-led CPD pathway and the professional learning pathway has remained constant over the four years. Mind you, we only started conceptualising it as such last March and now use the language of expert-led and professional learning intentionally. 

 

Current AP Programme

We now see the ETF’s professional development programme for APs being made up of: 

Expert-led CPD – designed and led by experts in their respective fields. This year it’s made up of four modules in Advanced Practice:                                                                            

• Development Observations and Leading AP Teams  – designed and led by Joanne Miles and Prof. Matt O’Leary
• Thoroughly and Deepening Thinking Environment  – designed and led by Dr Lou Mycroft and Bryony Croft
• Practice Enquiry Circles pilot  – (co)designed and led by Dr Christina Donovan, Dr Colin Forrest and participants

+ a rich menu of 1.5 hour expert-led Festival Fridays CPD sessions with experts from across the sector.

Professional Learning – that’s peer-to-peer learning; often peer-supported and peer-led – is one of the ingredients which gives #APConnect its unique flavour. We took a leap of faith four years ago when we launched Communities of Practice – now known as Constellations – with 50 APs. We are so, so glad we did as Constellations sit firmly at the heart of #APConnect. Constellations, Skylarks, Northstar and Festival Fridays all sit under this umbrella of professional learning.

‘The stars we are given. The constellations we make.’  Rebecca Solnit

Find out more about Constellations; time-limited, open-bordered, common purposes and practices of difference at the conference. 

#APConnect’s professional learning pathway includes two new kids on the block this year: Skylarks and the Northstar Train-the-Trainer in Advanced Practice. Both programmes are designed to support the sector build its own quality improvement capacity and capability by growing and developing AP teams from the inside out, but to do this effectively our co-evaluation research found they also had to bring the outside in!  

 

Our focus for the day  

We are carefully crafting the day to facilitate meaningful conversations so we can all share our growing knowledge-base and practices of advanced practice and the role of the advanced practitioner within that. Be prepared to be inspired, engaged and fully present. 

The six functions*  of the AP role, four years on, still holds strong as APs provide 1:1 support, lead professional development, coach and mentor, support new staff, work strategically and stay current. But our thinking on the seven values* of the AP-type role has moved on to embrace values-led leadership and deliberately bringing the outside in so APs can work at the cutting edge of advanced practice.

 

Evidence-informed 

We’ll share findings from two research projects undertaken during 2020-2021. Both are significantly shaping thinking. We’ll open up spaces for you to think and explore what these findings mean for you in your setting and your role –  must reads if your organisation has invested in the AP-type role.

• Advanced Practitioners during COVID, Thriving or Surviving? (2022)  
• Re-thinking the Role of the Advanced Practitioner (2021)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Check out our APConnect research blogs for further thinking.

 

APs and AP Leaders 

APs and AP leaders will discuss how they’ve been rethinking the role of the advanced practitioner as they draw upon rich research and practice evidence. They’ll explore what that looks, sounds and feels like on the ground for practitioners, learners and managers. We’ll pause regularly and invite you to share your freshest thinking via an interactive form. We tested this last year inviting delegates to respond to questions relating to the teams’ Thinknotes: we dropped the Keynotes as we’d learnt so much and wanted to share.  Fascinating and affirming insights! 

 

AP-led workshops

Like previous years, you’ll be able to choose one AP-led workshop and listen as APs tell their own story. You’ll learn about rich and deep professional learning opportunities they’ve created with community, capacity and trust at their heart, scaffolded by one (or more) #APConnect pathway. You’ll discover the difference such activities are having on colleagues, students, organisations and the sector. All workshops will be recorded for wider use. Do check out, if you haven’t already, last year’s brilliant workshops to get a flavour of what’s in store!

Thinking time

We’ve built in time, whilst you’re tucking into coffee and cake, to explore the artefacts of advanced practice. For Lave and Wenger (c 2007)** members of communities develop a set of shared experiences, tools, stories, problem-solving strategies that become a shared repertoire for their practice. We are keen to open up this AP practice for a wider audience so it can add value. According to Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner*** (2020) that’s most likely to be immediate or potential value: applied and realised value can only exist when implemented.  Be prepared to browse and dip into the: 

 Skylark choir 

Skylarks are a new 2021-22 programme pathway. AP teams bid for 3k funding to design, run and evaluate a series of peer-led and peer-supported professional learning activities: specifically AP-led networks, Ideas Rooms and action learning sets. You’ll hear skylarks songs on the day! If you can’t wait, follow the Skylark  journey via our blogs. 

 

 

 

 

 

Northstar Train-the-Trainer in Advanced Practice

The Northstar experience is made up of PD1: #APConnect Living Archive, PD2: Northstar Deepening Thinking and PD3 Introduction to Intersectional Accessibility. We’ll introduce you to PD1: the #APConnect Living Archive which tells a story of advanced practice – the past, the present and the future. The Living Archive is Northstars first port of call as they curate their own professional AP development programme that suits their context, their APs. There is no one size that fits all but there are key concepts to cover. 

 

Development Observations and Leading AP Teams: Sharing with the Sector 

Browse reflections from delegates who’ve engaged with two of the ETF’s expert-led advanced practice modules. Joanne and Matt were determined to find a way of sharing the brilliant insights from implementing work-place projects with the wider sector! 

We’ll also exhibit Fabulous 50 (reflections from Constellation B), the Matrix of Opportunities (monthly crowd-sourced PD, and places to blog, podcast, publish, present and amplify FE voices). I could go on but think that’s enough for now. Excited? We are! Join us.

Book now! 

p.s we’ll start a waiting list as soon as we are full. 

p.p.s. you can browse last year’s conference landing page here 

 

*Tyler at al (2017) Understanding the Role of Advanced Practitioners

*Wenger, E. (c 2007) Communities of practice. A brief introduction

**Wenger-Trayner, E. and Wenger-Trayner, B. (2020). Learning to Make a Difference: Value Creation in Social Learning Spaces. Cambridge University Press 

 Image by @Penmendonca