Join us for Practice Development Group Celebrations – Fri 5 Feb 2021!

The team at touchconsulting Ltd would love to celebrate your engagement with Round 1 of the Education and Training Foundation’s fully subsidised Practice Development Groups (PDG) programme on 5 February 2021.

What’s happened so far?

We are thrilled that 80 + practitioners across the Midlands are engaging in Practice Development Groups (PDGs) during this first round (Oct – Jan 2021). Each practitioner is putting a magnifying glass to their practice – within a peer-to-peer community –  examining one topic i.e:

• digital approaches to teaching maths
• developing apprentices English skills
• embedding maths in vocational programmes to support GCSE maths
• making English and maths fun, interactive and practical
• teaching ESOL online
• developing students’ ability to critically analyse and evaluate a text using online collaboration
• keeping learners engaged & translating practice to the new digital world of delivery.

PDGs sit firmly within practitioner-led enquiry, and are driven by participants who work collaboratively to undertake a maths/English inquiry related to their practice. Teachers plan, do and review; regrouping and discussing what worked (and didn’t) with their PDG peers, and then go again.

 

PDG facilitators

Each PDG is being supported by an amazing facilitator – a practicing and busy teacher. Facilitators are doing a brilliant job in an incredibly tough term. Facilitators are keeping the momentum going, re-arranging meetings, providing 1:1 support when faced with teachers (& learners) who’ve had to self-isolate, attending OFSTED interim visits, arranging last minute cover, coping with hybrid teaching and everything else that has cropped up during this term! The Slack facilitator group is witness to these challenges and, more importantly, to their creativity and persistence.

We have one facilitator experimenting with asynchronous action learning sets (ALS) using FlipGrid as the medium to retain the ALS rounds and ethos. Coincidently, Lou Mycroft and I were having a similar conversations on the #APConnect project touchconsulting Ltd runs for the Education and Training Foundation asking:

How do we move from synchronous ALS to asynchronous ALS without comprising their impact and ethos?

Synchronous ALS worked in the old world but we may well need to expand the format in this new, much more fluid world. We are experimenting and will keep you posted!

A huge appreciation to the facilitator team – we know it’s been a bumpy ride!

 

Celebration Event

So, we are carving out a little bit of space and time – on 5 February 2020 from 9.30 – 11.30am to be exact –  to reflect and celebrate. We have been thinking hard about what this celebratory event could look, sound, feel like. We’ve decided to draw on Dr Sarah Copeland’s innovative work on Community Digital Storytelling. Who doesn’t love a story? After all, humans since day dot have been telling and listening to stories to make sense of the world. So Community Digital Storytelling, we reckon, will be an intriguing way of framing our PDG celebration. Each participant will leave with a ‘home-grown’ digital artefact telling their own stories after a bit of:

• storytelling circle time
• a hands on mini-digital workshop
• solo-breakout rooms!

Plus an added bonus  – it’s an approach you can use with learners. Join us – it’s going to be fun!

Sign up to the fully subsidised Celebration event here if you’ve been involved in a PDG in the Midlands during the first round; Oct – Jan 2021.

 

Do you fancy joining PDGs in the new year?

touchconsulting Ltd are running Round 2 starting in January 2021 on behalf of the Education and Training Foundation. You can find out more in this post and book your place.

 

Author: Joss Kang