Category Archives: Community

CSLL Seminar:John Scott – Transforming Tertiary Education in Bahrain

Posted on April 22, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Speaker:  John Scott

Date: 16th May 2013

Where:  Room 2.26, GSoE

John Scott will talk about the bold initiative led by the Crown Prince, Prince Salman and the Economic Development Board (EDB) to transform tertiary education in Bahrain. In the four years prior to the uprisings in 2010 Bahrain Polytechnic was mandated to provide education built on world-class models.

A concept of a universal curriculum built on problem-based learning was developed to provide students and employers with three transcripts from

• Academic Performance and skill,

• Profile as determined by the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory [ELLI] and

• Graduate profile in terms of Employability Skills

The seminar will explore the educational rationale and the development work that led to the introduction of the Employability Skills Graduate Profile in Bahrain and will outline the model that was implemented.

John Scott was appointed the founding CEO of Bahrain Polytechnic  from its inception in 2008 until his resignation in March 2012. He was responsible for the New Zealand led proposal, which won the contract in late 2006, and developed the educational pedagogy that underpinned the design of the polytechnic both educationally and physically.  He began his career as a primary school teacher before moving into the secondary school system as a counsellor in 1976. In 1978 he became a tutor and counsellor in the Community College System in New Zealand before being appointed the founding Director/CEO of Wanganui Community Polytechnic in 1983 and then CEO of Christchurch Polytechnic (CPIT) in 1993, a position he held until “retiring” in 2006 and moving to his position in Bahrain. After 27 years leading tertiary educational institutions, he currently works as an educational consultant.

Transforming tertiary education in Bahrain – John Scott – 16 May 2013

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Posted in Community, educational transformation, Engage, Event & News, Leadership

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SCLL Seminar Series: Practical Wisdom and the good RE Teacher

Posted on April 5, 2013 by | Leave a comment

When:  12th June 2013

Time:  17:00 – 18:15

Where:  Rm 2.17, Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol

Who:  Dr Janet Orchard and Dr Hugo Whatley

Title:

Practical wisdom and the good RE teacher: possibilities for change to ITT in RE in England

Abstract

This study argues for a new approach to Secondary ITT/E in RE in England, drawing on evidence compiled from a combination of empirical and philosophical research methods.  The study describes and analyses the double bind currently facing providers of ITT in RE. The status of RE is being down graded, while the established place of ITT in the university is being challenged by reforms to the sector as a whole. Overall, allocated places have been reduced radically and several courses have already closed.

We agree that radical change is needed but question the particular direction current proposals for change are taking. We argue that the account of the good teacher assumed in policy documents, which justify those changes, is unrealistically and unhelpfully ‘thin’. We find the notion of the good subject teacher which ITT in RE providers offer (constructed from their answers to questionnaires and semi-structured interviews and checked against the perceptions of a subject-specific focus group), to be much ‘thicker’ and more helpful. We note the additional demands these higher expectations place, not only on initial teacher training but ongoing subject specific professional development, and agree with the assessment of the RE Council for England and Wales in 2011 that longstanding shortages in high quality CPD in RE have affected standards in the subject.

However, even the richer account of the good RE teacher from providers seems relatively “thin” when held against conceptions of the good teacher being articulated in an emerging literature in teacher education and the philosophy of education. Rooted in the Aristotelian tradition, this model assumes that it is “practical wisdom” which distinguishes the very best teachers from others; we sketch the good RE teacher who combines high levels of technical competence, theoretical and academic rigor, as well as the capacity to make sound moral decisions to their regular classroom practice. We conclude by outlining the kind of ITT and CPD that practically wise RE teachers need, thus demonstrating why current policy changes and even established notions of best professional practice fall short of the genuinely ‘world class’ education system English young people need.

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Posted in Community, educational transformation, Event & News, Uncategorized

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SCLL Seminar Series: Parent Yarns—Learning Together: parent engagement in Australian schools

Posted on December 7, 2012 by | Leave a comment

We are priveledged to have Tess McPeake from the Smith Family Foundation, Australia providimnhg a Christmas Sseminar for us:

Parent Yarns—Learning Together: parent engagement in Australian schools

When:  20th December 2012

Time:  16:30 – 18:00

Where:  Rm 4.10, Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol

During 2012, Australia’s largest children’s’ charity—The Smith Family—organised a series of parent/school engagement activities in Northern Territory schools that aimed to skill parents to confidently communicate with each other and collaborate with school staff to resolve student issues. Known as Parent Yarns—Learning Together, these sessions were facilitated by ViTaL partners, Julianne Willis and Marilynn Willis, who introduced the concept of ‘effective lifelong learning’ in considering how parents can best support their children to succeed at school.  This seminar will explain The Smith Family’s vision and approach to improving life outcomes for disadvantaged Australian children, with a particular focus on the challenges of working in Northern Territory schools where over 40 per cent of students are Indigenous. Program Coordinator, Tess McPeake, will explain why a ‘school at the centre’ approach has been implemented to increase the rate of attendance, retention and academic achievement among Indigenous students, particularly girls. Qualitative findings from evaluation surveys collected at 16 Parent Yarns and a Parents’ Voices in Education forum will be augmented by a short documentary featuring school principals, teachers and parents who participated in the workshops.

Booking is required for the seminar; please contact damian.stoupe@bristol.ac.uk

 

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Posted in Community, educational transformation, Event & News, Knowledge Exchange, Learn, Uncategorized

“Rethinking Corporate Leadership as Corporate Authorship”

Posted on April 4, 2011 by | 1 Comment

Tim Coburn

The Systems Centre: Learning and Leadership in the Graduate School of Education and the Faculty of Engineering, brings together educational, corporate and community leaders with researchers, to engage in inter-disciplinary research and development, drawing on systems thinking and complexity theory as tools for understanding and re-designing learning systems and the leadership they need.

New public management, with its focus on ‘value neutral’ instrumental approaches for improving effectiveness and efficiency is of limited use when applied to organisations as complex adaptive systems. Employee or student engagement, a complex social construct, calls for richer forms of rationality. It flourishes within an architecture for learning and leadership which is resilient, allows for emergence and facilitates self-renewal – for individuals, teams and the organisation. Identity, story, personal learning power and interpersonal trust provide a frame for the co-construction of knowledge, performance and competence. They also support new forms of leadership and the generation of the collective intelligence necessary for organisations to adapt and learn.   The Systems Centre: Learning and Leadership is hosting a series of expert-led open seminars on these themes. The seminars will also provide a foretaste of our new MSc programme in Systems Learning and Leadership, which opens in October 2011 (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/education/students/masters/sll )

Out second seminar is being led by Tim Coburn, Visiting Fellow at the Graduate School of Education, and a corporate learning specialist who, for over 20 years, has held senior and global roles in learning and development with large corporate organizations including the BBC, Motorola, Rolls-Royce and Kenya Airways.

‘Effective leadership is one of the most sought after goals shared by professional people in both education and at work across public, private and third sector organisations. So, what is leadership? In this talk, I’ll be offering a personal perspective informed as it is by my own professional journey as a leadership development practitioner during 20 years with some of the finest organisations in the world – The BBC, Motorola and Rolls-Royce. I’ll tell you what I’ve learned from my own enquiry in which I sought both theoretical rigour and practical value. And, from my early attraction to the leadership ideas of courage, humility and service, I’ll explain how, through philosophical, cultural and technological revelation, I arrived at the idea of leadership as authorship. In so doing, I hope to engage you in developing your own idea of leadership, how you practice it and how you encourage others to consider it for the world in which we live.’

 

The seminar will take place at 4.30 pm on Thursday 1st June, in Room 410, at the Graduate School of Education.

The seminar will be preceded at 2.15pm by an Introduction to the Masters in Systems Learning and Leadership which will take place in Room 401.

For more information and to book a place, please contact Sue.Woodhead@bris.ac.uk

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Posted in Community, Engage, Leadership, Learn, Systems thinking

Towards a complex systems approach to educational transformation

Posted on March 5, 2011 by | Leave a comment

A study that has inspired us and laid a foundation on which we hope to build in our research programme is Bryk et al’s  longitudinal study of school reform in Chicago. Check it out here…well worth a read.

In 1988, the Chicago public school system decentralized, granting parents and communities significant resources and authority to reform their schools in dramatic ways. To track the effects of this bold experiment, the authors of Organizing Schools for Improvement collected a wealth of data on elementary schools in Chicago. Over a seven-year period they identified one hundred elementary schools that had substantially improved—and one hundred that had not. What did the successful schools do to accelerate student learning?

The authors of this illuminating book identify a comprehensive set of practices and conditions that were key factors for improvement, including school leadership, the professional capacity of the faculty and staff, and a student-centered learning climate. In addition, they analyze the impact of social dynamics, including crime, critically examining the inextricable link between schools and their communities. Putting their data onto a more human scale, they also chronicle the stories of two neighboring schools with very different trajectories. The lessons gleaned from this groundbreaking study will be invaluable for anyone involved with urban education.

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Posted in Community, Complex systems, educational transformation, Leadership, Systems thinking

Centre for Systems Learning and Leadership is launched

Posted on February 26, 2011 by | 1 Comment

The Centre for Systems Learning and Leadership has emerged from several strands of research, development and social enterprise based in and around the Graduate School of Education at the University of Bristol.   It goes back to 2003 when our research into learning power demonstrated that an individual’s learning power is powerfully influenced by factors internal to the learner and external – in the culture and community of which they are a part.  For example, we discovered that teachers who were most highly controlling tended to have classes with the lowest levels of learning power, and factors like ‘trust’  ‘affirmation’ and ‘challenge’ made a real difference to how a person engaged with their learning.

We explored teachers learner centred practices, leadership,  the sequencing of students encounters with knowledge in the curriculum and a school’s emotional climate.  From there we began to explore beyond schools – prisons, communities, higher education and most recently, the corporate world.  Our ideas were put to the test in an Institute for Advances Studies seminar series in 2008, resulting in a special issue of the Cuirriculum Journal – themed as ‘integrating the personal with the public’.

Our relationship with the Engineers in the Systems Centre began to provide us with tools and ideas with which to explain and develop our core understanding that ‘everything is related’  and technical systems  are always integrat to soft systems. We’ve developed an MSc in Systems Learnign and Leadership and our work with Learning Futures has focused our attention on ‘learner engagement’ or ‘deep learning’ as a key theme.  Our connections with the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University have deepened our understanding of the application of new technologies to enhance sensemaking – we have developed two learning ‘apps’ which support deep learning and enable culture change through the way they scaffold sense making.  Watcht this site for details of projects and forthcoming events. Our learning conversations take place with colleagues from around the world on http://www.learningemergence.net (see link on the right) and if you want to join in, check us out there.

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Posted in Community, Complex systems, Systems thinking, Uncategorized