The how after the why.....

On Thursday myself and a colleague spoke at the Incerts leadership conference at the Wales Millenium Centre in Cardiff.

We have worked a lot with Incerts over the years and have always found their online tracking systems brilliant for formative and summative assessments.

In the morning, we heard some great speakers.  Richard Gerver spoke about the need for education systems to be focused on learners and learning and to try to ignore the politics of distraction.

We also heard from George Gilchrist who had a Scottich perspective on school leadership and asked us some really thought provoking questions. 

I also spoke to George about our friends in Midlothian Educational Psychology Service and our Visible Learning collaboration 

When we spoke about our visible learning journey it fitted in really well after the 'why' all morning as this was hopefully shoeing school leaders 'how'.

Visible Learning shows you how to out learners first, how to enable learners to become their own teachers, how to use evidence and research to plan interventions and how it really can embed excellence into all schools.

We shared how we had implemented learner dispositions, learning progression charts, pupils as young as 3 evaluating their own learning, amongst others.

We also had videos of pupils explaining the learning pit, how they had evaluated their own work and parents talking about the difference in their children's attitudes.

We also shared some before and after videos of pupils talking about what makes a good learner.

I think it went down very well. Many people came up and said how impressed they were and how it had really got them thinking about their own schools.  

For us at school, our network grew a little.  I am sure we will keep up to date with George Gilchrist and we met some great heads from Swansea who want us to go down there to talk about Visible Learning.

I think I'll need a summer holiday first.