Teacher Education Scotland

This one day conference, set up by Holyrood magazine in Edinburgh, enabled us to hear from Graham Donaldson himself about the underpinning themes in his recent, national review of Scottish Teacher Education.  He had been asked by the Scottish Government to undertake this review on his retirement as Chief Executive of HM Inspectorate of Education. Overarching themes in the review are the recognition that teaching is both complex and challenging, it requires the highest standards of professional competence and commitment and that high quality people achieve high quality outcomes for young people. The full review is worth a read, for someone immersed in the fallout from the English government’s recent White paper it is a breath of fresh air. It contains a wide range of recommendations including an emphasis on partnership between all bodies involved in teacher education: schools, colleges, universities, local authorities and professional associations and on the development of CPD throughout a teacher’s career through establishing communities of practice.

The day itself was chaired by Mark Stephens, a broadcaster well known to the Scottish audience, who was not afraid to challenge the assorted academics, teachers and other education professionals present and enabled several lively question and answer sessions. Other presenters included Tony Finn from GTCS who spoke on developing teacher professionalism, Chris Day  from the University of Nottingham  who spoke on Teacher Quality and Student Outcomes making reference to the VITAE project,  Aline-Wendy Dunlop from the University of Strathclyde who spoke from her extensive experience of working with early years professional, Pamela Munn from the University of Edinburgh who spoke on teacher knowledge highlighting  three vital conditions for change in the sector. These were congruence of values, nature of pupil assessments (teachers always want their pupils to be seen to do well) and accountability and monitoring at national and local levels.  This was followed by a response from each of the main Scottish political parties to the Donaldson review which were broadly welcoming though separate concerns about numbers of ITE students being trained came up in the discussion.

The focus changed in the afternoon to effective CPD with a series of speakers highlighting the importance of collaboration, self-evaluation, experiential learning, reflection (facilitated by video observation) and enquiry for successful and engaging professional development.  It was suggested that CPD should be contextualised, personally owned and externally stimulated i.e. through challenging assumptions, stimulating ideas and illustrating new approaches. All set in the context of “how I can use this with my pupils/staff?”.  I was particularly interested to hear about the way GLOW (Learning and Teaching Scotland’s national VLE with a range of online tools including web conferencing and chat) was being used for formal and informal CPD. The afternoon flew by.