I was at the first Deputes Together
Conference in Edinburgh today. Overall it was a good day and the Edinburgh International Conference Centre
was an excellent venue. During the day we had two keynote presentations and a
general discussion on the evolution of the Deputes Together on-line community.
I think the community is a great idea. Over the past few
weeks, I have enjoyed exploring the various forums and will now make a bit more
of an effort to try and contribute to more of the discussions threads. I was
good to be able to feed into the development of the site. For example, in my
focus group I suggested that it would be good to have separate discussion threads
for things that are commonly on a depute remit for example SQA, timetable,
off-site activities etc… I also think it would be good to have a separate
discussion thread for people that are involved with the SQH programme. The
on-line community set up by Edinburgh University is OK, but I really
want to be able to draw on the expertise and experience of people that have already
completed the programme.
I made a suggestion to my group that anybody doing the SQH should be allowed access to Deputes Together regardless if they are a depute or not. Some people weren’t keen on this and would prefer it to remain a closed community, only available for depute head teachers? I think my suggestion about the branded Ipod also went down well – although I’m not sure this will become a reality!
The first keynote was on Adaptive Leadership by Mike McCabe, Director of Education, Culture and Life Long Learning in South Ayrshire. I enjoyed Mikes presentation and feel that we share similar views on a number of issues and some aspects of leadership and management. I was particularly pleased to hear Mike talk about teaching staff in relation to the four capacities of the Curriculum for Excellence. This was one of my key points during my SQH interview. Mikes going to let me have a copy of his presentation – maybe I’ll ask him if I can up-load it to slideshare to share with other people who might be interested.
The second keynote was on Online Communities by Professor Stephen Heppell. It is always a
pleasure to listen to Stephen. He is an incredibly humble, passionate and
knowledgeable man, and I always take some much from his presentations. I really
enjoyed the pictures of the schools from around the world and I wonder if the Buildings
for Excellence debate will produce similar designs and infrastructures in Scotland?
The main point that I took from his presentation is that, ‘current learning communities are
pushing the prototype of learning.’ I couldn’t agree more Stephen and I’m
going to come back to this point when I speak at the HMIe
conferences later in the year.
Finally, It was good to bump into Laurie O’Donnell at
lunchtime. He had been up for over 30 hours and was just back from a conference
in Washington.
I’m going to look forward to reading about his travel on his blog.
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