I’m just getting ready to run whole school INSET – this will be my second whole school training, I regularly speak at whole school briefing and on the one hand I’m absolutely petrified but on the other I am looking forward to it. I always enjoy training days and as a former colleague once said to me “you can’t make it to Headteacher if you can’t talk to whole staff”; this just got me thinking about whether I really wanted to make it to the very top or not!
Back to basics
We are using the launch of the new curriculum as a way of getting back to basics – teaching and learning and what makes a good lesson. Whilst we cover the new terminology (or old terminology that we’ve just forgotten about) like range and content, key concepts and processes we also try to avoid death by PowerPoint and instead model the types of good practice that we’d like to see in the classroom.
So we’ve got an evaluation sheet focused around six-hats thinking (or at least we will have by the end of the week when I’ve created it). Plus we’ve a dvd of one of our teachers using the thinking skill of ‘Mysteries’; naturally we’re not going to let staff watch a dvd without an accompanying cloze sheet, in the same way that we wouldn’t necessarily just let a class watch a dvd without giving them something to help focus their minds.
I’m just about to plan my opening talk about what we want a pupil to have learnt after 5 years at the school. Hidden curriculum anybody?