Editor's Blog

In a break from the norm this week we’ve got a guest blog post! Gillian Hamilton, our Head of Educational Services, has asked us if she could blog about the work she’s doing on Professional Update. Since we know she’s a great writer we agreed to hand over our blog to her for this update. Take it away Gillian!

Well it’s a really busy time for us here at GTC Scotland as we move to the next stage of our planning for Professional Update – which includes a formal consultation and planning for a Professional Update pilot. It’s hard to believe that I’ve only been in my new post here for about five months! In my last blog, I chatted about our plans for Professional Update as we were just about to head off round the country for a series of regional events.

These events went really well; we had many interesting discussions and got lots of helpful feedback from teachers and others working in the education field about our proposals. For those of you who weren’t able to come along, you can still see a recording of our Chief Executive, Tony Finn, delivering the presentation at the Edinburgh Event in November. I was pleased that we recorded the Edinburgh event, rather than one of the events where I was presenting…it always makes for uncomfortable viewing! As well as these regional events, people are continuing to send us questions and we’ve updated our Frequently Asked Questions on the Professional Update section on our website.

So what are we doing now? Our Professional Update Working Group has been looking at the questions we need to ask the profession as part of the formal consultation. The consultation is now live and we really want to hear from as many people as possible, so please access the consultation and let us know what you think.

It’s a great opportunity for you to help shape the thinking around this important development in Scottish Education. The Working Group is also beginning to plan for a pilot of Professional Update, working in partnership with a small number of local authorities. We are looking at what the process would look like in practice, and we plan to pilot this in session 2012/2013.

We have had invitations from a range of groups to talk about our work on Professional Update, and if this would be helpful for you in your work, then you can let us know at professional.update@gtcs.org.uk. There’s also plenty of information on the GTC Scotland website already, which helps us ensure that we are keeping everyone up-to-date with our thinking.

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It turns out I vastly over estimated the will power of my colleagues when it comes to denying themselves biscuits. The very next day after writing my previous blog post someone brought a tin of biscuits in to the office. So much for lasting until the end of the month! You can win a weekend break away in our latest issue just for telling us your new year’s resolutions. Thankfully we’re only asking you to tell us them, we won’t be expecting you to actually keep to them.

Thank you all for your feedback on issue 43, we’ve received some really positive comments on the disability guidance feature that is based on a joint project undertaken with the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC). The feature on Tawakul Karman and her involvement in the Arab Spring uprising in Yemen has also struck a chord with people. You can tell us what it is that motivates you by emailing us at editor@teachingscotland.org.uk and we’ll feature some in a future issue.

Last week we were out and about recording podcasts with The Vine Trust and Learning Through Film: Human Rights in Scotland for our next issue in March. If you’ve already read issue 43 you’ll have seen a mention of both these organisations in our news pages.

The Vine Trust are based at the Centre for Global Citizenship, which is a reclaimed barge docked down in Leith, through which they work with schools to encourage children and young people to become effective global citizens. Michelle Livingstone, Education and Development Worker at the Vine Trust, talked us through some of the projects Scottish school children have been involved with in Peru and even gave us a tour around the centre itself. (They have an otter living nearby that they often see from their kitchen window.)

Learning Through Film: Human Rights in Scotland is a project developed by documentary film maker Nick Higgins. In 2008 Nick produced an award winning series documentary film, The New Ten Commandments, which comprises of 10 short films based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The films have been developed in to a humanitarian education teaching resource serving as an accompaniment to workshops based on each of the themes covered in the ten films.

The podcasts with Michelle and Nick will be available in February and March exclusively on Teaching Scotland Online.

The warm glow of Christmas has finally started to fade and by now we’re all back at work. Looking ahead at the start of the New Year we can already tell (12 days in) that we’re going to have a busy one. This prediction may or may not be connected to the current state of my inbox after only a week back in the office. The good news so far is that the editorial team is managing to stick to our new year’s resolutions which, like everyone else, are all about cutting out the gluttonous excess we enjoyed over the festive period. (Personally I’m giving it until the end of the month before someone cracks and brings cake or biscuits in to the office. Stay tuned for updates.)

One of the first tasks waiting for us after the Christmas break was the sign off of Issue 43 of Teaching Scotland. Our January issue generally ends up slightly frantic towards the end stages as it always has to be proof read and signed off in the first few days back in the office. This year was no exception with the magazine being proofed, signed off and sent to the printers by 6th January. (How we did all this without biscuits is a complete mystery to me.)

The theme of issue 43 will have a theme of leadership and motivation with a feature on Tawakul Karman, winner of the 2011 Nobel Peace prize and the first Arab woman to receive the award. Karman became the international face of the uprising in Yemen that took part of the Arab Spring in 2011.

As part of our series on influential figures in Scottish education we’ve interviewed Stewart Maxwell MSP, convener of the Education and Culture committee. You can find his interview is his issue along with photography of our day at the Scottish Parliament on our Flickr site.

Finally we also have an important feature on our recently published social media and electronic communication guidance. As is the case with social media stories in the media there was a frenzy of articles from people commenting on the guidance and also from people giving their own opinions on the issue. (As you might expect from a social media platform, there were a lot a debates taking place on Twitter about the whole affair.) We’ve had brilliant feedback from both those in education and the social media sector praising the guide for having a sensible approach to social media. In this day and age it’s a must read document and you can find out more when Teaching Scotland comes through your letter box (or email inbox) next week.

The festive season is upon us and the Teaching Scotland editorial team sit here in our Santa hats (not a joke) we’re lamenting upon how fast the year has gone by. It doesn’t seem like this time last year that we were discussing which artwork from Gillian Kyle that we would be using on our 2011 January cover. We won’t bore you with a retrospective look over the past year like most other blogs are doing, we’d much rather talk about the pandas!

Yes, we have some new neighbours over the hill at Edinburgh Zoo. Sweetie and Sunshine (or Tian Tian and Yang Juang as they are more commonly known in Mandarin) have arrived in Edinburgh and have taken up residence in their enclosure at the zoo following a massive media frenzy. (We were most disappointed to learn that the pair won’t be giving any interviews anytime soon, not even for close neighbours like us. Boo, what a great cover page that would have made!)

Looking forward towards the New Year, issue 43 in January will be themed around Leadership and Motivation. Our main feature is an interview with some previous Nobel Peace prize winners about what motivates them and what it’s like to be seen as a leader in their own fields. We also recently met with the new Education Committee at the Scottish Parliament. While our chief executive, Tony Finn, was discussing GTC Scotland and our educational priorities we scooped an interview with Stewart Maxwell MSP, the Convener of the Education Committee. Our pictures from the interview and our time down at parliament will be available on our Flickr site as a supplement to the paper article.

Keeping this now increasingly tenuous link to leadership going, we will know who our new Council will be by the time issue 43 is released in January (keep your eyes peeled for a future feature.)

This will be our last blog post of 2011; we’ll be back in the New Year just in time to proof issue 43 before it heads off to the printers. From all the team, we hope you have a lovely relaxing Christmas break and we’ll see you back here in 2012.

We celebrated All Hallows Eve at the start of this week, or if the kids in your neighbourhoods are anything like ours, the Guisers were celebrating all weekend long! The editorial team here at Teaching Scotland actually look forward more to the day after Halloween when the office is awash with leftover treats, it’s a tough job but someone has to eat all the leftover toffee apples. Hopefully it will be the same story in staff rooms across the country this week. (Do toffee apples count towards your 5 a day??)

Even though it won’t be published until January we’ve had an early planning meeting for Issue 43 of Teaching Scotland. I know it feels like a looong way away but we actually have to sign off the next edition before the Christmas break, which I hate to say isn’t that far away now we’re in to November. The January issue will be themed around Leadership and Motivation and we’ll be sourcing the main features over the next couple of weeks.

Over the next month we’re also going to have some fresh talent in our editorial team. We have two work experience students coming to visit us on separate weeks to find out more about producing a magazine. Not content with letting them observe and ask questions, we fully intend to have them writing their own articles for the magazine by the end of the week so keep your eyes peeled for any posts from them.

It's been a more subdued week for us here at Teaching Scotland. The October holidays have made for thin pickings on the news front and those left in the office have been left debating serious issues such as; which is better hobnob or digestive?

Subscribers to Teaching Scotland Online have been enjoying Issue 42 of Teaching Scotland for a week already while our paper subscribers should only be getting their copies this week. Just one of the many perks of subscribing online (another of course being that you get to read this wonderful blog…) Our keynote on the McCormac review has, unsurprisingly, been a popular read so far given the impact that the review is having in education right now. If you would like to share your own views on anything we've had to say on the matter you can comment here or send us an email.

On Monday Education Scotland invited us to attend their ICT in Education summit in Stirling. The aim of the day was to gather views and ideas on how technology can help improve learning and teaching in Scottish schools. Truly embracing ICT, those who couldn't attend on the day got a chance to participate online with the whole summit live streamed. Online viewers were also able to chip in their own views with tweets, a wiki page and a Google doc to contribute to.

The summit was a really productive day and has kicked off further debate in places such as Pedagoo and ScotEdublogs about how we can overcome difficulties such as changing the mind set of teachers; allowing students to access more content whilst keeping them safe online and improving the existing ICT infrastructure in schools.

Now the holidays are almost over its time to start gearing up for Halloween and the dreaded clock change at the end of the month. Enjoy the light in the evenings while it lasts!

After one final burst of summer last week the weather has caught up with us. It really feels like autumn and any hopes of going to the beach during the October holidays have been well and truly dashed.

Speaking of dashing (groans) we mentioned in our last post that we would be featuring Oscar Pistorius in issue 42. We've got a really inspiring interview with the South African sprinter, who looks set to qualify for the 2012 Olympic Games, talks about how he has overcome adversity and the loss of both his legs to win Paralympic Gold. We're also talking to Bill Maxwell, interim Chief Executive at Education Scotland, about his vision for the organisation's future and what the new national body will mean for teachers.

Following on from our feature in issue 41 about Professional Update, we're taking a closer look at a similar scheme introduced in 2007 by the Institute of Teaching in Victoria, Australia. CEO Melanie Saba explains their Professional Development programme which is part of the renewal of registration for Victoria's teachers.

Before we hold a formal consultation on Professional Update we'd like to hear more of your views on the issue. We'll be holding a series of meetings across the country where you can hear our initial thoughts and share your own views with us. To a find meeting near you visit the Professional Update pages of our main site.

Issue 42 will be with you in the next couple of weeks, we hope you enjoy it!

It certainly has been a busy few weeks in Scottish education since our last blog post. Last week saw the launch of the McCormac Review of Teacher Employment in Scotland which outlined a series of recommendations aimed at improving educational outcome for children and young people in Scotland. You can read our response on the main GTC Scotland website and, as always, you can pass on your thoughts and comments here through the Teaching Scotland Online website.

The Scottish Learning Festival 2011 is in full swing in Glasgow centreing on the theme of Curriculum for Excellence: Learning, Teaching and Assessment, Making the Connections. If you can't attend this year you'll be pleased to know that Education Scotland have been live streaming the keynote presentations on their website and will be making them available for you to view from today onwards. We enjoyed the opening keynote from Education Minister on Wednesday and Sir John Jones' keynote 'The Future Is Not What It Was' in the afternoon received a standing ovation at the end! (We can't confirm or deny whether the Education Minister's keynote received quite the same reception however…)

Attendees have also been busy tweeting away their thoughts on the seminars and everything on offer in the exhibition hall. You can join in or see what they're been tweeting by searching for the #SLF11 hashtag on Twitter.

As if things weren't busy enough this week we've also been hard at it getting all the features for the next edition of Teaching Scotland ready to be signed off. (Comments have been made by the editorial team that Teaching Scotland is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge… we start working on the next edition as soon as the current one goes to the printers, hence our blog title this week!)

Just as a little teaser we've got a great interview for you all to look forward to with the South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius otherwise known as 'The Blade Runner'. We'll tell you more about what to expect in Issue 42 closer to publication so watch this space!

A couple of weeks ago we were lucky enough to attend the 11th GTC Scotland National Lecture given by Professor Richard Holloway as part of the Festival of Politics. We were lucky not only because we got to hear a brilliant thought provoking lecture but because it meant we could record the lecture for everyone who couldn't attend on the night.

The title of Professor Holloway’s lecture, 'The Shoogly Kaleidoscope', was actually a reference to paradigm revolutions. If we were to view our lives through a kaleidoscope these revolutions are the points in which the kaleidoscope is given a good shake, completely shifting our world view. The lecture itself looked at recent revolutions that we have experienced (such as the communications revolution) and what defines our current world paradigm.

If you would like to listen to the lecture in full you can find the audio of the lecture on our National Lecture page where you can listen online or download a copy for your audio device.

We also hosted a panel debate on the topic of sports education with expert's throughout the field. With the issue of childhood obesity gaining more attention in Scotland and the Olympic and Commonwealth Games right around the corner, the panel debated the ways in which schools can help our children and young people become healthy, active adults, not to mention potential gold medal winners!

Issue 41 of Teaching Scotland has been out for a couple of weeks now and our exclusive interview with Education Minister, Mike Russell, A bright outlook caused a bit of a storm in the press and our own inbox. We were also really pleased to hear from other NQTs who felt the experiences of the Teacher Induction Scheme shared in the article Tomorrow starts today mirrored their own time spent as a probationer.

Thanks to everyone who commented online about the stories and interviews in this issue, good or bad we want to hear your thoughts.

We're back with a bang after the summer holidays, dotting the i's and crossing the t's on issue 41 of Teaching Scotland.

Our main feature this month is an exclusive interview with Mike Russell, Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning. The Minister talks frankly about the Government's approach to education, where there is room for improvement, and the lessons he has learned from his first term in office.

You can also read about our chat with some newly qualified teachers who shared their experiences of their probationary year, and their hopes and aspirations for their future careers. Their enthusiasm and passion for teaching was inspiring as you'll see in the feature.

As well as revamping Teaching Scotland online over the summer, we've also launched our very own Facebook page and we'd love you to head over there and give us a 'like'. It's exciting to be publishing much more information about our work online in ways that allow you to become more involved with us and the magazine.

Social media has been making the news again recently but there's no doubt that it's playing an increasing role in our society and that there is much about it that can make communicating with you easier, and more enjoyable. Hopefully you'll agree that Teaching Scotland online is an example of this, especially with all the new social elements we've added in.

So, welcome back from the holidays. We hope you've had a nice relaxing summer break and that issue 41 of Teaching Scotland helps ease you back into the new school year.

As the holidays draw to a close you can see we've been busy over the summer period working on a brand new look and feel to the online accompaniment to Teaching Scotland Magazine. Teaching Scotland Online will help you keep up to date with what's going on in the profession, help you learn what's new in CPD and professional practice and encourage you to share your own experiences.

With the next issue in August we'll be offering more interactive features with exclusive content only available online. We have some exciting new columnists debuting later this month giving a fresh perspective on Teaching. We've made it easier for you to get involved with the magazine and share your thoughts on the articles or issues at large. We're also imbedding social media in to the site which will make it easy to share articles with friends and colleagues if you think they'd find them interesting.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on the new look.