When learners’ progress isn’t as fast as you’d like, do you lean on staff to make the targets they write SMARTer? Or if you are the teacher/assessor, do you have that sneaking suspicion that SMART target setting doesn’t really produce the intrinsically motivated learners you want? In next week’s open session – The Art of Using Target Setting (Wednesday pm, 17 November) – we’ll be taking a surprising look at the problematic role of SMART in learner target setting. I’ll […]

What do you think about your own learning-outcome writing? It’s fascinating to hear the range of teachers’ responses to this question. Too often, I hear: ‘I usually write those once I know what I’m going to do’. There’s good and bad in this answer. The ‘good’ is that this teacher probably knows their subject very well and doesn’t feel the need to spend much, if any, time on lesson planning. We need this level of vocational expertise in FE! But […]

On Thursday, we’ll be looking at 11 wonderful tools for making online and blended learning wonderfully engaging. Now if you’re into technology-enhanced learning, that sort of opening sentence will produce one type of emotional reaction. But if you curse Rona every time you teach online, you might experience an entirely different emotion! Please bear with me, however, as this session isn’t what you think. I promise there’ll be no cognitive overload and that I won’t try to teach you how […]

Have you ever seen the Ofsted/Estyn/EducationScotland/ETI inspection sentence: ‘It’s too early to judge the impact of this new initiative’? If you’ve had it written in your own report, you’ll know just how annoying it can be to have a huge swathe of your quality improvement work damned with this one-liner. That it’s never too early to judge impact, makes it all the more frustrating. In this week’s open workshop – Perfecting Development Plan Writing – we’ll be looking at what […]

I’ve worked on somewhere in excess of 4500 SARs and it’s still one of my favourite areas of work. I wrote my first self-assessment report at the end of my first teaching year back in 1987-88, not because anyone asked us to, but because we knew we weren’t doing it right and so wanted to know how to improve. Ever since then, I’ve considered self assessment to be one of the most creative parts of our day job. When I […]