On Tuesday, March 30th, we’ll be unpicking the four common issues that can ruin your development plan. ‘Perfecting Development Plan Writing’ is an engaging and interactive online workshop that has its roots in the analysis of thousands of providers’ development plans. The session uses some wonderful online collaborative tools to help give delegates a new lens through which to see their development plan – or to confirm what they might already have suspected.. And did you know who one of […]

At the beginning of last month, I learnt the term ‘Connectivism’. The lovely irony of this was that I learnt it when I pulled together a team of FE professionals to form the ‘Learning Theory Research Group‘. The ‘lovely irony’ was that the process of connecting with this team was, itself, a Connectivist approach. An approach, I have to say, that I’ve loved long before learning the term. The group kindly contributed to my work on ‘A Unified Theory of […]

Tomorrow, I’ll be working with a lovely bunch of providers from across the Liverpool region on ‘Tools for Online Engagement’, some of which centre on ‘pre-learning’. You know what I mean? Learners turn up to your lesson curious to know more, maybe provoked a little, but also with a good sense of the learning journey they’re about to embark on. In other words, with an ‘Emotional Learning State’ conducive to embracing your content. If you’re interested in exploring pre-learning, or […]

I’m increasingly interested in ‘gamification’ and will be using an inventive version of this in next Tuesday’s ‘Assessment & the Art of Lazy Teaching’ session. I’ve been looking into it a lot over the last few weeks just because it’s an exciting way to teach and, if feedback is to be believed, a wonderful way to learn. I’ll share some of yesterday’s comments later to give a sense of how it can really change the learning experience. And do please […]

Back in the noughties, I had one of the best jobs in first the Adult Learning Inspectorate, then Ofsted, and finally LSIS. I used to work on the inspectorates’ Preparing for Inspection Events with the wonderful Nigel Evans and Jane Shaw. Do any of you nominees remember them? One of my favourite sessions was on self assessment. After several months of running the same session week in week out to hundreds of nominees, I remember expressing a little frustration to […]