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Don Ledingham

Tuesday 14 February 2006

Schools are on the mid-term break yesterday and today so not as much e-mail traffic as usual. I spent most of this morning working with Derek Haywood, School Business Manager, trying to finalise the budgets for primary and secondary schools.

Worked on SELS from 11.00-1.00 this system will allow us to actively engage pupils in providing feedback on the school exeperience. We are going to put the student data onto the system for schools which should make it much easier to implement the on-line questionnaires.

2.00-4.00 Met with Alan Ross, Sheila Ainslie and Raymy Boyle to consider how we can develop our cluster approach to integration. We discussed the twin challenges of promoting a culture of inclusion and the structures and processes necessary to enable it to be effective.

TFT number 3

In the course of the conversation I was struck by the following question " Can a teacher, or for that matter a school, really live up to an inclusive culture if they don't try to adopt a positive perspective towards children, such as that I described on Friday, i.e. unconditional positive regard? - I think it's almost impossible to do so without such a perspective. If we are overly influenced by the likeability of a child, or their commitment to the education process we can't really be successful in changing their behaviour (we'll just want to get them out!) I thought the section in the Educational Psychology service section of the website relating to motivation and Maslow's motivation theory to be very relevant to this debate.

Comments

Positive attitudes towards Children

Yvonne Binks

Wednesday 01 March 2006

There is a really useful website www.thetrojanproject.co.uk
Check this out for pupils views on what makes a good teacher, how they like to learn, what makes them feel safe inschool etc.

Inclusive schools = Inclusive attitude = Finding the best

Ewan

Tuesday 14 February 2006

I reckon that inclusion can only work when teachers find the best a kids has to offer and exploits that. In French class it might well prove that a kid has poor grasp of grammar but has a great memory, or a great mathematical grasp of how sentences go together but a terrible memory for vocab (that's me!). Or, it might be that the kid is great at art but terrible with words and the logic of sentence structure. In this last situation the French teacher's job is to find activity that takes advantage of this visual mind and uses it to translate the kid's knowledge into better French. Easier said than done, but I managed it with storytelling in French in S1 and got 30 kids writing and speaking French most S4s would be proud of.

It's all about finding talent and exploiting it in each subject area. It's not about a kid becoming solely 'a great musician', 'good at maths' or a 'super writer', but using these skills to reach success in all areas.

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