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Ollie Bray

Wednesday 23 August 2006

The school has a real buzz about it at the moment, the majority of classes seem to be working well and students are engaged in what they are learning. I hope that this attitude will continue for the rest of the year.

Accompanied Heather Fleming on a home visit just after registration to pick up a student who was having difficulty coming into school. I learnt a lot from Heather in the 30 minutes that I spent with her. She has a wonderful way of communicating with students and parents. I hope to be able to shadow her for a half day at some point during the next year as part of my own continued professional development. We brought the pupil back into school and I was delighted to see five ‘excellent’ grades on his monitor card when I bumped into him (literally) at lunchtime. Don has blogged about the importance of home visits before and I can now see how important this process is.

I popped into M Mohammed’s class very briefly during one of my trips round the school looking for pupils. An exciting lesson was taking place in Citizenship with S1 students looking at how they fitted into the life of MusselburghGrammar School and what they could contribute to the school. As I was driving home tonight I was thinking about the lesson and how we could share this information with everybody. I will come back to the theme of learning logs (or learning blogs) after I have had a chance to bounce some ideas around with Ewan next week.

SMT meeting after breaktime duty we discussed a number of issues including SELS, assemblies, re-coursing and a Curriculum for Excellence morning for S1 pupils.

Jim Young a former colleague of mine from Knox Academy once told me that he spent most of his time ‘investigating’ and this afternoon I became the Sherlock Holmes of the profession. I spent a bit of time investigating an incident involving a number of our students. The investigation eventually led to the temporary exclusion of one of the roll. Exclusion is an important part of the discipline process and although all East Lothian Schools make every effort not to exclude – there are situations when this is unavoidable.

For the final part of the day I had been given a ‘please-take’ for one of our S1 Seton Social Education classes. It was great to be back in the classroom talking and communicating with young people. It was a nice class, with some really fun characters. We spoke about their experiences at the school so far and talked a little bit about what the S1 Social Education Course involved.

After school there was an opportunity for all of the new staff to meet up with the school management team and have an informal chat about the week so far. Everybody seems to be having a positive experience. I asked a few of our NQT’s about last weeks induction programme and they were all very complimentary. This is great news. I really believe that our East Lothian induction programme is moving from strength to strength.

Tied up a few loose ends (well….quite a lot of loose ends!) and left at 18.45.

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