Today I took part in a CPDCentral/CPDReflect workshop with CPD coordinators from some of the local authorities around Glasgow. This was the fourth of a series of workshops abley led by Con Morris of the National CPD Team.
So what was I doing there you might ask?
In order to answer that, I’ll need to tell you a bit more about CPD Central and the newly developed tool CPD Reflect.
CPD Central is a National Group inside Glow for anyone that is interested in CPD. It’s an area to share and make connections across local authorities. I had the pleasure of doing a demonstration of Glow and an introduction to this online community for those present at the session. What interests me most about this community however is not merely that it exists, but how it’s being developed. You see CPD Central is not being managed or administered from on high, but rather the members are deciding what they want to do with the space. To me, that screams collegiality and community.
I wonder if people are ready for that though? All too often in Scottish education we seem to have a ‘what can I get’ mentality when faced with using technology. Where does an online community begin? Does it start with ‘what can I give’ or ‘what’s in it for us’?
The second tool that we were looking at in the workshop sessions was CPD Reflect. I remember sitting down with Con a couple of years ago as he started to gather opinion and advice about what a reflective online CPD tool could be, and we spoke at length about how beneficial an reflective journal could be to a practitioner, and how valuable it would be to have a tool that allowed a practitioner to judge their own development against the standard for professional registration.Two years later, CPD Reflect is about to be launched on a unsuspecting nation of educators.
Off the bat I love the whole concept of CPD Reflect. I think it’s great that there is now a tool to help in the whole CPD/PRD process, and make it far more meaningful for those involved, instead of the ‘tick the box’ exercise I fear it is for so many in scottish education. I love the fact that using this tool, you can personally set targets an objectives for improvement in areas of your professional practice and let technology do what it does best – collate, track and share. How brilliant is it that this tool allows you to share what you want from your own area of CPD Reflect with others of your choosing?
Does this all sound too good to be true? I suspect there has to be a catch – I don’t know if teachers will have time to get the best out of this tool. It takes time to fill in sections of information. You’d have to commit to this tool to realise the benefits. Do teachers have time to do this in an already busy working day?
How often do we merely choose a CPD activity because we saw something we liked in a local authority calendar, or because it related to the school development plan? How closely do either of these factors relate to our own professional needs for development? CPD Reflect allows us to flip this model on it’s head, and focus instead on our needs for development. It allows us to recognise areas where we are merely beginning to adopt good practice, or integrate it into our working life. Perhaps the tools best strength lies in the ability to note not just where we are integrating, but where we are innovating in our work – connecting innovators with beginnners could work wonders on our profession.
CPD Reflect will be available soon through Glow – watch the CPD Scotland and Glow Scotland websites for further details.
