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Education Authority

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8th September 2022

Building Emotional Resilience through Inquiry Based Learning – Celebration of Learning Conference, 21st September, 2022

Dear Principal,

One of the many education initiatives which EA developed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, was a Teacher Professional Learning Programme, built on an existing partnership with Professor Barry Carpenter CBE, Professor of Mental Health in Education, Oxford Brookes University. This programme was called Supporting Learning through Covid-19: an inquiry-based professional learning approach. In the midst of the huge challenges brought about by the pandemic, many teachers engaged in this programme and in 2021-22, thirteen schools developed their work further, focussing on building emotional resilience using Inquiry Based Learning approaches. Professor Carpenter, a leading international educational professional in child and adolescent mental health, argues that the only way we can learn and develop as a profession is to move forward through a process of inquiry based professional practice:

“Teaching is an evidence based profession, but where we do not have the evidence or knowledge to educate children living through a global pandemic, or those with a new disability, we have a collective responsibility to focus on inquiry based learning that allows us to systematically and deductively collect evidence and analyse the outcomes for use in practice”. Professor Barry Carpenter

On 21st September 2022, the schools involved in this programme will publish their work and share the outcomes at a Celebration of Learning conference, being held in the Glenavon Hotel, Cookstown. Professor Carpenter will provide the keynote presentation and he will be joined by Vicci Wells, Head of Sport & SEND Inclusion for the Youth Sport Trust and Alan Wood, Director and Co-founder of Evidence for Learning.

Thank you for your interest.

Patricia Cooney and John Unsworth,

Assistant Directors, Education Directorate