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Description

My role sees me work as a member of various teams; some are short-lived, coming together for the duration of a particular project, whereas others are continual. The teams may be small, often working as a pair with a colleague, or sometimes as a member of working party with membership across all 25 sister schools.

This provides a flavour of the variety of groups and project teams to which I have recently contributed:

• School website review team
• Learning platform procurement and deployment team
• ICT Development Group
• School calendar review team
• Parents’ Portal support team
• GDST Digital Strategy Forum
• ‘Values Day’ group
• Pastoral Reports Group

In addition, I’m also called on in a more ad hoc fashion where individuals or departments might need assistance or guidance with a particular initiative or development - the Drama department in helping produce the blended learning support for students undertaking their GCSE project work for example.

Reflection

One of the most rewarding, yet challenging, aspects of my role is working across such a wide range of people and on such a variety of projects. Often it is to me that team members turn for ‘expert’ advice, sometimes of a technical nature (I have no technical qualifications as such, but perhaps the nature of my role means I am perhaps better read in these matters than the average), but more often from a management or pedagogical standpoint - how do we marshall resources to meet this need, or how do I organise the available time to deliver these learning outcomes? Finding creative solutions in situations like these requires skill and experience, together with powers of interpretation and negotiation. The rewards arise from collaborating to find elegant and effective solutions which address specific needs, but the challenges come from finding the middle ground when pushing people forward into new areas, yet not so far that they become isolated and disillusioned.

During the preceding term, our 6th form students formed a group with a couple of staff advisers to produce the first edition of a digital newsletter. My role within the team was to help guide the choice of platform, then support those charged with producing, organising and publishing the content . This involved an initial training session, together with ongoing support with different elements as required. This was then published to our community (and beyond) through our learning platform and can be seen in this post.

Assisting pupils with the transition between the primary and secondary stages of schooling require careful management and support. As a cross-phase school, we have a large cohort of students who move through directly from Year 6 to Year 7; however we also have a substantial number of new students joining us in Year 7 who come from a wide range of geographically dispersed primary schools. In addition to the face-to-face programmes which take place we have also put in place an online community into which our transition pupils are enrolled. This acts as an equaliser; an environment in which all participate, but which is new for all. A team of staff and current Year 7 pupils (“Big Sisters”) act as points of contact hand channels of communication for pupils in transition. This is undertaken using Edmodo, a communication platform which doesn’t require the users to have accounts within our learning platform, but whose membership we can manage and monitor. My role involves providing the technical and administrative underpinning, as guided by colleagues with pastoral responsibility, together with supporting staff and pupils for whom this may be a new venture. Here is a screenshot of the environment (as of 14:30 on 27-08-2014):