Course Details

Do sign up now for the first in a series of annual regional conferences for those with a remit or simply an interest in improving the quality of teaching and learning.  We have two prestigious speakers who will present us with new ways of thinking about teaching and learning, and several practical workshops where practitioners can share strategies and ideas for effective and innovative professional development.  Workshop details will be provided very soon; in the meantime the speakers’ details are as follows:

Professor David Halpin from the Institute of Education (University of London) will promote a concept of education that links with the idea of hope and optimism.  He believes that the Utopian-Romantic associations with education are important: the imagination, its creative development and the duty of loving care that teachers should have for their students.  He focuses on the progressive forms of teaching and learning that have been lost to teachers’ professional thinking and practice in recent years.  Criticising the instrumental rationality of reaching official targets and associated modes of formal assessment, Halpin is passionate about teachers’ need to reclaim their educational imaginations for the benefit of their learners.

Steve Watson will present Building Learning Power, an approach originated by Guy Claxton in 1996 and currently being widely circulated, mainly in schools.  Essentially, it focuses on learning skills and also on improving and developing students’ learning habits. For example, teachers learn how to develop students’ learning power, a learning ‘character’ and consider whether the classroom environment needs to change. Profiling students’ power to learn is part of the approach, and the intention is to enable students to identify for themselves the learning skills they already possess and those they need to develop.

Please contact Michelle Chesterfield if you require anything further - 0115 854 1626, michellec@emfec.co.uk.