This was absolutely action packed! I didn’t expect to be opening the second day of the show and I have to say it had a completely different vibe to yesterday’s keynote.
This was a real celebration of what the best teachers can do and a great reminder that for many of us, its literally carry on! James Stronge & Leslie Grant reminded us that it really does come down to relationships, great teachers care about their students and I loved the reaffirmation of the key things that make us teachers. One important note, is that student directed was not a strong feature of high performing teachers. Most of the high performing teachers in the sample were also NOT lecturing. Yes, there was plenty of teacher input but it was interactive and their research suggested that the best learning is interactive, but teacher directed. I also enjoyed the twist on the 4 part matrix! We all wanted to know what was in that bottom quadrant and turns out it does not exist!
Other than that I got to see precisely one session and that was Kim Coffino. She took us through the process of being an instructional coach. To be an instructional coach puts you in a unique position and I loved the idea of a network of coaches to help each other. It was powerful, that she had definitions for what she sees as an instructional coach and the importance of managing both up and down. It reminded me of my own experiences with the various coaches I have seen in schools and as I explained in the session,”If you only get on well with management, then you could be in the school forever and be ineffective but if you only get on with teachers at the chalk face then you might be effective, but your tenure will be short lived.” We also discussed the key differences between mentoring and coaching. Kim reminded everyone that if you enter this role, you need to justify your existence every single year, because your influence is likely to be less direct than improved exam results.
After than it was back to business, we were slightly surprised to see a hard core programming session get so busy that “Dan” called on the bat phone to ask me to support, then I realised he’s added “AI” to the title! It also turns out that Malaysia is the land of the free when it comes to AI, because we have access to all the American chatbots, the European bots and the chinese bots. No VPNs required!
Dan did a great job presenting and one of the key messages we got across was that these bots can code to some extent, but they make a lot of errors. You need the foundations to be able to check the code and understand what is going on. What I also enjoyed was Dan sharing at how good these GPTs are at explaining how code works and how this can enable you to quickly document and create custom handouts for students.
I then had two sessions of my own to run, one on Octostudio and the other on Storytelling with multimedia. (Members of the site will have access to these decks, next month).
