Presentation For J Crawford Open Meeting

Ian McCracken LRC Manager Govan High School Glasgow. It’s all about skills! Connections between Information Literacy Skills and wider skills

Starting Points :-
Noticing different teachers’ expectations from pupils
Observed that there was little or no focus on skills
– but that skills underpinned much work expected
3) Result – frustration all round!

Identification & Assimilation- 1
Started thinking about the skills needed to
identify and use keywords:-
Analytical ability
Flexibility
Good vocabulary
Ability to make connections

Identification & Assimilation-2
Looked at everything I could from school subjects, online
reports etc to see if any of these skills mentioned – nothing!
BUT
– teachers/reports still expected pupils to have these skills
(and many others!)

Identification & Assimilation-3
Began to formulate questions such as:
– has anyone thought through the process, and the skills
needed at each stage?
Does each department think someone else does this?
Even if departments do any kind of useful work, is it
given the same name and done the same way
– in other words, pupils may not know they’re being
asked to do the same kind of task.

Assumptions and expectations Identified common assumptions- most were based on a lack of analytical skills on the pupils’ side, and a lack of checking for skills on the teachers’ – but no starting points established Behaviour Support – started talking to newly appointed Behaviour Support teacher, who was very interested in the issues regarding how pupil behaviour could be adversely affected by these problems “ Good bad examples”!!

From Theory to Practice:-
“ Homework” Club – with lots of tasks to encourage keyword acquisition –Guinness World records- also linked to subjects
( e g alphabetical/dictionary skills)
2) Senior Helpers – got pupils together who had been helping
- Created list of LRC skills

Senior Helpers – compiled list of skills

Theory into Practice – “The Big Picture
At the same time as this work was going on in the LRC, the school was looking at becoming “skills-based”. The “ground rules” that Philip Graham and I had developed from an Information Literacy starting point became very important.
These were:-
The notion of a Common Skills Vocabulary
The notion that skills did not just happen – pupils had to know what they were and be involved
“ Skills behind the skills” – what skills are involved in the process as opposed to the task
The idea that skills were not just classroom based but happened everywhere that a learning activity was taking place
The importance of consistency and connections – a “Skills System”, not just skills on their own.
Skills matching – the concept that once you had determined a defined list of skills, this could be the “fixed point” that everything else could be matched to

71 Future Skills – identified & matched to
all
Standard Grades,
local and national business requirements,
Skills for Scotland Strategy,
all
curricular and extra-curricular work,
100 careers,
And of course to a Curriculum for Excellence
– in principle and in detail.

A Curriculum for Excellence and Future Skills Please consult your handout LINKS BETWEEN MENU

Lin Smith MCLIP School Librarian The Ecclesbourne School Wirksworth Road Duffield Belper Derbyshire DE 56 4 GS email [email_address] An independently developed alternative approach using some similar concepts

To help pupils with this area of learning we need to…
Name and identify the skills required
Understand that information skills have to be explicitly taught
Use the same terminology in different subjects so that skills can be seen as transferable
Emphasize that the process is as important as the end result

Furthermore….
Pupils should be able to…
communicate well in a range of ways
understand how they learn and learn from their mistakes
to learn independently and with others
know about big ideas and events that shape our world
enjoy learning and are motivated to achieve the best they can now and in the future.

Recent Developments
In the school – several successful Future Skills symposia
Information Literacy – matching Future Skills to
all information-literacy related outcomes
3) Identifying the most often used information literacy skills,
based on the above

Sample – I’m happy to send full set to anyone who wants a closer look

Tallying the Skills

The ten most used Future Skills in e-lit analysis of cfe Outcomes:- (in ascending order) 43 Image modelling Connector 48 Reaching conclusions Decider 53 Setting information out Communicator 53= Big picture connections Connector 59 Adapting communication Communicator 63 Discovering Originator 66 Processing information Connector 75 Gathering facts Connector 78 ICT E-Lit Communicator 82 Analytical skills Connector

The LEAST used Future Skills in e-lit analysis of cfe Outcomes:- Co-operation Contributor Creating word pictures Communicator Decision-making Decider Imagination Originator Counting skills Sorter Pushing boundaries Doer Flexibility Sorter Independent expression Originator Empathetic skills Communicator Team skills Contributor Neurological connections Sorter Note taking Communicator

Ian McCracken LRC Manager Govan High School Glasgow. [email_address] 0141-582-0090

Presentation For J Crawford Open Meeting

by cirving on Sep 17, 2009

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Presentation For J Crawford Open Meeting — Presentation Transcript