Presentation day at AGQTP

Last meeting for the year was presentation day for all involved. A culmination of the work done in the third term on our projects.
Here is a brief summary of most of them:
All Saints - Reviewed the schools Personal Responsibility Policy using Cognitive and Cooperative strategies and the tuning protocol. Then used the same protocol so that we could review their policy. Very successful at their school.
St Gabriels - Focussed on working with targeted teachers in their school to model the strategies. Picked up a unit of work (on Creation) and showed how it could be taught over five lessons. Other teachers looked on and took notes. They were enthusiastic and will now model them to other teachers.
Our School - decision making processes in our school. Clear that this needs refining to be able to manage some of the decisions that need to made in the future e.g. future SACE.
St Francis X - wanted to make P.L. more relevant and individualised. Used PMI - a good tool to model and use to review. [Could lead into using a protocol to examine the results]. As a result of the review, there is more continuity, they include more energisers from other people, incorporate cognitive and cooperative strategies, time for sharing and professional reading time. Learning teams have formed and a member of each team is part of the Lead Learning Team. Teams include Higher Order Thinking, Brain Based Learning, Choice Theory, Cooperative/Cognitive Strategies, Questioning, and Student Engagement.
Mary Mount - does student directed learning improve engagement? They worked in teams on a topic of their choice on energy. [Have asked her to send me a copy of what she did]
St Josephs ? - Used protocols to share the learning that they and others had experience in the various AGQTP activities.
Sacred Heart Middle School - Authentic assessment. Class did study on what chips are best. Need to use statistical tools to work this out and then write it up justifying their decision. [Again, have asked him to send me the documentation]
St Josephs Tranmere - whole school engaged in a project on Antarctica which focussed on all four Productive Pedagogy elements. Huge project.
St Francis A - using pp based activities to raise student engagement.
My reflection on the process is the enormous range of talent in the room and the different roads people appear to be taking whilst introducing these pedagogies. The discussion after the presentation reflected this with a general feeling that many people were prepared to go the next step and willing to lead others through the productive pedagogies pathways.
I felt that we needed to document the way in which people have grown and developed in this area and what was necessary for this to happen ie. time to review, try, evaluate, listen to others then try again. Also we need to indicate what conditions are necessary to help the process in our schools: principal on board (especially in financial terms), some teachers in the school willing to tackle new ideas, a long term commitment to change.
Should be an interesting year next year.