This meeting was our sixteenth meeting of our group which now has over 350 members in the database.
Over the last year we have had meetings with a focus on
- Masters degrees in SEND from Doncaster University Campus
- Neurodiversity from the ADHD foundation
- nasen – their offer to teachers
- Young STEM leaders/Skills builder partnership/CREST awards
- ChemBAM – teaching chemistry to learners with visual impairment
Please get in touch with Rob if you want the notes for previous meetings.
Points arising from the discussion
Where can we keep the notes of our meetings online? Can we have a padlet or a webpage somewhere? Rob and Jane will investigate.
We did discuss the possibility of adverse childhood experiences – it was suggested we focus on needs and strategies. With schools moving towards zero tolerance and one size fits all approaches, raising some of the causes of behaviour helps to raise awareness and educate teachers who don’t understand the reason for behaviour in schools.
Sometimes when you target one group you make the content accessible to other groups – we find this with Books beyond words. They are being used by teachers with other groups of learners than the ones the authors envisioned.
Should we also have a discussion question for each meeting to allow for a structured discussion?
Would a workshop on accessing funding be useful? The group thought it would be including tips for writing bids and matching up people offering funds to those who provide them.
Impact of previous meetings
Several people noted that the ChemBAM was very useful and visual impairment has been a subject of several workshops to date.
One teacher followed links to the Lightyear foundation on a previous newsletter and has received funding/workshops as a result.
One teacher felt that the group was good for connecting with other teachers and feeling like part of a community, you miss these emails when you aren’t part of a large department or are a lone teacher in a small school. Lots of schools in Scotland are very small where there might be a single science teacher – this networking support is very important and is a core purpose of the ASE as well as our group.
Sharing of good practice is very useful for teachers who don’t follow experts in different fields, and this is more pronounced when you leave the UK.
Links from the chat
Books beyond words https://booksbeyondwords.co.uk/
Royal Society exhibition https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/summer-science-exhibition/
Please do get in touch if you have any questions and do encourage your colleagues to receive their own copy of these communications by visiting www.ase.org.uk/ise
The next meeting
The next meeting will be on Mon 2nd October at 4pm.
