Practitioners and managers from across the education and training sector joined together at Ramside Hall in Durham on the 18th of December 2017 for an inspiring and uplifting event to celebrate the success of the North East and Cumbria Oustanding Teaching, Learning and Assessment (OTLA) programme.
The North East and Cumbria OTLA, funded by The Education and Training Foundation and managed by a consortium led by Success North, has enabled groups of providers to access collaborative development grants to investigate and develop teaching, learning and assessment approaches for the benefit of learners. The collaborative partnerships comprised 19 providers from different sectors, including FE, work based learning, offender learning and community settings.
The event gave each project team the opportunity to run a workshop to showcase their project and to share their knowledge claims. Teams introduced their projects with a poster and a song that they felt captured the key messages and outcomes of their action research, with song choices including: “Altogether Now”, “Let It Shine” and “It’s All About You”. There were some very tuneful renditions! You can listen to the original versions on the event spotify playlist.
OTLA Research Lead David Powell invited the teams to share the insights, understanding and good practice they had developed through their action research, by writing these on paper bricks, which were then used to construct a ‘wall’ of OTLA outcomes (shown above). Graffiti included:
“Sharing our practice so we open up new opportunities for learners”
“Equality and Diversity starts with the first contact with the learner – not just in teaching”
“See teaching, learning and assessment as research”
Professor Jean McNiff, who has delivered a series of highly engaging CPD workshops on action research as part of the OTLA programme, reminded everyone that we must celebrate what we do and make sure that we develop strong voices to produce and share our informed research into our professional practice.
Project teams now have until July 2018 to extend the work of their current projects. They’ll be able to gather more impact data, implement approaches they have seen from other projects on the OTLA North East and Cumbria programme, further disseminate their findings and widen the reach of their current work.
The project reports and accompanying resources are now available to the whole sector via the Excellence Gateway.
The OTLA North East & Cumbria Team
