Opening up thinking about education today for tomorrow - Imagining possibilities and solutions

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Further interest and interesting developments

Two further things have happened.

1. Letter from Prof. Brian Caldwell
Brian Caldwell acted as my project referee and something of an e-mentor in developing the submission for the Churchill Fellowship. He was a great support and very encourgaging.

Recently I received a letter from Brian regarding my Final Report. In the letter he says,
"I must say ... that your report is the very best I have read - in context and presentation.
The way you conceptualise what you learnt is extraordinary. I would highlight, especially, figure 9 on page 38, which could surely be the basis of policy, practice and many publications and presentations."

This response to my report is very encouraging particulalry given the somewhat mute response and interest expressed up until the last couple of months.

2. Teaching Australia
I had had a meeting with Fran Hinton from Teaching Australia earlier this year regarding my Churchill project and gave her a copy of my report. Today I happened to be on the Teaching Australia web site. I noticed with interest that recently Teaching Australia had called for a Request for Proposal seeking proposals to undertake feasibility studies for a Centre for Pedagogy and a National Clearinghouse for Educational Research, as well as Victoria University having been selected to undertake research into effective and sustainable partnerships between universities and schools. These developments appear to be related to some of my recommendations.

Interest is growing

It has been an interesting few weeks.

The Australian Catholic University (Strathfield) invited me to present on my Churchill project as part of their seminar series. I presented an overview of my project in an hour long presentation entitled What difference can we make? It used a series of case strudies from the trip to explore some of the concepts.

The seminar was well received with over 30 participants across the Government, Catholic and Independent sectors. Word of mouth has led to some further presentations within the system I work for, to some key groups.

It is exciting to open up the thinking of others who are positioned to make a difference to the students they teach, their schools and the profession.
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