GA Presidency Month 3: November 2021

on

The 3rd month of my Presidential term started with the 2nd week of my half term. Previously this has been used for overseas trips: Iceland or somewhere in Europe and occasionally returning from SAGT conference. This time it was more home based, and involved quite a lot of writing and work on ERASMUS projects.

I had the usual mix of events large and small which I had signed up to present.

Planning and emails regarding the GA Conference 2022 continued of course with speakers to add and additional work around that.

I attended the AGM and Committee meetings of my local GA Branch: the Cambridge and District GA branch. I will be speaking in 2022 on my conference theme.

COP26 began at the very start of November. The GA has been involved in a range of activity around the themes of the conference, and the importance of the decisions taken there. COP took place during the first couple of weeks and there were various links, including the arrival of my DressCode shirt.

I spoke to some students in Scotland as well, while standing in a wood on the UEA Campus. This was then used in some way at COP26.

We also had some good news that a proposal we had put forward for the UGI-IGU in Paris was accepted. This is based around the work that the GA is doing in the area of curriculum thinking. This is an area I used to work for the GA in of course.

I will be sharing more on this through GA channels as we will be looking for possible contributions and e-posters in this area for our session in July 2022.

Eleanor Rawling is leading the work on the curriculum framework for the GA, and we will be putting out a call for papers in the next few days.

In the 2nd week of the month, there were a few other events which I took part in.

GA SIG Wales - I had been invited by Gill Miller, President in 2019-20 to take part in an event on transition around the new Curriculum for Wales.

Check out the work they are already doing on the curriculum frameworks on the SIG Wales page of the GA website.

I did a small input and was then followed by some other speakers:

You have a month from the time of this post to catch up with an event which I presented at on Wednesday this week for the SIG Wales Volunteer Group.


You can watch me speaking from 4 minutes in - the sound gets a little muffled toward the end - which seems to be happening a little at the moment with my laptop.

The presentation slides are here:


If anyone has any questions, please get in touch...

One key event happened in November, which happens three times a year: a meeting of the GA's Governing Body. Governing Body meeting takes place face to face where possible, alhough my last face to face one took place in February 2020 over in Preston Montford in Shropshire.

The President joins Governing Body (GB) for the duration of their Presidential journey. This now lasts for three years, but I was the last person for whom this was a four year journey.

It was good to meet up with new staff members at Solly Street and actually have the whole Presidential team in the building for the first time ever (in our case) and for several years in general.

The following weekend was my own daughter's graduation.

Earlier in the week I was interviewed by Dorian Brown of Teachers Talk Radio. It was a good chat about the power of Subject Associations and my journey to being President. Click here for the link.

Wednesday the 24th of November was the Oxford GA Branch Lecture - 'Your Place or Mine'  as well: the David Pilgrim Lecture

This is a variation of a lecture which I have done before at a nnumber of venues. It was hosted by St. Edwards School (Teddies) in Oxford - a long drive over and back.There was a really good crowd of students - the largest audience of the year, although Tim Marshall is doing next week's lecture. It was my first face to face event for quite some time as well.

There were also one or two issues with conference as speakers pulled out and I had to work to find replacements. Work also continued with visits by colleagues to the conference venue to scope out the hybrid nature of the event.

The month ended with delivery of the new GA textbooks for KS3 which have been created and which are excellent as well.

Here are the Twitter statistics for the month to finish:


I am now a quarter of the way through the Presidency. Time is going quickly, and I will be half way through before I know it I'm sure.

Wishing everyone a restful Christmas break in advance. 

December's monthly update will appear in early January 2022.

Comments

Post a Comment