Gillian
Registered: 03/12/08
Posts: 1
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| | 03/12/08 at 09:36 AM | Reply with quote | #1 |
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I have been told that my D&T department has to deliver the Engineering Diploma from September 2008.
I haven't got any engineers on my staff.
What should I do?
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Mike
Registered: 02/23/08
Posts: 25
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| | 03/12/08 at 11:17 PM | Reply with quote | #2 |
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This does sound like something of a challenge!
But it is the case that many teachers of electronics, systems and control and ICT had to pick it up in order to teach it. The Engineering Diploma is more complex and an industrial placement would be ideal preparation. The advantage with local collaboration, especially schools with FE colleges, is that there are going to be people in the team with the right experience that can be shared. With personal development targets and a supportive SLT it will be possible to use the first year of the Diploma to pull together everything that is needed to deliver it with increasing confidence in further years.
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Archimedes
Moderator
Registered: 02/22/08
Posts: 26
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| | 03/29/08 at 02:27 AM | Reply with quote | #3 |
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This is an important question to ask.
Gillian's school has chosen to deliver the Engineering Diploma and they recognise that staff development (and resource development) will be top priorities. This is the starting point for actively engaging with the Diploma as a department.
A sensible option will be to work with the lead LA person, who will be organising events and other activities which encourage collaboration between schools and colleges, and provide opportunities for staff to develop the new skills needed. Team approaches to teaching, particularly in the first year of the Diploma, will help. Another part of the equation will be acquiring appropriate resources to support practical studies and good student support materials. Building a learning programme around a Learning Platform (VLE) will be an important way to encourage student self-learning. In the first year teachers will be on a steep learning curve, along with their students.
The awarding bodies, for example, Edexcel, are providing good hands-on courses to explain course content and assessment. Professional associations like DATA are also planning member events to tackle these issues.
Consortia, in their bids, had to show that they were able to deliver the Diploma, i.e. that their teachers had the teaching skills. The reality is that, unless the teachers delivering the Diploma are engineers, they will inevitably have subject-specific INSET needs. Many employers are currently hosting visits for teachers to see how the business works, and we can expect industry secondments to be available as Diplomas develop.
What developments and support activities would teachers most value?
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ajax
Registered: 09/30/08
Posts: 2
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| | 09/30/08 at 10:36 AM | Reply with quote | #4 |
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You make it sound rosy Mike, but for many schools doing the diploma this term it is fairly chaotic.
We are lucky in having a brilliant LA leader but even then we are tackling all sorts of problems while we attempt to get the course into shape.
The biggest difficulty has been the delay in getting materials from the exam board. But also, many of the staff are not yet confident with teaching the course.
What we are doing is using a lunchtime each week to debrief, and an after-school meeting every week to share teaching ideas. We are also trying to make the teaching more flexible so that we share our particular expertise across classes, e.g. our CAD_CAM expert does the initial teaching for all the classes. We are also going to write more student notes so that they dont always keep asking the teacher, and we aim to setup an 'Ask-the-Expert' email system - but this is still in the ideas stage.
What we could do with is more off-the shelf teaching materials matched to the resources we are using - ideally as Word docs. We would like to create a complete online course so that students can use the study materials anywhere. Any ideas on this would be very welcome.
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DanDare
Registered: 04/27/08
Posts: 3
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| | 10/02/08 at 10:57 AM | Reply with quote | #5 |
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Great ideas ajax. Good practical advice. It is useful to know about what others are doing. My background is ICT so I am concentrating on writing student materials to support practical work in the IT parts of the course like design, control and CAD-CAM. Our partner college is already setup with the more 'industrial' part of the course. We are structuring the course partly around where resources are situated, which probably isn't the best approach. Our issues at the moment are upskilling for staff and making use of our industry links in a structured way that we can document into a study programme. Any more ideas would be really welcome. It would be nice to know if we are on the right track.
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