Staff Development Flyer
Issue 11, Feb 2017
Inclusiveness
January sees the launch for this year's Big Learning Project.
You will be able to register to start your project until Friday 17 February 2017
We have now arranged it so that you can begin your project whenever is most suitable for you; following the guidance we have online and attending face-to-face sessions whenever you're able to.
The Big Learning Project is open to all staff, no matter what your role. You will each shape your project around a problem, challenge or opportunity relevant to your context and you'll design an evidence-based experiment that you will then measure the impact of. You can therefore spend as much or as little time as you can afford throughout the project before sharing your learning with colleagues in June.
Register to participate in the project here:
https://goo.gl/forms/qiqeAASsPuGon0cA3
Explore each phase of the project here:
https://sites.google.com/a/sheffcol.ac.uk/tscpd/big-learning-project
Integrity
Tuesday 3rd January was the 2017 Learning Festival. On this day 55 staff and two students graciously gave up their time to share their skills and knowledge in the delivery of workshops for the rest of the staff. With a wide range of workshops to choose from, there was something for everyone; 388 staff attended the first workshop and 339 attended the second. The afternoon session was for departments to meet as a team and come up with pledges for the new term. 473 members of staff attended with 318 pledges made. We hope they're going well and we look forward to reflecting on progress on the next Development Day on Thursday 9 March.
Learning Festival Feedback
You said:
- 'If running Unconference again, more structure is needed.'
- 'Something for Business Support staff.'
- 'Hillsborough as a venue for the next one.'
Next Time:
- We'll consider the structure we use for the Unconference so that you can all make the most of this time.
- Although we had more on offer for Business Support staff, we are already working to ensure that ALL staff are fully integrated to the next whole College day.
- We are looking to hold the next day at Hillsborough.
As with all previous development days, we will soon be publishing the full feedback for the day on our sites pages: https://sites.google.com/a/sheffcol.ac.uk/tscpd/development-days
You can already view all resources shared by clicking here.
Involvement
Thank you to each one (42 of you!) who signed up for the Buddy Box this term.
The boxes, designed to bring a smile, are already beginning to make their way around the organisation to their recipients.
We'll be giving a second opportunity to register after February half-term so look out for the registration details!
Inspiration
It will contain some Teaching and Learning suggestions, some top tech tools and much more besides.
Inspiration
We believe we should work hard in order to be happy, but could we be thinking about things backwards? In this fast-moving and very funny talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that, actually, happiness inspires us to be more productive.
Innovation
In our team we move around from site to site over the week; it's very rare that all of us are in the office at the same time. Because of this we needed to find a way to stay in touch which not only let us message each other, but also keep a thread of how conversations are going. Over the last 12 months we’ve looked at a number of different solutions. Firstly we tried to just use email, but with the amount that we got in the department it soon became apparent that it was going to take longer to find email threads than the time it saved us. This led us to look at a number of solutions. We started with Trello which is like your old corkboard on the wall. You can create tasks and keep them up to date but the limitation was that you could only put one person in charge of an item. Next we looked at Wunderlist, which is more of a list manager, but again we found that anything other than creating lists was a bit of a time hog having to move between screens to get things done.
In October we decided to give Slack a try. At its simplest Slack is a message board where you can post things, but where it shines is in its concept of channels. Much like how Twitter and Facebook work with hashtags (#), if you want to post something in a different channel you just look for the hashtag on the left side, click it and start typing. It lets you talk about subjects all from one window by just choosing the channel you want. Where it really shines is its ability to plug-in additions. We use Google Apps extensively in our department and through an add-in are able to attach docs, sheets, forms and slides to the channels. There is also a to-do list that you can plug in for making lists in the channels too.
We are finding Slack to be a game changer in our department and hope that this brief overview makes you think about how you can use technology to enhance your team’s communication.
Please get in touch with us to learn more! elearningteam@sheffcol.ac.uk
The End of an Era...
Organisations frequently need to say farewell to staff moving on to enjoy their retirement. Less frequently, the organisation needs to say farewell to a member of staff who will leave a huge hole behind them. In 2017, a mere 23 years (!) after Chris Phillips started work at The Sheffield College, we will have to say farewell to a person who has contributed so much since she began in 1993.
Chris has seen the team she has worked for move from Training and Development, Professional Development to Staff Development. She has worked for 10 managers over this time and each of them has brought new approaches to development. She has seen work move swiftly from typewriters, through computers and now working in the cloud (wherever that is!).
In each of the department’s numerous guises, Chris has been the reliable first point of contact for staff and managers alike and her years of knowledge gathering will be sorely missed by the team. Although we will be lost without the answer for every enquiry (however bizarre!), it is Chris we will miss the most: she leaves a lasting legacy to the Staff Development team and very big shoes to be filled (not that her feet are large!). Her integrity has lead to her building strong working relationships with staff from all parts of the organisation and this means she’ll be missed by far more people than just Helen and Hannah.
Enjoy your retirement Chris, after 23 years, and approximately... (yes, we may have guesstimated some of these numbers!):
44252 hours at work…
46 Development Days…
23000 members of staff through development days…
9163 staff development application forms since 2005…
...you more than deserve every minute of it!