TeachingLeaders – A call to action: educate critical minds!

Posted by irislapinski on August 29th, 2010

Last Friday I went up to Nottingham since Sharath Jeevan from TeachingLeaders had asked me to give the final address and call to action at their 2010 Cohort Residential at the National College for School Leadership.

Just in case you are unfamiliar with TeachingLeaders: Set-up in 2009, they train and develop outstanding school leaders (e.g. heads of department) in challenging inner-city schools, so as to directly raise pupil achievement and aspirations. They have got off to a rapid start with strong support from the government and the major political parties and are now in 87 schools across the South East of England. You can find out more about them on the TeachingLeaders website. Beyond the National College key partners are TeachFirst, ARK and FutureLeaders.

Initially I struggled to come up with a meaningful call to action, but then 2 weeks ago I stumbled across a short article in the Evening Standard mentioning that teachers were protesting very narrow exam frameworks, which did not really allow pupils to learn critical skills. With CDI’s educational inspiration Paulo Freire in the back of my mind I had my call for these 80 aspiring leaders in schools: to go beyond narrow learning targets and to enable young people to think critically and to set and achieve their own ambitions.

We will be launching in Central Foundation Girls’ School in 3 weeks time and I’m very excited to see if CDI Europe and Apps for Good can help to make this call a reality … more about this in our next blog post. (You can already register online via our Eventbrite page)

The full presentation can be viewed here:

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