David Weston describes a Teach Meet Collaborate event held at Canon’s High School. This is one of the articles in the TDT October Newsletter (sign up here).

I’ve often said that a danger in the traditional Teach Meet format is that you end up with the start of lots of great ideas but end up implementing none of them effectively.  Keven Bartle (@kevbartle) and Helene Galdin-O’Shea (@hgaldinoshea) from Canon’s High School and Park High School tackled this problem with the creation of a fantastic new event: Teach Meet Collaborate.

The event, held at Cannon’s on Wednesday 25th September, 2013 drew a large crowd of teachers both from the host school and from many neighbouring establishments and speakers came from as far afield as Birmingham. The concept was simple: present great ideas (in the usual Teach Meet format) but invite further collaboration in each to create cross-school, collaborative action research projects. Keven and Helene cleverly interlaced these invitations with more traditional presentations that highlighted previous research and collaborative work so that all the participants were exposed to successful projects as well as drawn in to new ones.

I was invited to give a ‘keynote’ presentation on effective collaboration and evaluation (a departure from the usual format) which I hoped helped to galvanise people to clarify concepts in to some powerful enquiry. You can see my presentation here:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/lKAQj11cRlw&w=450]

Huge thanks to all of the presenters and attendees who, between them, exemplified everything that you would want from successful practitioner research and professional development. It was an honour to take part and I hope that Keven and Helene have started a big new trend.

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