Author: Lynne Jones, SCILT
As part of our professional learning offer for the past few years, SCILT Professional Development Officers have facilitated a number of collaborative projects centring on aspects of practice identified by schools. Those aspects have included parental engagement, strengthening literacy skills across languages, meeting learner entitlement and inspiring interdisciplinary contexts for language learning.
Previous and current Professional Learning Partnerships (PLPs) have involved children and young people, teachers, local authority development officers together with charities, bilingual theatre companies, university students, architects, teaching artists, sports professionals and others, all to innovate and make a difference to language learning in a wide range of settings.
Partners connect to create something amazing, for example an exciting IDL programme of work, a performance, redesigned curriculum pathways, multimedia publicity campaigns, an intergenerational family learning programme. All partners commit to share the learning from the PLP to a variety of audiences. Many stories of powerful impact have already been shared. Discover more about previous PLPs on the SCILT website.
The good news is that a brand new PLP with the Maths Outreach Team at the University of Edinburgh is on the starting blocks and your school, cluster or authority could be involved.
The academics and university students of the Maths Outreach Team are keen to collaborate to explore what maths and languages have in common. Puzzles, patterns and linguistic code-cracking bring maths into play to demystify how languages work. A great way to explore the underlying structure or numerical systems of some of the world’s languages!
Intrigued?
The PLP will develop organically during the partnership process. At the moment, Maths Outreach colleagues are interested in any and all of the following:
- primary
- secondary BGE (S1-S3), perhaps involving teachers of maths, languages and English
- parental engagement
- widening participation
If one or more of those piques your interest too, you are invited to get in touch via this online form. Please note that an expression of interest at this stage is not binding.
In the coming months, SCILT and the Maths Outreach Team will offer an online information session to all primary and secondary teachers who express an interest. In this session, you will be invited to help SCILT and the Maths Outreach Team colleagues to identify a specific focus for collaboration in the PLP.
Please share this information with your wider professional networks.
Contact Lynne Jones with any queries you have about this exciting opportunity.
Credit: Photo by Karla Hernandez on Unsplash