April update

Things seem to be moving pretty quickly now. Had a Leaders teleconference yesterday where we firmed up a few things:

• next Leaders teleconference May 10th at 4:30 - we will be communicating by email in the meantime
• Leaders workshop May 31-June 1 (meet on Thursday in Brisbane at time and venue tbc; all day with Neva at OLI on Friday)
• training sessions: TNQT June 25-27; WBIT July 4-6; SQIT July 9-11 - we talked about the value of the other Leaders coming to Cairns to assist/observe/evaluate the training
• videos - a good cross-section of sessions available (I do still need to line something up in Cairns - maybe Mary?)

AVETRA conference

The AVETRA conference was great - international perspectives on VET, some interesting presentations on professional development, organisational capability, VET history, amongst other things - and being in fascinating Footscray. Vietnamese restaurants, Filipino grocery stores, African cafes - so many different languages, so many people, Africans nearly 7 feet tall, Vietnamese, Chinese, Italian, people milling around shopping, eating, talking.

The presentation at the conference went well - only about 6 people there but they were interested. I have posted the paper on the wiki.

Met Susanne from CIT who gave a presentation on their comprehensive evaluation of a mentoring program they ran there. She kindly offered to send me their documentation and bits and pieces - will be very useful.

the importance of learning slowly

This link courtesy of Stephen Downes' OLDaily: http://brandon-hall.com/garywoodill/?p=14 - it's a review of a book by a German psychiatrist about how "the brain is based on vector algebra rather than numerical computations". I'm not sure my own neural pathways are up to understanding it fully but I like the sound of it. Worth a read.

March workshop

We had a very productive couple of days in Brisbane at the end of last month. I'll post the minutes in the wiki (which I'm going to tidy up when I get a chance). The main outcomes:

• a clearer shared understanding of our aims - these are outlined in some powerpoint slides Peter put together with help from Carmen and Deb - which I will also post on the wiki
• agreement to build a more explicit focus on coaching and mentoring
• some valuable training from Neva in coaching and mentoring skills
• plans for consolidation across the 3 institutes before further expansion
• dates for training sessions in each of the 3 institutes, with a target of 10 additional TROPIC Mentors in each (June 25-27 in Cairns; July 4-6 in Hervey Bay -tbc- and July 9-11 in Toowoomba)
• plans for a 'teaching and learning conference' in October
• TROPIC Leaders to teleconference fortnightly - Neva will join us to provide high level coaching to us, and the 5 of us will meet face-to-face in late May to plan the training sessions

Tasmania sent me their amended versions of the observation sheets and microskills which I will also post on the wiki and ask members to comment by May 18.

This week I am going to the AVETRA conference in Melbourne where I will give a presentation about the TROPIC evaluation.