Tonight saw Oxfordshire’s Teach Meet Fish Bowl event…
(thanks to BrainPop for the picture)
it was a mash up of ideas involving the essence of Teach Meet and a fish-bowling technique.
Picture the scene, a solitary table with four chairs around it set up in the middle of a circle (well horse-shoe) of chairs.
There were about fifteen teachers involved in the session, two of them virtually taking part via Skype into a touch screen computer placed on a chair (a novel experience for all!).
The idea was that active participants move onto the central seats to share their ideas or question people already in the middle, when all the seats are full someone moves out again. The rest of the group are silent observers, taking the opportunity to think through the same problem or develop the same ideas whilst observing the vocalised ideas and thought processes of the central group.
The focus of this particular fish bowl was planning. The group were challenged to demonstrate the planning process and ideas they would bring to plan a new themed plan. They were presented with ‘Lyra’s Oxford’ as the first planning task and a very interesting debate started on where a teacher’s starting point should be. Lots of good ideas were shared, they came so quick and fast that the live blogging and tweeting of the session couldn’t keep up.
Lots of great ideas as well as break out discussions happening between fish bowl sessions. The discussion moved off on a tangent towards then end covered a very interesting issue of lack of continuity and conversation between primary and secondary. The fact that transition from Keystage 1 and 2 is much improved and managed but from Keystage 2 to 3 doesn’t work still. Also the fact that curriculum and creativity has spread from foundation stage through to the rest of primary but currently stops there..
I guess to get more details you will need to check out the full blog notes and ongoing discussion is based at tmfishbowl.ning.com and Twitter was used to capture the essence of the meeting using the hash tag #TMFishBowl
The session was also filmed by Leon Cych and bits of video will become available on the ning space in the short-term future.
Many thanks to BrainPop (particularly Eylan) and James Bird for making it all happen and blogging the idea HERE.
Update:
buzzinged.wordpress.com 