The minister's reply

 Last month, before the Scottish Learning Festival took place (23-24 September), attendees were invited to submit questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Education for her to answer.  I submitted the question below but only a few were answered directly by the minister at the conference. The remainder were subsequently dealt with by email.  The minister’s answer is below. Only a relatively short part of it refers directly to information literacy and only to the schools sector. The wider agenda is ignored and there is no answer to the question - what strategic initiatives does she think the Scottish Government can engage in to promote it? I shall be enquiring further and also refer her to the US President’s greater commitment to information literacy. (See URL http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/documents/2009literacy_prc_rel.pdf  

 Question to Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Education in the Scottish Government

 

My question to the minister is:

 The important skills of critical literacy / information literacy has been highlighted within the Curriculum for Excellence: Literacy across learning (finding and using information, understanding, analysing and evaluating) levels Early to Fourth. Does the minister agree that  information literacy  skills are essential in  independent learning at all educational levels, career choice and long term management, employability training, workplace decision making and lifelong learning and what strategic initiatives does she think the Scottish Government can engage in to promote it?

Answer from the minister

Thank you for submitting a question, please see below the response from the Education Secretary,

 The Scottish Government is determined to help our children and young people develop the literacy skills they will need to thrive in the 21st century. Skills in literacy unlock access to the wider curriculum, increase opportunities for the individual in all aspects of life and lay the foundations for lifelong learning and work. Curriculum for Excellence, the Scottish Government's major programme of reform for the education sector, emphasises the importance of literacy skills and makes clear that all teachers have responsibility to promote their development.

The Curriculum for Excellence principles and practice paper for literacy sets out the outcomes we want our young people to achieve as they progress through their education.  Young people will need to know about the fundamentals of reading and writing but also how these skills can be applied critically, across different media, to analyse and evaluate information and to work out what trust they may place in it and identify when and how people are aiming to persuade or influence them.

As our children and young people progress through learning they should develop increasing independence in applying these skills, and the ability to use them across a widening range of contexts in both learning and life. Glow, the world’s first national schools Intranet, provides learners with  a range of tools and rich learning materials which can be accessed at any time and anywhere there is an internet connection, offering a safe, accessible online environment which supports independent learning.

Scottish Learning Festival 2009

Last week John and I attended the 2009 Scottish Learning Festival which mainly attracts the school sector in Scotland with an occasional scattering of FE and HE. However this year the main focus was the Curriculum for Excellence and I'm not sure if the later sectors of education were present or not as you never get see a list of who is attending. In addition the sessions I attended were primarily focused on literacy across learning and the primary and early years sector as this is the area I am about to start some work on for the Curriculum for Excellence Literacy Team - ‘Real and Relevant – Information and Critical Literacy Skills for the 21st Century Learner’ (Early and First Level)

I attended the following sessions and keynote over the two days and will simply provide a link to the programme just now but will do some postings from my notes later:

• Improving Scottish Education 2: Pre-school to Early Primary - Kate F Cherry, HMIE


• Achieving a Smarter Scotland: Transforming our Education System to Deliver the Best Outcomes for Every Child and Young Person - Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, Fiona Hyslop MSP, Scottish Government

The keynote speeches including the Cabinet Secretary's were videod and are online for viewing / listening to.

• Engaging with Curriculum for Excellence - Small Steps to Success in Primary Schools - Susan Quinn, Educational Institute of Scotland


• Interactive Approaches to Literacy Learning and Teaching - East Dunbartonshire Intervention Team


• A Single Curriculum 0-18: The Same Quality Approach - Keynote Speaker: Professor Ferre Laevers, Director of the Research Centre for Experiential Education, University of Leuven


• Literacy across Learning in the Primary School: The Experiences and Outcomes in Practice 


• Early Years - Making Connections across the National Landscape - Jean Carwood-Edwards, Early Years Team Leader, LTS
  Jane Stirling, Early Years Development Officer, LTS

The work I saw taking place in early years and primary schools was truly inspirational and I will try to take on board / incorporate what I saw into the work I'm about to embark on.

Like most conferences there were sessions that I would loved to have been able to attend but you can't be in two places at the one time. Sessions like:

• Largs Academy Virtual School Library - Theresa  Newbury the  Librarian is doing some wonderful engaging and interactive work and is included as an exemplar for the National Information Literacy Framework (Scotland)


•  Curriculum for Excellence Outdoors in Primary Schools


• Curriculum for Excellence – Making the Change with Critical Skills


• Improving Learning – Improving Literacy

Scottish Learning Festival

Included in the the sesions I attended was the keynote speech by Fiona Hyslop MSP Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning in which she outlined the central role of learning in supporting the Scottish Government’s strategic objectives. Of particular interest was that of a mention of Information Literacy skills and Dundee Librarians creating a community of Information Literacy skills in her speach in reference to examples of joined up working and GLOW.

She spoke quite a bit about GLOW (a national digital network for Scottish Schools) and referred to it as a truely innovative service on a national basis, recognised by George Lucas who was calling on US Congress to do the same. (Laurie O'Donnell, director of learning and technology at Learning and Teaching Scotland, was named as one of the George Lucas Educational Foundation's "global six". Each year, the film-maker's foundation honours six educationalists who it believes are "reshaping education". O'Donnell was honoured for his use of information technology.)

With reference to the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) she said it was skills for learning, skills for life, beyond curricular into life and that there was still much to do: assessments; skills development; professional development for teachers.

In the afternoon I attended a thought provoking session by Ruth Sutton entitled "It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it…that’s what gets results" she talked about 'not the what but the how of teaching' and that there was 'not enough focus on the how' and that there was an 'enourmous gap between vision and reality'. She also talked about initiatives and spining or weaving plates and that from a personal perspective 'nothing that we identify as best practice is entirely new'.

With reference to research and practitioners - she talked about 'how do we get the water to the end of the furrow' which I though was a good analogy for getting research out into practice something which the library and information profession research community has looked at. On Assessments - Assesment for Learning (AfL) was more like Assessment for Teachers however teachers that support Assessment for Learning would not go back. Also there needed to be a move from 'plan for coverage to planning for learning'.

She talked a little about Limbic Learning (a new term for me) which is all about using the part of the brain which deals with emotion, experiences and habits - helps the telling into habits from knowing into doing. According to Sutton Limbic Learning is the key to challenge traditional approach to teachers' professional development. Returning to the how not the what she said that Curriculum for Excellence needs to be defined as the how not the what.

The afternoon's keynote Reforming the High School Curriculum: Tools for Raising Quality of Learning and Improving Equity, Richard Teese, Professor of Post Compulsory Education Training and Director of the Centre for Post Compulsory Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Melbourne. He sees CfE as far sighted and ambitious and that it will tax Scottish schools on two major fronts: how to raise the quality of learning of many students and how to ensure that all young people build well on a succesful experience of school. He says progress on both these fronts will require strong incentives. His keynote included identifying some of the key challenges for Scotland in the context of CfE.

My final session of the day was Real and Relevant - Information Literacy Skills for the 21st century Learner Louise Ballantyne, Development Officer, Literacy, Learning and Teaching Scotland. According to her biography 'Louise has a broad experience of teaching at different stages throughout the primary school. Most recently at LTS she has played a key role in the writing of Literacy and English outcomes for CfE, and has engaged with authorities across Scotland as to how to take the framework forward.' I was particulalry interested in hearing what Louise had to say about information literacy as the Seminar Description refered to 'the Curriculum for Excellence experiences and outcomes direct practitioners to help learners find and use information effectively, to use information ethically and with a critical eye.' Whilst what Louise was saying with reference to information literacy was not new to school librarians and those professionals involved in information literacy it was interesting and good to hear a teacher talk about information literacy. Once finished her material will I understand be available on the CfE website. I also understand that one of the school librarian GLOW mentors approached her about the material being included in GLOW. I hope to meet up with her at a later date and discuss as the seminar describes 'one of the more challenging areas of Curriculum for Excellence.' This is the part I like about attending events sharing information with other people.

Scottish Learning Festival - CfE Science and Technology

New for 2008 at the Scottish Learning Festival was Topic Surgeries which according to the programme would faciltate informal discussions with presenters lasting 12 minutes. Having identified Joyce Henderson, Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS) new Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) Technologies: The Draft Experiences as the one for me. I joined the surgery to find two teachers doing most of the talking about what they liked and didn't like about the outcomes, leaving no time for me to get a word in, in the 12 minute allocated time. I did however manage to have a quick word with Joyce and her colleague about information literacy, it's cross curricula relevance to CfE, the work of school librarians / learning resouce co-ordinators plus leave her with a copy of the national framework (Scotland).

Information I gleaned is that they (CfE) are going to be looking at skills, which will tie in nicely with the work we are doing and that following consultation / research carried out by Glasgow University (interim report is on the web) they are redoing the Science draft learning outcomes and experiences.

Using gaming to incorporate Information Literacy with Maths

Article on integrating games and Web 2.0 tools into IL instruction

"Gaming and learning: Winning information literacy" by Marsha Spiegelman and Richard Glass in C&RL News, October 2008 Vol. 69, No. 9

This ties in with my last post on using gaming and learning. This time it is with HE students in the US and of particular interest is the integration of IL within Maths and students enjoying using Maths logic to search databases. Examples of IL and Maths are thin on the ground.

Agan it is a collaborative piece of work which I think is important linking people / professions and IL / academic subjects to produce inovative learning. This is reiterated by the writers in the last sentence of the article
"Successful projects like ours require that you leave the confines of your library walls. Approach like-minded colleagues, attend cross-disciplinary conferences, and turn on your inner gamer to make productive collaboration happen."

This is something we try to do within the Scottish Information Literacy Project.

Although this is set within HE, the thrust of the concept could be equally applied within other sectors.