Local authority Glow mentor

Ms Spey, Lorna’s teacher, was nominated by her local authority as an Glow mentor. She’s now involved in training teachers in her own local authority.

Becoming an Glow mentor

Ms Spey was keen to extend her skills and experience and her authority suggested she might want to attend a two-day residential course to become a Glow mentor.

This would mean more responsibility - training colleagues across the authority - and she really wanted to get involved.

On the residential course

Net conferencing was a new and exciting topic for Ms Spey - she also learned about integrating MIS data on teachers’ personal sites.

She was glad the course designers realised the challenges of fitting Glow training into existing authority training and development plans. To help this, there was a comprehensive toolkit of materials, resources and ideas.

The whole group also got clear advice and guidance on how to support each other, their schools and the teachers they would be training.

Putting the course into action

Back at her small Borders primary school, Ms Spey discovered that her authority had received technical guidance on how to implement Glow. They decided to fully involve CPD co-ordinators and quality improvement staff to help plan the training.

Some of her friends had already started using Glow to communicate - and she quickly joined the online community.

Running the first training session

Ms Spey’s first training session was a twilight session at a large secondary school. Thanks to good communication, the teachers knew why she was there and what the CPD benefit for them was - so she could concentrate on running the training session.

In the next few days she found questions waiting for her in the discussion area of the authority’s CPD interest group. There was one she couldn’t answer - so she simply sent it on to the Glow educationalist she’d met at the course.