The purpose of Ginnis Training ...
is to help schools and education leaders to translate insightful, modern ideas about teaching and learning into effective practice.
The emphasis of Ginnis Training ...
is primarily on encouraging teaching methodologies that motivate, that result in deep learning, that meet students’ varied needs, that deliver good test and exam results and that additionally give students the wherewithal to become skilfully independent, mutual, creative and responsible.
is secondarily on helping school and Local Authority senior personnel to provide the leadership qualities, development opportunities and management strategies needed to take effective teaching and learning forward.
The skills of Ginnis Training ...
are in providing training that is lively, experiential and interactive and consultancy that is attentive, pragmatic and focussed.
Our activities include ...
- leading school training days
- engaging in longer-term consultancies with individual schools and clusters
- presenting at headteacher, Local Authority and themed conferences
- providing customised courses
- contributing to Authority-wide initiatives
- devising and delivering bespoke workshops
- developmental coaching and mentoring of innovative teachers
- coaching and mentoring of school and Local Authority leaders
- facilitating strategic thinking
Big issues
Paul and Sharon are indebted to the great and free-thinking education pioneers of the last hundred years and to those current researchers and innovators, many of whom are our friends, who are doing great things despite the narrowness of present political priorities in English education. While attempting to serve the current needs of schools and their students, Paul and Sharon believe that it is important to keep asking big educational questions, discuss radical perspectives and pay heed to successful alternatives in order to ensure that future education is better than present schooling.
Most young teachers know little about the depth and range of educational thought that is their heritage. These days, the sociology, history and philosophy of education rarely feature in initial and in-service training and consequently our profession is running the risk of intellectual impoverishment.
Some of the most intelligent and thought-provoking ideas of recent generations have been kept alive by Educational Heretics Press, a small, independent, not-for-profit press run by our long-standing friends Professor Roland Meighan and Janet Meighan. Visit their website www.edheretics.gn.apc.org and view the titles.
Also visit www.21learn.org, the website of the 21st Century Learning Initiative led by John Abbott, which asks well-founded questions of the present
If you are prepared to surf the site, browse the blog and follow the links, Personalised Education Now, a group that Sharon and Paul have belonged to for many years, will take you on a fascinating and informative journey through the landscape of alternative educational thought: www.personalisededucationnow.org.uk.