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On Wednesday 19 January, education gurus Dr Jo Boaler and Cathy Williams of Stanford University will celebrate the achievements of 200 Scottish teachers, acknowledging their effort, commitment and ‘mindset’ during the pandemic.
Dr Boaler is one of the most influential educators in the world. Referenced as one of eight people “changing the face of education” by the BBC, she is the author of 18 books, including the global bestseller Limitless Mind: Learn, Lead and Live Without Barriers and is a White House presenter on women and girls. The teachers have all taken part in Mindset Teams, Winning Scotland’s professional learning programme to help education professionals develop a ‘growth mindset’ culture in their schools. The group includes cohorts of teachers from North Lanarkshire, the Northern Alliance and the South West Educational Improvement Collaborative. In addition, 71 teachers took part via the Education Scotland STEM fund programme. Helping children develop a growth mindset gives them a priceless gift – the desire to continually learn and improve throughout their lives. The catch-all term for decades of robust psychological research by Boaler’s Stanford colleague, Dr Carol Dweck, a ‘growth mindset’ enables children to:
Since schools returned in August, Winning Scotland have registered 290 teachers onto our Limitless Learning courses, in 106 nursery, primary and secondary schools across three local authorities.
Limitless Learning is a short-form, high-impact growth mindset CLPL approach, comprising 6x 60-minute online modules supported by 6x 60-minute complementary twilight sessions. Of the 290 teachers beginning their Limitless Learning journey, 205 are newly qualified and early phase teachers from Dundee and Aberdeen, with a further 85 teachers joining a numeracy focused cohort from Renfrewshire. The Dundee and Aberdeen teachers are the first to sign up for our new Limitless Learning curriculum specially designed to support teachers who have had the early stages of their career disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The launch of Planet Youth in Scotland in September 2021 was covered in the mainstream media.
STV ran this story on Friday 25th September:
Footage courtesy of STV
Laura Devlin, education correspondent at The Courier, also reported on the programme on 20th September, with an article entitled: From Reykjavik to Dundee: How local pupils are leading the way with Icelandic model of drug prevention.
View the full story here. For more information, visit our Planet Youth in Scotland webpage. Winning Scotland has formed a partnership with the University of Bristol and the University of Cardiff Public Health Intervention Responsive Studies Team (PHIRST).
Funded by the National Institute for Health Research, the partnership will underpin an evaluation of our flagship ‘Mindset Teams’ programme, and ultimately understand its long-term potential to positively impact public health and children’s education. Mindset Teams supports the development of a growth mindset culture in Scottish schools in order to improve learning resilience for health and education outcomes. The programme enables teaching practitioners and senior leaders in education to work together to develop, implement and embed a growth mindset culture in schools to address pupil learning, wellbeing and ultimately attainment and inequalities. Our earlier findings suggest that Mindset Teams positively impacts teacher perceptions and improve pupil attitudes, but the PHIRST evaluation takes a closer look at the longer term impact. Can Mindset Teams help reduce the poverty gap and improve health?
Fancy joining Planet Youth in Scotland?
We are building a small team to support our new initiative, Planet Youth in Scotland and are open to an initial conversation with anyone who feels they have the right skills, attitude and experience to add value to the project. We may seek to recruit for a number of posts at various levels. As such, as this stage we are inviting informal expressions of interest to get involved – we are more interested in people than job titles right now! In general though, we are seeking candidates with a passion for youth development, experience of partnership working and a track record of coordinating, influencing and facilitating across a range of sectors and stakeholders. In addition, some/all of the following skills and experiences are highly desirable:
Salaries will be decided based on the posts we agree/offer, but we anticipate a salary range between £30,000 and £45,000 pro rata, depending on the role. Express your interest To express your interest, email info@winningscotland.org by 31st October, enclosing a CV and a cover letter which explains why you would be a good fit for this project and the impact you believe you could have. If you would like an informal conversation about the role(s), contact zahra@winningscotland.org. We welcome interest from people seeking secondments, freelance or fixed-term contract roles. We are seeking a new project coordinator for our physical activity project, On Our Marks.
On Our Marks engages young people and their families in physical activity through school and the community. Delivered in partnership with local housing association, ng homes, the role involves supporting 4-5 schools in north Glasgow to develop and deliver the On Our Marks project. Role: Project Co-ordinator (On Our Marks) Reports to: Impact and Delivery Manager Remuneration: £25,000 pro rata Hours: 18.5 hours per week Contract role: Fixed term, October 2021 to July 2022. Contractors and freelance workers are also invited to apply Click here to download the full role description. To apply for this role, please submit your CV and a cover letter detailing why you believe you’d be the right person for this position by email to Grant Small, Impact and Delivery Manager: grant@winningscotland.org If you have any questions about this role, please contact Grant either by email or by phone on 07535 693 873. Closing date for applications is 5pm on Friday 17 September 2021. Interviews will be held on either Tuesday 28 September or Wednesday 29 September 2021. Winning Scotland are delighted to announce the appointment of Zahra Hedges as our new CEO.
Zahra will step into the role previously held by Morag Arnot, who has led Winning Scotland as our executive director since 2013. Zahra has more than 15 years’ leadership and management experience in the public, private and third sectors and we’re very excited to welcome her to the team. Most recently, Zahra was a senior policy advisor for the Scottish Government, supporting all 32 local authorities to roll out a community based mental health and wellbeing service for children, young people and families. Prior to that, Zahra worked for Community Enterprise in Scotland (CEIS), playing a key role in the latest iteration of Just Enterprise, the national programme of business support for social enterprises. Until last year she was Vice Chair of Social Enterprise Scotland and now sits on the board of SACRO as well as mentoring with Pilotlight and MCR Pathways. Winning Scotland’s Mindset Teams programme, a professional learning approach for both teachers and education leaders, has gained official accreditation from the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS).
Mindset Teams is our unique, immersive blended learning programme that supports classroom teachers and school leadership to work together in teams to create a growth mindset learning environment across subjects and throughout whole schools. In gaining the award, Mindset Teams is now:
A new professional learning course is helping teachers improve their knowledge, shift perceptions of pupils' ability and increase pupil engagement.
Developed in partnership by Winning Scotland and Renfrewshire Council, ‘Limitless Learning’ is a growth mindset professional learning programme comprised of 6x 60-minute e-modules and 6x 60-minute twilights. The objective of the approach is to provide teaching professionals with easily accessible and instantly applicable learning to support the recovery effort following school closures and restrictions. A cohort of 61 Renfrewshire teachers took part in a numeracy focused version of the course, between January and June 2021. An evaluation report demonstrated a range of positive outcomes including:
“We’d done some growth mindset work before, but this was like they’d perfected it,” said a transition teacher taking part. 42 teachers from West Dunbartonshire have started Winning Scotland’s Mindset Teams course.
They join more than 500 education professionals from across Scotland, including cohorts from Dundee, Renfrewshire, North Lanarkshire, the Northern Alliance, the South West EIC and Edinburgh Napier University. Mindset Teams is Winning Scotland’s flagship professional learning programme. It supports teaching professionals to establish a growth mindset culture in their schools. We recently published our Mindset Teams Impact Report, where participants told us:
Mindset Teams is endorsed by Education Scotland and accredited by GTCS. Participants can gain 15 accreditation points at (Masters) Level 11 from Glasgow Caledonian University. We're looking for a new CEO to lead Winning Scotland. This is a fantastic opportunity to work with us as we continue our mission to develop confidence and resilience in young people.
If you think you're up for the challenge, take a look at the job description for more details and how to apply. You can also read more from Morag about the role and her decision to step down. In January, we launched our new Limitless Learning programme in partnership with Renfrewshire Council.
In light of the ongoing disruption to education caused by the pandemic, Limitless Learning is designed to ensure every child can progress in their learning without any lasting negative effects from school closures and restrictions. The need for Limitless Learning is clear. The Scottish Government’s recent ‘equity audit’, a broad study of literature alongside a detailed survey of 54 Scottish schools, identified that:
Limitless Learning uses growth mindset principles and practice to provide teachers with access to a series of e-learning modules that offer practical learning and pedagogy to support the return to formal education. The modules are supported by a complementary series of ‘live’ virtual seminars to allow collegiate discussions between teachers, where they can share ideas and best practice, and embed learning. A group of 124 teachers have become the first in Scotland to achieve a qualification in the widely acclaimed ‘growth mindset’ approach to education.
Education professionals from schools across 19 Scottish local authorities and one university (Edinburgh Napier) completed a 12-month blended learning programme as part of our Mindset in Education programme. The teachers developed a deep understanding of how to integrate growth mindset practice into their day-to-day teaching and classroom culture. Having a growth mindset in school helps young people approach tasks with the intention to try their hardest, learn from mistakes, develop strategies to solve problems and to persevere when faced with challenges – all critical to successful learning and attainment. The education professionals gained 15 accreditation points at Masters Level 11 in ‘applied growth mindset’ from Glasgow Caledonian University. Between November 2020 and January 2021, three new ‘Mindset Teams’ cohorts were launched, all with a STEM oriented focus.
Mindset Teams is our flagship growth mindset professional learning programme, supporting 700+ teachers across Scotland. Mindset Teams invites groups of three school staff or more to form an ‘implementation team’ to apply and embed growth mindset across their learning community. Visit our Mindset page for more information. In November, we kicked off with 38 teachers and school leaders from schools across Scotland on our ‘secondary maths’ programme. This was followed in January with 33 teaching professionals joining our new primary science course, and a cohort of 63 mindset maths learners from North Lanarkshire. Our executive director Morag Arnot reflects on the challenge of rebranding during a pandemic….
In 2020, despite the global health, social and economic crisis, Winning Scotland undertook a brand refresh - new logo, new name, new narrative, new website - it was no small undertaking and I learned a lot from the process. I’ve been reflecting, as you tend to at this time of year. I was thinking about what was occupying my mind last January. We were in the midst of trying to discover more about our organisation, its perception, positioning and offering. With my background in communications and marketing, this was something which had been an ambition of mine for some time. Having undertaken research with our present customers and partners earlier in October 2019, in January 2020 Winning Scotland was just about to commission focus groups to start the process of understanding how we were perceived among audiences that didn’t know us. It was the first formal market research we had commissioned for years. Positive Coaching Scotland Plus (PCS Plus) is Winning Scotland’s national programme that uses sport and physical activity to help young people develop confidence and resilience.
PCS Plus is widely used in formal sports like football and rugby. However many young people enjoy their sport more informally, through local charities and community groups The coaches and volunteers in these settings do not have access to PCS Plus development and training. In 2019-20, we piloted PCS Plus in a range of community sport settings to test its effectiveness. The pilot was funded by the Baillie Gifford sponsorship committee |