What are you doing on Saturday 26th September? Not got any plans? Why not organise a #PedagooLocal for your area?

Earlier this year Ciara approached us with the idea of organising a Pedagoo-style event for her local area of Perth & Kinross. This isn’t something we’ve done for a long time so we’ve resurrected the name #PedagooLocal to make it happen. The idea is that teachers can organise a small-scale Pedagoo style-event for their local area with whatever support from Pedagoo that we can muster up. So, #PedagooPerth is on, and a few others have expressed an interest in organising their own #PedagooLocal event…such as #PedagooFife.

Ciara and her colleagues in Perth have opted to hold their event on Saturday 26th September, but here’s an idea. How about we try and have lots of #PedagooLocal events all over the country on the same date? I’ve floated this idea with the #PedagooFife team and they’re up for it – so the big question is, are you?

How do you organise a #PedagooLocal event?

First of all, you need to check out the small list of conditions we’ve come with for using the name and ensure that you’re happy that your event will work within these. This just involves ensuring that your event:

• is free to the teachers attending.
• takes a longer format approach to sharing (i.e. primarily 30/40 minute Learning Conversations/Workshops as opposed to all 7/2 minute presentations – we’ve got nothing against TeachMeets, we’re just trying to add a bit of diversity to the mix).
• is open to teachers from anywhere, even if primarily aimed at one particular area/local authority.

But what will organising the event actually involve? Firstly, we’re more than happy to sort out stuff like a logo, a webpage and the signup forms as on the #PedagooPerth page.  You can do this stuff yourself if you want, but we’re happy to help with this. You will obviously also need to:

• Find a venue in your local area that you can have for free. It’ll need to have enough spaces for folk to break up into smaller groups for the learning conversations. Don’t worry too much about A/V facilities, in my opinion some of the best learning conversations occur when there are no A/V facilities and folk are forced to just sit round in a circle and talk to each other. Good places are community centres, libraries or even schools. If you can’t have the space for free you could approach a sponsor (which could even be your Local Authority) to pay for the venue and we’ll pop their logo onto the logo for the event.
• It’s great if you can have some sort of catering, but you don’t have to have it. As you can see from the Perth event they’re going for a half-day format so they don’t even need to think about lunch.
• You’ll need to promote the event in your local area. We’ll do shout outs from the Pedagoo social media accounts, but nothing is more effective than directly contacting folk. You’ll need to encourage some teachers you know to lead learning conversations and you’ll need email all the teachers in your local area to let them know about the event. Your Local Authority might be able to help out with this.
• Once everyone is signed up, you’ll need to prepare the learning conversations. This is the tricky bit, but it’s normally fine for teachers who tend to enjoy organising stuff like this.
• You’ll need to email everyone in advance of the day to let them know the plans for the day. You’ll also need some way to let folk know which learning conversations they’re in and when.
• On the day itself, you’ll need to welcome everyone, explain the format, get it going, then relax and enjoy.

See, it’s not so hard. How cool would it be if we had #PedagooLocal events all over the place on the same day…we’d break the internet! If you’re up for #PedagooLocal TakeOver please get in touch using the form on this page: pedagoo.org/local/takeover

EDIT

There’s been a fantastic response to this idea already! I’ve started tracking the possible events on this page: pedagoo.org/local/takeover