In September, after joining another school(and accordingly another division) I chose to give myself an objective: to make surethat departmental gatherings were important, astute and esteemed. To put it plainly, Iwanted to guarantee that our Geography departmental gatherings were something other than adiscussion of administrator or a rundown of dialog focuses that, truth be told, couldhave been spread out in an email.We are sufficiently fortunate to have a timetableddepartmental meeting like clockwork and this has an immense effect. There isan hour put aside for us to cooperate, reflect as a group and have somegenuine discourse that is beyond the realm of imagination in our bustling educating days.  Whilst this is beyond the realm of imagination in all departments,this blog subtleties four thoughts on howto guarantee that any gathering you do have, anyway ordinary or long, is one ofvalue.1.Using test board assets In an ongoing departmental gathering, we watched a recorded input session about the 2018 tests from our test board. This session examined in detail the regular territories of accomplishment and entanglements for understudies. While we could have perused the analysts’ report freely, it was phenomenal to sit together and talk about what we are doing in our exercises to guarantee we’ve gained from a year ago’s tests. We responded to the inquiries together, investigated model answers and in particular, took in a great deal from one another’s knowledge.2.Educational sites With a gigantic assortment of instructive web journals being posted every week, I’m never shy of pieces to talk about with the office! My standard methodology is to pick a blog entry or article that harmonizes with our current departmental concentration and give it out to the group to peruse ahead of time. One late precedent was a blog entry on input and improving understudies’ work by the fabulous Mark Enser. Indeed, it was the chance to hear the fluctuating feelings of partners and fundamentally think about our methodology as a division that additional immense incentive to our meeting.3.TED Talks Another methodology that I’ve adored employingthis year is to share an especially intriguing, significant or thought-provokingTED Talk with the group and to examine our reactions. As a rule, wewatch the TED Talk in front of the gathering to ensure we have a lot of time todiscuss. Before instructing Development to our Year 8 Geographers for instance, wewatched the TED Talk given by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie titled ‘The risk of a singlestory’. This interesting discourse cautions about the threat of criticalmisunderstanding in the event that we show just ‘a solitary story’ or a solitary account abouta nation or gathering of individuals. Thus, we considered our forthcominglessons and what might need to change to guarantee we were not fizzling injured individual to ‘singlestoryism’.4.Test-running showing thoughts The last thought for a departmental gathering is to, as a group, become the understudies and preliminary an instructing thought that you intend to use in exercises. Prior in the year, I realized that I needed to accomplish two things in our gathering: right off the bat, I needed to acquaint the two NQTs with utilizing deduction and source examination in exercises and furthermore, I needed to break down our Year 11 mock outcomes. Thus, a thought was destined to take out two targets with one shot! We examined the false outcomes through a deduction framework that we were going to use in an approaching Year 9 exercise. The outcome? A progression of clear assignments (according to the worksheet) that every one of us needed to do so as to dissect the counterfeit outcomes AND an educated exchange about how the movement could function with our understudies. Significantly, this was well-educated in light of the fact that we’d quite recently done it ourselves.If you have some other thoughts of how to utilize departmental gatherings profitably, I’d love to hear them below!Kate Stockings is Head of Geography at The Hampstead School having finished her PGCE at the University of Cambridge 2014-2015. She is a creator for OUP and has quite recently finished her Masters in Education.Like this:Like Loading…Related