Driving Professionalism: SSESD Graduate Jenny Willis
Read Jenny Willis' story. Jenny is an Advanced Quality Practitioner at Heart of Worcestershire College and graduated from ETF’s first full cohort on the Specialist Status Education for Sustainable Development programme, after the initial pilot year.
Jenny is also an Advanced Teacher Status (ATS) graduate, and it was that positive prior experience of achieving a professional status that led to engagement and enrolment on the SSESD. Jenny told us:
‘I had previously done my Advanced Teacher Status (ATS) with ETF [Education Training Foundation], so I felt like I had a good idea of how ETF would run an accreditation like this. So, although it was relatively new, it wasn’t as intimidating as something completely unknown, having done ATS before.
‘Sustainability is something that I’ve been passionate about for a long time and in my current role as an Advanced Practitioner, part of that includes helping other people to look at sustainability and how they include and embed that Professional Standard, and how we do that as a college.’
A flexible course structure
Reflecting on the course structure, Jenny shared:
‘We had to self-assess against a set of criteria and then build a portfolio that shows how we’re working to address the spiky profile that the self-assessment posed. Also, we had to complete a project. You could make the project something entirely new or something you’ve been working on for a while. I chose to focus on something I had been doing for a while, but what it did for me was really make me look at that afresh, with a critical analytical mindset rather than just on doing things the way we’ve always done them because that’s the way we’ve always done them. It gave me that impetus to really dig into what is working and what could be better.’
Championing ESD
Jenny’s project focused on the creation of new roles within the organisation, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) Champions: ‘What I was aiming to do was to recruit a Champion from each vocational or academic department within the college and create a sense of community where we could share ideas, resources and good practice. Then the Champions could go back to their teams in their vocational or academic areas and disseminate that practice.
‘I then did some work putting together a survey, which I then shared with the existing members of the ESD Champions team, really digging into what they wanted from that group and how they would like it to work. How can we make this feel like more of a community? Based on the feedback from that survey, we managed to dig out a slot on a professional development day where we could get the group together to share ideas and challenges. And we also opened that up to people who were interested in joining the Champions team, and we had a couple of new people join from departments where we didn’t have a Champion. So that was really beneficial and it really refreshed that ESD Champions team and gave us more of a sense of purpose and more of a sense of community.
‘In terms of my practice, one of the criteria that I’d self-assessed not quite as strong as some of the others on was about drawing on feedback. That prompted me to conduct this survey to really think about the responses and then change what I was doing with the Champions.
Future Plans
Moving forward, I will repeat that survey process again, periodically. There’s no point keeping going with something if people aren’t getting what they need from it. That’s changed my practice: rather than just doing what I think is right, I’m listening to people to find out what they need to move forward.’