 Hi, folk! Welcome, welcome. Catherine and I are going to talk for the next 15 minutes and we're going to show you all around the Effy tapestry. What you can see in front of you right now is just a few of the communities within Effy that we've been involved in just over the past few years and that have had quite an impact on us, ourselves and our practice. One thing before I hand on over to Catherine is I just want to talk about Effy and what that means. Effy, as an acronym, means Further Education but it encompasses so much within the sector and the post compulsory sector, including colleges of course but also community learning, training and also prison education and so much more. So Catherine, would you like to kick us off? Thank you Chloe. So welcome everyone, I'm Catherine and I've been in the Further Education sector for just over 20 years now so Chloe and I are just getting together today to talk through some of the communities and we just sort of said before we hit record that a lot of these have sprung up over the last two or three years. So born out of lockdown, a lot of them and I think being online has has perpetuated that and enabled a lot more people to get together in lots of different spaces. So I'm just going to talk about a couple that have really impacted on me. The first one that you can see is called hashtag AP Connect. So obviously the hashtag on Twitter but AP Connect was a funded project by the ETF and I was part of that for four years and it became a community and the AP is advanced practitioners but it wasn't just for advanced practitioners. It was for people across the Further Education sector to come together and be a voice and to support each other, to support colleagues and to learn about advanced practice, to learn about what we all do in our own individual settings, all the many settings, some of which Chloe has already mentioned. But to share to network and to take things back to our organisation to improve the quality around teaching, learning and assessment. So that sadly came to an end when the Department of Education withdrew that funding. It was run through the Education Training Foundation, lots of acronyms and I'm being very careful here to keep them, the acronyms explained. But the AP Connect led me and some colleagues to doing something within our organisation so we've sort of picked up that baton and continued that and continuing the advanced practitioner network nationally. Another one that I am currently involved in is the LSR and you'll see there that's the Learning Skills Research Network and again that's the national body and I've just become a convener for that body. And it's working with the HE so the Higher Education sector, the Further Education sector to support research and the development of skills and learning across our sector. So that's going to be a number of national events, but it's also regionalised and local events, and we're looking at planning a conference for next year, which is exciting. Another one, just quickly, is the Thinking Cultures, again something that's sprung out of AP Connect really and is a continuation of that, which is practitioners coming together around the thinking environment, which we're going to talk a little bit more about and model some of that for you. But I'll just hand it back to Chloe. Chloe, do you want to tell us about some of the networks you are involved with? Yes, indeed. Thank you very much, Catherine. Well, where shall I start? Hmm, I think the Reading Circle. So that's the Effie Reading Circle here. And I, alongside one of my peers, what I was going to say, who isn't here today, obviously, just Catherine and I, but Kate set this up. Oh goodness me, it was April 2021. And we set it up because we just weren't reading enough. That was basically it. That was the gist. We've read enough Zog for our lifetimes. And we just wanted to read something a little bit more and engage and Catherine, you're a part of the Reading Circle as well now. And it's been going strong since April last year. And it's just been a really great opportunity to, I find it gives a bit of accountability. We read different books together over a period of three sessions, which is on each session, each meeting is like two weeks apart. And I feel like it gives a bit of accountability to one another to, like, if we didn't have it, then we might say, yeah, we'll read that book and three years later, it's still on the pile. But when we've got like friends and we've got peers that we know we're going to meet in two weeks time, we want to make sure we've at least read the introduction or listen to the TED talk. You know, sometimes that happens because life happens and that's cool too. But also importantly, I found that, I don't know whether you'd agree, Catherine, but just having a check-in, you know, having that just checking it, you know, checking each other is all right every two weeks. We always start with asking how are you and that's so important. I think that's been really impactful. So that's the reading circle. And one of the reasons why I originally set that up was because I was doing my ATS at the time, that's Advanced Teacher Status, again, Catherine was mentioning those acronyms, we've got a lot of them in FE, apologies. So that's a, and from that we actually started the advanced, the ATS staff room, and that was doing that process. We came together, there was just a few of us in that group, I think it was just about five or six of us, but that was a space for us to come together and as we were going through what was actually quite an intense and arduous process, the ATS process. And we've gone through highs and lows as a group, but it's been really important for us to be able to have that space together. And the ATS staff room is we've all come, we all still speak and chat with one another, but we've all finished that process now. So the staff room is no longer, because it's no longer needed, which is absolutely fine. Sometimes that happens with these communities. But maybe folks that are doing ATS now themselves for the, you know, the next cohort, maybe they'll set up their own ATS staff room. Oh, one more. Okay, let's go with the coaching and mentoring collective. This is a new, a new collective that has been born out of the coaching and mentoring programme that the ETF Education and Training Foundation, Catherine just mentioned. The team that developed that programme have been working on this collective, and the first session they had was like June last year, and they co-created it with folks that came. They asked us what we wanted and what we needed out of a space, which was great. And the next one is, oh, it's in my diary, I should know before we press record. I think it's in the over in the next few weeks, but they are on a vent break. So, but that is for folks who are coaches and who are mentors and just coming together to talk about any worries, any concern, any, any ideas, thoughts, just having space for them to come together as coaches and mentors themselves, which I think is really important when you're giving time to other folks when you're coaching a mentor, and it's just a little space for them themselves. So that's a new space that I'm really excited to be a part of as it blossoms. I think that's it. We've done three each there, Catherine, but you mentioned before about the thinking environment and a lot of the different communities and spaces that are on this jamboard in front of us actually use the thinking environment to lead their spaces, don't they? Absolutely. So the thinking environment, if you're not familiar with that, is a way of being, and it was founded by Nancy Klein. So if you want to read more into that and look more about the foundations of that, she's written a lot of books starting with Time to Think, and there's also a website, Time to Think, that you might want to check out. But as you've said, Chloe, already online spaces have fuelled the need for structure, really, because you're going to an online space and nobody's talking and you don't want to talk over each other and it's much more difficult to read those communication cues when you're not face to face. So the thinking environment brings about structure where thinkers are equal in a space and differences welcome. And each person in that space can do their best thinking uninterrupted. There aren't many rules, but one of the rules is that you're not interrupted, your thinking will not be interrupted. And that's wonderful because you can do your best thinking and listeners are giving you their generative attention to support your thinking. But you know you won't lose your train of thought. Nobody's trying to grab the airspace. We've all been in spaces where people grab the airspace and hang on to it and then a cat get a word in. But the thinking environment is a beautiful space where everybody's valued and everybody's voice is heard. So there's many applications of the thinking environment. Again, you can review those through the work of Nancy Klein and there's lots of things online. But Chloe and I are just going to demonstrate one of the applications now, which is a thinking environment dialogue, which allows us to have a conversation, but still allows us to do our best thinking. So we're just going to do that for you now. And I think we've got about five minutes, Chloe, to go through that. So I'll start us off. Chloe, what do you think feel or want to say about the FB tapestry? Oh, goodness. What I want to say is that you could see everything that we've got on that, you know, that jam board. And there's so many. And there's so many that have made impressions upon us over recent years. And I know that there's so many more. So if there's folks in FE watching this now, they're probably thinking, oh, this and this, this and I've been involved in this. And there's so many. And we probably don't know whether we could fit them all on there. In fact, there's so many. But they're so personal. And I found that a lot of there's so much being created and developed from the ground up by the need of practitioners. And I think it's interesting that. And I suppose it's interesting, obviously, that we're doing this for the old conference as well. I'm thinking about digital in mind in the past few years. So many more have I've been involved. I know many others have been involved in so many more since we've been doing a lot more online. And I'd love to see that carry on. I'd love to see folks still carrying on doing stuff online and not not just going back to, well, we'll have to, you know, organise hours of being on the train to go, go somewhere for an hour. It's lovely to be in a physical space with folks, of course, it's lovely to have cake and share cake with a friend. You know, just being able to sit comfortably in your own environment and just chat with one another and share with one another somewhere where you're comfortable. I mean, that's another thing if folks are, you know, on on the on computers in organisations or trying to find Wi-Fi in a community centre or a library outside or wherever they can, whether the data is actually working. Or being able to be in spaces comfortably in your own environment or an office space that you've set up and that you're comfortable in. I think there's something in that that isn't necessarily, when necessarily able to garner a nurture when you've travelled for two hours on a train and a bus and maybe a taxi as well on top of that, especially if you don't drive. So that's what I'm thinking right now. What about you, Catherine? What do you think, feel and want to say about the FV tapestry? I think, yeah, I think I agree with all that and I think what's been nice this year is that for some of those communities we have met in person and that's been amazing. But continuing online as we are now, I mean, geographically we're quite far apart. A lot of the communities that we're in span the breadth of the nation and beyond. And it's been amazing to connect with people that you would never have connected with if it wasn't for technology and the new way that we're doing things, the creative ways that we've been doing things. But the fact that we've made friends as well, we've made friendships. We've now, I mean, we had networks before but we've now got huge networks where if we've got an issue or a dilemma or something comes up, I know just the person I can contact for that and I can do that straight away. And I'll probably have an answer by the end of the day or at least a conversation like we've done today, we've jumped on a Zoom. I mean that the opportunities are endless really for what we can achieve but I think just people coming together for a shared purpose and lots of different people in different spaces. Yes we see the same familiar joyous faces in spaces but also I've been in a new space this morning and met people that I've never met before and got their perspective and got their insights. It's just such a powerful way of building those networks, building those connections, feeling that sense of belonging without leaving your dining table. I mean I still sometimes just can't quite believe the impact that it has had but particular communities have impacted on me as a practitioner, have impacted on me as a person, as a mother. All these different identities that we have, these communities, each community gives me something different for all those things. What do you think, Corrie? Oh gosh, yeah, you're hitting the nail on the head that I mentioned it before about the reading circle and I know we've got it tonight and I'm so excited to just be with people that, you know, consider you all my friends, you know. And I just think I don't know whether we would have had the reading circle, you know, a few years ago. And I'm so glad that we've got this now and that I just want to check in with everyone. And sometimes I actually have a really rubbish week and I'm like, you know what, I can't wait till the reading circle, but it's not just to offload, it's just to be around people, even if I don't say anything in that first round. It's just to be around those friendly faces. You know, and I value that so much. I'm starting to get mushy, I value you all. So I'm going to pass on over back to you, Catherine. What do you think for anyone? I think that this is, I feel this is the start. There's so many, as we showed earlier, so many communities, but you know, half of those have been developed in the last six months. I feel there's more and more to come, more things to, you know, and we said earlier, didn't we? They are just the ones that we're involved with, but there's so many, but we just have fear of missing out if we're not a part of that. But I think this is the start and I think practitioner-led communities and spaces are the future for a fee. I think it's a wrap-up, don't I? I think it's thank you for joining us. We hope you're taking away a brief overview of the many practitioner-led communities in the third education sector, some of which we've just highlighted we are part of. But there's so much more to explore. So if we think your starting point is the link there, you can see to sign up to the FE tapestry. And this is the PDF newsletter, the link's there for you, and that encompasses much of the activity in this sector. So if we look forward to carrying on the conversation. Thank you, Chloe. Thank you all.