Why: Understanding What We Need to do Differently to Motivate Students to Learn

This session will argue that while managing behaviour, raising attainment and making teachers accountable are all important factors in school improvement, it's time to go beyond these to look at what we really need to do to ensure that all students develop the four capacities of the curriculum for excellence.

Twenty years after the abolition of corporal punishment in Scotland, schools have not changed sufficiently to support all teachers to help all young people develop the capacities identified in the curriculum for excellence.

Surveys of research carried out independently in Scotland and the United States confirm that it's how individual teachers come across – who they are, what they think and what they do in their classroom that makes the biggest impact on student's belief in their ability to learn. It comes down to how effectively secondary teachers:

1. engage with students as people

2. create a community of learners in their classroom.

3. help students to be independent learners, This session will look at the implications for classroom practice and the way that teachers are supported to develop their practice.

Ian Smith has worked in Scottish education for over 30 years at school and national level at the Scottish Council for Educational Technology (SCET) and the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum (SCCC). In 1998 he founded Learning Unlimited which has been described as Scotland's most successful teacher development agency.

Ian is an accomplished speaker, workshop leader and author. In the past twelve years he has run workshops with over 40,000 of Scotland's teachers face-to-face - over half the profession.

He is the principal author of a set of training materials on Assessment for Learning which have been sold to more than half the schools in Scotland.

One in every three teachers in Scotland has a personal copy of his booklet 'Assessment for Learning : Mark Less to Achieve More'. Ian writes a monthly feature for the Times Educational Supplement in Scotland and is currently involved in developing training materials for teachers on motivation.

In recent years he has been asked to run workshops on classroom methodology in Hong Kong and in the United States. He worked in New Jersey to develop a training programme on assessment for learning which is being rolled out across the state.