Conference Agenda

Talented students succeed if they are given the training they need, and this is only possible when efficient talent management is developed in the school environment. We need to be able to build "fast lanes for fast vehicles" in schools just as we have "slower routes" for some students. This study explored the relationship between the attitudes of a group of teachers (n = 92) towards specific forms of talent promotion and the teaching practices they use in the classroom.The purpose of the research was to identify the attitudes of a group of teachers/principals towards gifted and able students and the specific forms of talent promotion at the school institution level. We examined a link established between attitudes toward the programs for talented students and the use of differentiated practices in classrooms. Teachers' attitudes toward talented students vary greatly; some refuse to identify them, while others overestimate a student who excels in a particular domain of knowledge for his general abilities. Attitudes are decisive in the development of differentiated educational practices. We consider it necessary to know the factors that influence the attitudes of teaching staff to be able to act in this sense. Some teachers' attitudes are formed more through interactions with gifted students, others through training in the field of psychopedagogy of excellence. Regardless of how teachers have developed certain attitudes towards giftedness, they must show a better understanding of the characteristics and needs of gifted and able students so that they can facilitate the identification and provision of specific forms of promotion and development of talents in schools. Teachers must feel competent in implementing these differentiated practices for gifted students, trained in giftedness issues, and supported in terms of the management of the school institution.

In the context of equalizing educational opportunities for all pupils, the concept of common or inclusive education has emerged more clearly in recent years (Kasíková & Straková et al., 2011). Schools accept all children, regardless of physical, intellectual, linguistic, economic and other conditions and prerequisites. The Ministry of Education in its Strategy of the Education Policy of the Czech Republic until 2030 + emphasizes the solution of this situation by using didactic procedures of internal differentiation in the teaching process. Therefore, the main aim of the poster is to present didactic variations of differentiation of teaching tasks with regard to their operational structure in relation to the individual needs and interests of pupils.

Czech research characterizes internal differentiation as dividing pupils in a heterogeneous classroom into smaller homogeneous groups, e.g. according to the level of reading skills (Tieso, 2003, p. 31; Najvarová 2008, p.7-21). The English equivalent is within-class (ability) grouping (Hornby & Witte, 2014, pp. 90-91). Some research studies document that students from different groups do not receive the same learning opportunities. Pupils from a stronger group learn more than pupils from a weaker group (Gamoran, 1995; Hornby, 2014; Oakes, 1986), which may be due to teachers providing different instructional stimuli to pupils (Kasíková & Straková et al, 2011). This is because pupils with better learning outcomes enrich each other, whereas pupils from weaker groups are deprived of this benefit (Dar & Resh, 1986). In international research, the assignment of differentiated tasks in lessons has been shown to serve the purpose of harnessing the potential of each pupil and improving the quality of the educational process of large heterogeneous collectives (Cox, 2008; Doubet & Hocket, 2017; Tomlinson, 2005).

Teachers can differentiate instruction in terms of content, time, methods, and organization (Kratochvílová & Havel, 2011). (Cedrychová, et al., 1992) further add that effective differentiation requires different variations of learning tasks. They should appropriately match the learner's specifics or particular groups of learners (Cedrychová, et al., 1992, p. 46). Holoušová (2002) characterizes learning tasks as a wide range of all learning creative tasks during a teaching unit.

In the Czech research field, there is an absence of research devoted to the differentiation of assignments. Therefore, the poster describes the use of pedagogical means of differentiation of the content of the curriculum, differentiation of the difficulty of the curriculum, differentiation of the scope of the curriculum and differentiation of the temporal aspect of the assigned curriculum through a learning task. The poster further analyses the differentiation of the operational, motivational and evaluative aspects of the learning task in relation to the individual needs of the learners. It analyzes the composition of the assignment differentiating the difficulty of the learning task using Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Needs (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001).

The optics of the poster's focus is the differentiation of the learning task respecting the ividual peculiarities of the pupils, in the profiling subjects, Czech language and mathematics. It analyses the learning task as an important means of differentiating the pace of learning for pupils with specific learning disabilities. Pedagogical means of differentiating the content of the curriculum for pupils of foreign origin and differentiation in terms of difficulty for pupils with mild intellectual disabilities, but also for gifted pupils. The poster highlights the advantages of natural differentiation (Roubíček, Hošpesová, et al.; 2010). The innovative natural differentiation is that all children in a heterogeneous group receive the same tasks, but the tasks have an interesting potential – they hide different levels of difficulty. This creates a stimulating environment that promotes pupils' interest and motivation in solving the learning task.

Investigating Saudi Secondary School teachers’ use of social media for continuing professional development

Research Questions:

1. To what extent and in what ways do the participants use social media to assist their CPD?

2. What differences do the participants report between the use of social media for CPD and traditional CPD?

3. What aspects of CPD do the participants find benefit most from the use of social media?

4. What do the participants identify as the advantages and disadvantages associated with the use of social media for CPD?

Introduction

In Saudi Arabia, teachers' professional development is an area that has received a lot of attention from the government because the government has invested heavily in strategies for achieving a high level of quality in the education sector (Qablan, et al., 2015; Almazroa, 2013). The new curriculum adopted in Saudi Arabia focuses on a learner-centred approach with an emphasis on the constructive learning and teaching trends that promote inquiry among the learners. However, as indicated in Almazroa and Al-Shamrani (2015), a significant proportion of Saudi teachers still base their pedagogical approaches on the traditional models that do not align to the objectives of constructive teaching and learning pedagogies (Aljaber, 2018). This issue is critical and has played a major role in reducing the applicability of educational reforms. Professional teacher development is essential in Saudi Arabia as a strategy for supporting the new curriculum and the key elements of the education system in the country.

Theoretical Framework

Social media is widely used in different fields of life, including the field of education. Therefore, the literature review intended to start in a broader context and then narrows down to find out how social media is utilized for educational purposes, especially by Saudi Secondary School teachers for CPD.

Research such as Mallia (2014) indicates that integrating social media into the course of studies can enhance their potential as learning tools (Mansour et al., 2014). The views on the educational potential and benefits of social media are not uniform. For example, in Roblyer et al., (2010) focusing on social media use in a higher education context, it was found that students were more likely to appreciate the potential of social media in learning than their teachers. In the study, they concluded that for the highest benefits to be achieved for all stakeholders, the teachers and students needed to align their attitudes towards technology use in teaching and learning. These considerations are necessary in designing and supporting teaching interventions that are effective in meeting the needs of the students (Osborne & Connelly, 2015).

The challenges to professional development are highlighted in the literature review to indicate why there is a need to identify alternative strategies such as social media that can be used to enhance professional development.

Personal and Professional learning networks
A personal learning network is a resource using social media and technology, anywhere you want to gather, connect, work together, and build contacts with peers. Worldwide, participating educators can send requests and exchange resources. It can be looked at gathering of resources (such as training materials, notes of training and experience, etc) by adults and the effective ways of using and implications (Neubauer et al., 2013).

The key aspect of the approach is that it empowers the teachers to feel in charge of their professional development. Social network sites such as ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’ have the benefit of enabling users to set up PLNs by playing a major role in enabling teachers to develop new networks that are cyber-enabled (Joosten, 2012).

Attendance at large-scale events is considered a crucial element on the way to an academic career. However, many studies point out how conferences can also be experienced as exclusive or even exclusionary events, lacking diversity because of financial, physical, social as well as health-related barriers and accessibility issues. The challenges for early career researchers to perform the ideal of visibility and extraversion are increasingly pointed out in the field of Critical Event Studies (Henderson, 2015; Walters, 2018) and in recent literature on ableism in academia (Brown, 2021) which provide in-depth and embodied insights into the stress related to cognitive and sensory overload (Farahar & Foster, 2021).

This poster contribution offers an opportunity to establish dialogue around a diversity issue which some ECRs may only encounter silently: how can large-scale conferences be reimagined as opportunities to embrace rather than mask neurodiversity? Affective academic hospitalities can be nurtured to increase the presence of safe spaces. Events are then witnessed as enabling rather than overwhelming. Initiatives such as temporary conference silent rooms have gained in importance in recent years.

My suggestion is to open a shepherd's hut as a 'conference fringe', an additional space during the first two conference days (ERC) in order to reflect collectively and visibly about the needs of neurodivergent researchers and highlight the deeply relational possibilities of embracing neurodiversity in academia. This proposal comes out of my own PhD research, during which I was given the chance to find my own conferencing language as a multisensory form of public engagement. From 2019 until 2022, I was encouraged to install a mobile shepherd’s hut at Scottish conferences to invite into informal daydreaming sessions around the wood fire stove, reconnecting to Gàidhlig traditions of storytelling. This ‘conference fringe’ allowed to reduce the sensory overwhelm experienced at academic meetings, a conference fatigue that exponentially increases with the scale of the event. It allowed to concretely see the potential of outdoor hospitality hubs as a way of connecting through introvert conviviality. There is a possibility to balance the 'visibility lottery' of academia with the need to rest and to digest. More and more people expressed support for a long-term outdoor conference hide-out, an unexpected outcome of a largely improvised tour (Hanser, 2021).

I would like to propose the use of the shepherd’s hut as an opportunity for the co-creating of hospitalities, informed by the distinct relationality of neurodiversity. This means that I would release an open invitation to ECRs across Scotland to become involved, to discuss the possible location of the shepherd’s hut hospitality hub during the conference and to develop a temporal system for participatory co-hosting (e.g. ‘hut hospitality attendances’ during coffee breaks or after keynotes).This proposal can build new connections between ECRs based on the valorisation of neurodiversity and could lead to further ECR-led experimentations with other networks across Europe. Many ideas have emerged since the start of the conference fringe tour (an example in continental Europe: www.tinycampusontour.eu). Hospitality hubs can enrich potentially anonymous conference experiences by expanding the range of designs and proposed sites for networking differently between the many delegates of a large-scale gathering.