Chairman’s Chatter – May 2014
Chairman’s Chatter is published in the quarterly ART WORKS magazine for ART Members and ITTS Teachers.
ART Conference thanks
Thank you to all those who attended, presented and helped out at the ART Conference in March. It was a really good day, a great opportunity to meet teachers from around the country and the feedback has been very positive. Remember to put 7th March 2015 in your diary for next year’s Conference in Birmingham!
Working with the Central Council
The Central Council has arranged several Regional Seminars following up on the recommendations of the Change Ringing for the Future Conference held in Wellesbourne in November 2011. ART has been fully represented at these seminars and has been given plenty of time in the schedule to get the message over to audiences which in some cases were initially sceptical. Several ITTS Module 1 Day Courses have been requested following the seminars. So far the seminars have been held in Nantwich, Nottingham, York and Winchester, with another two planned – Bristol 17th May and Exeter 19th July. Please do come along if you are nearby.
Recruitment
The newly released recruitment video made for ART by Neil Ephgrave is now on YouTube for all to see. It is a short film designed to spark the imagination of members of the public who might like to take up ringing.
The film has also been released on DVD for people who would like to buy a copy for recruitment purposes locally. You can obtain a copy from the ART Shop.
Teaching Toolboxes
Are you using the Teaching Toolboxes? They provide ready-made course materials for you to use with your ringers. Each one has guidance notes to assist with things like identifying suitable ringers and other planning matters.
For each one there is a pack of student resources and a pack of teacher resources. Each toolkit also has a power point presentation for you to use to cover the theory of each topic. There are seven toolboxes Foundation Skill/Plain Hunt/Plain Bob Doubles/Grandsire Doubles/Plain Bob Minor/Stedman Doubles/Much more Minor.
They are freely available to ART Members via the Association of Ringing Teachers section of the Moodle website and to all those who have attended a Module 2 Day Course in the ITTS Module 2 section on Moodle. For all others they can be purchased on a CD
Merchandising Manager
Tony Goodman is our new merchandising manager and he is the one who will send you out the various CDs and DVDs we produce and also the Learning the Ropes Personal Progress Logbooks. He is the face behind the online ‘shop’. We are very grateful to Tony for all the hard work he has put in to get the scheme up and running.
How are you progressing with your Module 2?
Have you completed your Module 2 online theory test and assessed lesson?
We need 79 Teachers to complete by the end of November to hit our target!
The Ringing Foundation have set us targets as conditions of their financial support. We are doing well on the targets for the number of Day Courses we have run, the number of Teachers accredited at Module 1 and for new ringers we are excelling the target by nearly three fold! This is good news, however we are behind on our Module 2 accreditations. If we do not make the target set it may very well have financial implications for our future.
So if you are part way through your accreditation process please complete the parts you have not done, get your Mentor to do your assessed teaching sessions and submit the passes to the Moodle site.
ART Charity Status
Our application to the Charities Commission to become a registered charity has taken longer than expected but following a Management Committee meeting in May we expect to achieve charity status quite quickly. Fingers crossed!
Learning the Ropes
How are your ringers getting on with their Personal Progress Logbooks?
Do they like receiving their certificates? Where do they have them presented? Do you make an occasion of it for them?
Don’t forget you can put those you have recently taught onto the Learning the Ropes scheme as long as they can pass the Level 2 handling assessment.
It is good to see ringers passing through the system and becoming proficient at with their ringing. Once you have got a ringer to Level 5 you will have a fully-fledged ringer who can go out into the broader ringing world and progress even further.
Pip Penney