Phase 1: plenaries
The plenary events are all-day events. They are open to participants from all centres, with one event at each centre. One is a Saturday, one a Sunday and one a termtime weekday, in an attempt to provide the greatest spread of access to participants.The objective of the plenaries is to share practice, reflection and planning with participants across all centres to provide the maximum opportunities for peer learning and collaboration. The plenaries are an excellent chance to meet course participants from other geographical areas whose context may be similar to your own, and / or who may be thinking (for Phase 2 or 3) about a similar outcome or use for the course in their own school and which you might be able to collaborate on at distance.
The plenaries are long days and are planned carefully to include a range of interactive, mobile and dynamic activity. We intend them to be enjoyable and positive shared learning experiences for all. They will include resources not otherwise presented at the evening classes. Each plenary is titled with a famous quotation as a core theme to prompt a range of further activities around that topic. The intention is to provide an opportunity for open-ended, idealistic and visionary thinking by participants: a “think tank” for creating change in UK schools.
The anticipated attendance is a minimum of one plenary, and we encourage participants to attend all three if possible. If you are only going to attend one, try to avoid going to the one at your own centre. (And don’t be afraid! Everyone else will be going on an adventure too!)
The Plenary titles, dates and venues are as follows. The "prompting" quotations which title each plenary are designed to stimulate debate and do not necessarily represent the views held by any or all members of The Ethos Project.
| Date | Venue | Title |
| Sat 10 May | Maidenhill | “Virtue is a way of Being”: a consideration of virtues evident (and absent) in young people, the language of virtue used (and abandoned) in schools, and the risks of indoctrination versus abdication of moral responsibility by teachers. - Making character education explicit. |
| Sun 1 June | Matthew Arnold | “Character develops in the full current of human life”: a reflection on alternative schooling models, holism, extra-curricularity, life chances and life experiences, and the question of whether schools are able to develop Character at all. - Making character education opportunistic. |
| Tue 8 July | Tiffin | “Only a secular model of Character can produce a hopeful consensus”: an examination of issues of faith and values, community and different communities, and an examination of the possibility of a “shared public life” which includes a consensus on Character. - Making character education dialogic. |
Participants are welcome, as Phase 1 unfolds, to contribute to the emergent planning of these activities, and to request certain directions of kinds of material for the plenaries, or to suggest contributions they themselves can (individually, institutionally or collaboratively) make. The plenaries are designed to be more responsive to and led by emergent participant interests and requirements than the initial evening programme.
All three one-day events draw on resources available from the website of The Ethos Consortium. Guidance on which of those online resources are most relevant to the respective themes of the three plenary days (explicit, opportunistic and dialogic themes) can be found by downloading this guidance document.