Tag Archives: School improvement

Our Collective Responsibility⤴

from

In the past week I have launched a short term working group in my school looking at using a coaching model for observations. The reason for this is linked to the narrative our school leaders are building towards. A large section of our staff have undergone training on coaching and using it to coach not only pupils but others and also we continually return to the ideals of system and servant leadership.

I believe a coaching model for observations will help us alleviate the fear and anxiety often associated with observations. Tell me, how often has someone observed you, gave you direct feedback and then you went to to do absolutely nothing that would improve your teaching practice?

In many schools and in many classrooms observations have little to no impact on the experiences of young people. This is because the key player in this does not have ownership or autonomy over their development. It is easy to watch a lesson and tell the teacher your thoughts but this can lead to resentment and anger or even worse…nothing. By encouraging observers to watch everything that goes on in a lesson and then ask coaching questions during their meeting to review the lesson such as why? tell me more? what do you think? and applying 80/20 talk time principles it places ownership firmly at the door of the teacher being observed. They after all are the most important factor in this. Through coaching questions you can provide a supportive yet challenging environment which forces people to talk through what went wrong, why it went wrong and what they are going to do about it.

By doing it this way we can all help each other as both the observer and the observed can learn during both the observation and the follow up discussion. This brings me to our collective responsibility.

We all have a collective responsibility for the success of each and every pupil. We also have a collective responsibility to improve each other, help each other and support each other. I want to work in a school where every teacher has learned that if any teacher or pupils is struggling and they have information that can help, they feel a responsibility to share it. Far too often teachers are an island in their own classroom. When the door closes (or stays open) and you are in front of 30 young people it can start to feel isolating but it never should be. We all teach the same young people with the same common purpose (our Just Cause) so it is ludicrous to think that we keep things to ourselves or allow others to struggle without showing them our support.

If we think of the ideas of Servant Leadership which tie in nicely with what I am aiming for here. A Servant Leader focusses on the growth and wellbeing of everyone within their community. They also puts the needs of others first and helps people around them to perform and highly as possible. In my model for observation I discussed above perhaps the observers role is that of a Servant Leader. They are placing the needs of the observed first and are using what they see in a 50 minute lesson to help the observer identify areas for improvement and strengths, of course.

A great video to watch about Servant Leadership is this short 3 minute video where John Harbaugh, Head Coach of the Baltimore Ravens discusses how he enacts Servant Leadership. In his coaching conversations he regularly asks two questions ‘what do you think?’ and ‘what do you need?. We should be asking this of our Teachers everyday and it isn’t the sole responsibility of our school leaders but of everyone as we all have a Collective Responsibility for the learning of our young people and each other.

It is way too early to share whether on not our new model for observations will be a success but I do believe that become a Servant Leader and helping everyone learn of our Collective Responsibility we can make observations meaningful and impactful when the practice translates into helping our young people experience an excellent education.

What makes great teaching?⤴

from

Matthew

I have always been very impressed by the Sutton Trust. They are an educational think-tank or “do-tank” as they call themselves, focused on closing the attainment gap through good research. They are well known to teachers in England where schools recieve additional funding in the form of a “pupil premium” which follows learners from areas of deprivation. (Dreadful term in my view). Schools want to spend this pupil premium money wisely, and therefore the Sutton Trust’s list of different intervention programmes in schools, graded by effectiveness in raising attainment and correlated against good research, is invaluable and consequently very fully used by schools there.

They have identified a real problem; good research exists about learning in schools, but making sense of it for our own settings and circumstances is like panning for gold. It shouldn’t be like this; bodies like the Sutton Trust realise this and they commission their own research and meta-research to help sift through the swirling sands to hand us the raw nuggets. This meta-research is particularly helpful, since individual studies are often not statistically significant, or they are located so narrowly in the setting of the study that we can’t generalise the findings. A meta-study takes a larger sample of lots of the studies, and pulls out statistically significant wider trends that we can be more sure of, and therefore act-on with more confidence. One recent example of this was Professor John Hattie’s meta-study (Visible Learning study) of the effectiveness of schooling interventions such as AfL and reducing class sizes. This has been hugely influential in Scottish policy making and practice since 2009 when it was published.

http://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/

Well, all of this leads to me making a learning suggestion. The Sutton Trust have produced a really excellent meta-study in the form of “What makes great teaching?” by Coe, Aloisi, Higgins and Major. This work from October last year explores what works in learning and teaching, and what doesn’t. There are comforting messages in here for us, as much of what we do is endorsed, and of course, there are challenges for us too, as some of our frequently observed practices simply do not have a backing in meta-research. If we are serious about continuous improvement, then reports like this should be essential reading. Thankfully authoritative ones like this don’t come by all that often, so we don’t need to feel too overwhelmed. To be frank, school improvement must be underpinned by really strong shared understanding about what is most likely to work; all teachers and Quality Improvement Professionals working in schools should grab a nice hot drink and take an hour or so to enjoy this.

On a more playful note, I feel that someone should do a meta-study of “readability of useful reports”. Much useful academic research is strangled-at-birth because it is utterly unreadable and therefore lost. This one is “fairly readable” while the content is invaluable. When I get commissioned to produce the Boyle readability/usefulness scale, (please?), this will score highly but with a “mildly hard thinking but worth it” warning stamped on the cover!

Get it here for free:

http://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/What-makes-great-teaching-FINAL-4.11.14.pdf

Matthew

 

Learning Schools are still our main aim⤴

from

Matthew

Which document does the following statement come from?

How well aligned are priorities for career-long professional learning to priorities in the school improvement plan and do they lead to positive impact on outcomes for learners?

I’ll bet that those of you who aren’t professional documentation “anoraks” might suspect this to be about Professional Update or good Professional Review processes in school. The actual source is the Self Evaluation section of How Good is Our School. (Section 5.9 Anoraks!)

I draw it your attention simply because I believe that powerful Professional Learning is in fact the main route to meeting HMIE’s new raised expectations of Self Evaluation. That may seem an odd claim, but it is one endorsed by many Inspectors.

You see, schools have so many things to do and are so busy that there is a danger of important areas of development becoming systems. I have suggested in this blog that CPD had become a system and a set of requirements, Self-Evaluation can suffer the same problem; schools have become good at the processes of Self Evaluation:

  • Doing a “broad audit” to identify strengths and development needs
  • Using some “student voices” in school development
  • Talking to a wide range of stakeholdes
  • Development planning
  • etc.

These processes are done to some extent in all schools, however, HMI expect us to go deeper than this. An illustration of the kind of practices that would evidence a highly Self Evaluative school, shared by HMI in a training session which I attended, included “Action Research”. Think about this for a moment, you can run all the systems perfectly, but not be designated excellent in Self Evaluation! As ever in education, what makes excellence is cultural embedding of the principles and habits, not completion of the systems and routines alone. Action Research indicates that a school has identified challenges, and that they consider it appropriate to allocate staff time to do some deeper learning and research to improve practice. That same session saw the Inspector agree that a truly Self Evaluative school would be equally well described as a “Learning School”.

The point of Self Evaluation is to improve our schools. The point of staff learning is to improve our schools; these things are synonymous! Self Evaluation processes are essential to know yourself and to identify the areas which most need development and to identify underpinning reasons why. Learning is the process that leaves the school better able to apply new understanding and new thinking to complex challenges. School learning includes:

  • Learning what we do well and what we don’t
  • Learning what works elsewhere
  • Learning what research and theory can add to our understanding
  • Learning how to be a more flexible and exciting organisation

So a true learning organisation will have a lot of activity like:

  • Looking at learners’ needs
  • Looking at community needs and rethinking practice to address them
  • Sharing interesting practice internally
  • Looking at international practice and comparisons
  • Developing staff skills and theory
  • Running action research programmes

So in short, evaluating the gap between “what is” and “what could be”, driven by the learning and skills-development of a group of learning teachers, is exactly what a school that really understands Self Evaluation would do!

The world is increasingly complex, and having identified, for example, that you have an issue with the under-attainment of boys, you will realise that the causes of this are complex and often located in the culture of a local community as well as national trends. The danger for a school without a really strong learning disposition, is that they will look for standard good-practice from successful schools, but often find that it either doesn’t exist, or it doesn’t translate in practice to a different community. It is a real advantage to understand some theory, to have involved community stakeholders in conducting an analysis of the local challenge and to have encouraged a culture of managed experimentation. With these skills and foundations in place schools can construct their own solutions, reflect intelligently on how to respond when they need tweaking or changing, and understand better why an approach has worked.

So to embrace highly effective Self-Evaluation, embrace Professional Learning.