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School improvement without expenditure: the first steps First, set up a small management group made up perhaps of the deputy head and the heads of two highly successful departments. Alternatively you might include the headteacher, the manager in charge of teaching and learning, and a singularly successful classroom teacher. If the group can be diverse so much the better. This group meets with the aim of drawing up a list of perhaps half a dozen key points which it is thought all the successful departments, or successful subjects, or successful teachers in the school share. Meetings can be informal, over coffee, down the pub even – and they should be short and to the point. More than anything they should relate to your school, its teachers, its children. The points listed should all relate to success and improvement. You should be generating statements such as, “History is particularly well taught in our school because…” When the group is happy with its shortlist, it should invite one other member of staff to join the group. This should be someone who is also successful in his/her own way within the school – someone who might easily have qualified to be in the group from the start, if it were not for the rule that there should only be three in the group. The group might thus move up to four people, or one of the originals might drop out. The group now uses the input of the new member to refine the details of what makes certain parts of the school successful. The whole purpose of the meetings is to be practical. One teacher might say, “I do think that we made a big step forward when we decided to…” and others might pick up on such a point and analyse its usefulness. The aim of the group, once it has started, is to be practical – to find ways of improving what one does in one’s own work within the school. In short it is a group which explores its own best practice, and shares it, and tries it out. What one should be hearing are statements such as, “We tried this, after you mentioned it last time, and it didn’t seem to work. What happened was…” These are thus open debates, full of self-questioning and exploration – answers are explored. What you should never hear – and what you must strive to overcome if the attitude creeps in - is “Mrs X is a superb teacher, I can see that. But of course I could never teach like that. It just isn’t me.” A statement such as that is only acceptable if the speaker uses a different approach to reach standards which are as high as those of Mrs X. Otherwise it is not acceptable. You should also never hear the comment, “I can see that can work in maths, but it wouldn’t work in history”. If there is a belief that one subject is inherently different from another, then that should be explored, and the sentence above should continue, “… so the way we will get results of the same quality is by…” The process continues. Every month or so the longest serving member of the group drops out and a new one comes in. You might keep someone within the group almost from the start so that the real aims and dynamism of the project are not lost, but gradually you work through the school moving from the more to the less successful parts of the school. Thus after a while you will have joining the group heads of department or classroom teachers whose work is not successful. But they will not feel threatened or on trial, because at least one other member of the group will have joined at that sort of level. To make this clear – you start with the most successful members of the school and gradually work down, perhaps just keeping one of the original team in order to ensure that you stay on track and that the group does not wander off into the world of “we are doing the best we can – but of course without more resources, what do you expect?” Or “with children like these, what do you expect?” The answer in both cases is that we expect improvement. Eventually the poorest, weakest parts of the school are represented on the group and for the first time ever they are examining what they are doing in the light of the activities of other parts of the school. They are doing so openly, willingly, and with a belief that matters can be changed. They make changes, and so improve. This analysis is of course the simplest of summaries – and simple summaries always invite comments to the effect that “I can see it working in some schools but it wouldn’t work here”. The reason my colleagues and I have produced so many School Improvement Reports all built around the same theme is to overcome such difficulties. Our reports represent a series of different ways of looking at the problem – and offer a way to get the groups going. From day one we made our School Improvement Reports copiable – a significant break with tradition. Because we argued that for school improvement to work all teachers should buy into the proposals, we also felt it was important that all staff should have a chance to read up on the ideas that were stimulating the debate. The reports are now available in three formats. They can be purchased as photocopiable books which come in ring binders, on CD Roms and finally as downloadable articles which can be retrieved directly from our web sites. Additionally we have introduced the School Management Newsletter, which is emailed free of charge to anyone who signs up. This covers topics relating to schooling and school improvement. It is completely free, and subscribers may unsubscribe at any time. To join simply send an email to EdNews@schools.co.uk and write the word subscribe in the subject line. |
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