[MUSIC] Hello. Welcome back to course eight, Developing Relationships. And this is week three, where we're going to be looking at working with your colleagues and school leaders. And in the first lecture, I want to look for a little bit of time, at school effectiveness and school improvement. What we can see from this quote by Smink, is that there is a connection between school effectiveness and school improvement. And if you read the last line both approaches need the other to successfully modernize the system. School effectiveness is concerned with results. We measure how well the school is going. School improvement on the other hand, is looking at the processes and the practices that we can change within the school that might actually prove the schools effectiveness. So if we look, first of all, with it suggested there's a number of different levels of effectiveness that we could talk about and as you can see on this slide, we can talk about classroom effectiveness and we can talk about school effectiveness. And that's the difference between focusing on particular classrooms and focusing on student achievement through improving our teaching. And school effectiveness which is establishing a variety of activates and processes at the school level that actually impact student learning. And then, we can look at school improvement. And, we've suggested here that school improvement happens within the school, and with an education authority. So, you might have the school system say, how do we improve effectiveness right across the school system? And, school reform. It's a larger structural change that systems go about, looking at trying to change the whole system in some way or other. Now where did school effectiveness start? Well we could argue that school effectiveness started back in the sixties. As a reaction to this particular quote by Coleman. And I'll give you a second or two to read the quote. [MUSIC] What Coleman is arguing here is that schools didn't really influence a students achievement beyond their own family and community context. In other words, schools didn't make much of a difference. Now that's a pretty devastating statement. Because we would always like to argue that schools do make a difference. And what the school effectiveness research was trying to do was to demonstrate that schools in fact did make a difference. That Coleman was operating in America. And at the same time, Rutter and his colleagues were involved in similar sorts of research in the United Kingdom. And you can see here the sorts of questions that they were asking, and there were similar sorts of questions. That is, does a child's experience at school have any impact on them? Does it matter? Are schools aside or does schools that differ. And then we started to look at what are the features of school that actually make a difference, that improve the student's opportunity to learn. Here's a definition that I wrote 20 years ago. Again, spend a couple of seconds and look at the definition. [MUSIC] What I'm suggesting here is that for a school to be effective it needs to have a high quality program. What I've also argued is that program needs to not only look at what the system wants, so the things that are tested by standardized tests, but also needs to include locally identified goals. The things that the local community wants for their students. They don't like the argument that in fact, all students within the school, it doesn't matter what your family or social background is, need to experience improvement. Across the school years but also lead to experience success at the end. And we do this by measuring things within the school but also externally. So if we're going to look at school effectiveness being about the program that is being offered by the school. We didn't need to ask ourselves the question what should our program be. In this particular quote by McGaw and his colleagues from Australia, where they are undertaking a national school effectiveness project, was that school effectiveness had to be about a great deal more than simply maximizing academic achievement. So if we're looking at the program a school offers, yes, it does need to include student achievement, but it also needs to include other things, such as developing life skills, looking at self esteem, looking at thinking. Looking at learning how to learn, and so on. So the communities in Australia said that an effective school has to offer a broad ranging program. So then, we can ask ourselves the question. What is an effective school? And I want you to spend a few minutes thinking about this. And perhaps this is something you can discuss on the discussion forum at a later stage. So what criteria would you use to judge whether a school was effective or not? Is it achievement? Is it relationships? Is it something else. The second question. What are five characteristics that you would identify, that an effective school would have that a less effective school wouldn't have? Does it have good policies? Does it have good leadership? Does it have good teachers? What are the other things that you can think about? Which two of these do you think are most important? So perhaps at this stage you can just think about it, and then later on you can discuss it with your colleagues on the discussion forum. So what's been said in the past? Well, what we can argue is that effective schools have quite a range of characteristics. And you have some on this slide that are identified as being characteristics associated with effective schools. And this is internationally. So right across the world, schools that are effective will have most of these things that are listed here operating at a fairly high level. So things like professional leadership, where the leaders work with the teachers, encourage the teachers, make sure that all the systems are in place, and that the school is operating well. It's a focus, a very strong focus, on teaching and learning, because we know that, in fact, the most effective schools are the ones that have many effective classrooms. Learning and student learning, which is the thing that's measured, happens in classrooms. So the interaction between teachers and students is very, very important to school effectiveness. We need to have purpose for teaching. In other words, we need to make sure that we are very strongly focused on the things that will make a difference in terms of student learning. It needs to be a shared vision. Everybody in the school needs to understand what we're trying to do, and how we're trying to do it. We need to have high expectations. We need to believe that every single student that enters our school has the ability to be able to learn, and to learn well. What we need to do as teachers is to find out, what do we need to do that makes this happen? There needs to be accountability. We need to make sure that we're concerned about our outcomes. We need to take responsibility for how well our students do. Accountability could be something that is done to the school. Accountability is something that governments do. They measure how well a school is doing. But internally, it's responsibility. I need to take responsibility for my students and how well I do. Other people can measure it but it happens because of what I do. There needs to be a safe and secure environment. Students need to know that they're respected, that they're liked, that they're well looked after and then they can perform in a much better way and finally, there needs to be professional learning communities. Teachers need to work together to ensure that the school is in the best possible place to do things well. Doctor Fawazz is going to talk about this a little bit later in our lecture series. What we need to recognize, as we mentioned before this week is that school effectiveness and school improvement are actually connected. And it's only when the research about school effectiveness and the research about school improvement are merged that we can actually establish processes that will enable schools to get better. Stoll and Fink identified two different ways in which we could measure how well a school is doing. The first way is on the effectiveness level. So a school could be effective or not effective. And the second way relates to improvement. So a school could be improving or it's getting worse over time. And as you can see from this slide, they've identified five different types of schools, moving, cruising, strolling, struggling and sinking. A moving school, is one that is both effective, but it's also getting better at what it does. A cruising school might be effective at the moment. In other words, it measures very well but it's actually declining. It's not doing anything to get better and over time it will get worse. A strolling school is in the middle somewhere. It's doing okay but it's not necessarily going any way. The struggling school is one that's not very effective at the moment. It's results might not be very good, but it's doing everything it can to get better. And a sinking school is one that's not very effective at the moment and it's actually getting worse over time. So let me ask you a question? What school is your school? Are you moving, cruising, strolling, struggling, or sinking? If I asked you to put a cross in the square where you think your school is now, where would you put the cross? It's quite difficult, isn't it. Because when we ask the question about, what school is your school? It's hard to make an overall judgement of saying well my school is moving. Because it might be moving in some things but not in others. So we can ask more specific questions. And what this slide shows you now are a number of different things that all schools have to do. Some of them are associated with achievements. Some of them are associated with relationships. Some of them are associated with well being. Some of them are associated with curriculum. And what we could now do is say, okay, where is your school for each of these characteristics? Are you moving, cruising, strolling, struggling or seeking when it comes to student achievement? Where are you in terms of staff student relationships? Now the reason I'm showing you this is so it gives you the opportunity to open professional conversations in your school. What you could do if you had all your teachers answer these questions, would be to then have a conversation about for instance. All of the issues associated with achievement. So you might look at student achievement. You might look at literacy attainment. You might look at numeracy. You might look at a balanced curriculum. And have a conversation about these things. Where are we as a school? Having identified that, the next question of course would be,how do we get better. What we can say about getting better is that there is no special recipe that will allow us to do that. We don't go down to the educational supermarket and we look for the box that says educational improvement. And we take it back to our school, and we sprinkle it over our school and add water and stir, and it really gets better. That would be a recipe approach. But what we now know, and the McGaw, Banks, and Piper quote here says it, schooling is too complex a business for a recipe. In order to improve your school, we have to look at the factors within your school. We can't assume that all schools are the same, they are very very different things. And because of that, we have to use a particular formula that works in this school. And the best people to know the formula that is required are the teachers and the administrators of that school. So, when we're thinking about school effectiveness and school improvement, we can make a few generalizations. School effectiveness can be improved if we improve the quality of our teaching and learning. And if we really wanna focus on that, we need to focus on what goes on in the classroom. So teachers have a very important role in terms of identifying how well their school will go. We need to focus on learning. And that's a broad range of learning. But we also need to focus on the outcomes, as well. We need to make sure that what we do in terms of teachers, responds to the way in which our students are learning. And we need to focus on working together as teachers, if we want to make the school improve. Now in the next session, Dr. Fawazz is gonna be talking about teacher unions and teacher associations as one way in which teachers can be involved to support the improvement process. Thank you for that. We'll see you in the next session. [MUSIC]
