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Lecture 1: What is a Good School?
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From the course by Commonwealth Education Trust
Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Introduction
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From the lesson
How Good is My Classroom?
This week is focused on the classroom and asks you to consider the question ‘How good is my classroom?’ It asks you to revisit, replay, and bring together the many ingredients that make a classroom a stimulating place for learning and an enjoyable and engaging place for teaching. We come back to the importance of assessment for learning. As Dylan Wiliam says, ‘assessment is minute by minute in the classroom’, not simply something that happens at the end of the course.
Meet the Instructors
Professor John MacBeathProfessor Emeritus
University of Cambridge, UK
[MUSIC]
What is a school?
Have a look at some of these images of schools
from Africa, Caribbean, Pacific Islands,
Australia, Singapore, Malaysia.
Schools come in all shapes and sizes and different locations.
But, they all have something, or some things in common.
Take a minute or two to just think about, despite their very different locations,
and very different forms, what do all schools have in common?
So, what do all schools have in common?
Well, they wouldn't be schools without children.
And they wouldn't be schools without teachers or adults who teach.
And they wouldn't be schools without a curriculum,
without some form of assessment.
Without some recognition of children's achievement,
perhaps certification, graduation.
And would they be schools if they weren't preparing children for life after school?
For jobs, or whatever else children may do, going on perhaps into higher education
or other avenues of adult life.
So, if we ask the question, in all of these contexts,
what makes a good school, what would be your kind of tutoring,
who would you ask to get an answer to that question?
Who knows?
Who knows best?
And how do they know, how do they form their judgements, what criteria do they
use to decide what's a good school and what's not such a good school?
And are they actually measuring in some way whether implicitly or
explicitly using some set of criteria.
If you were also to ask, who?
Who knows best?
Who would you ask to find out what makes a good school?
Would you ask teachers?
Would you ask the pupils or students themselves?
Would you ask, perhaps, parents?
Government ministers?
Inspectors?
And all of these people, when they make their judgements,
what would they be looking at?
Would you be looking at the physical environment of the school?
What the school looks like, what classrooms look like, where they're sited,
what's outside the classrooms, the playgrounds, the resources that there are?
Would you want to go a bit deeper and think about the ethos and
the values of the school?
That is if you like the climate, or the kind of culture,
which is much less easily observable, but
tells us an awful lot about the quality and the nature of the school.
Would you want to look at the quality of teaching?
Or the quality of learning?
Would you make judgments about the nature of the leadership?
Who leads?
How many people lead?
What is leadership?
How do people see it?
And what is the school's relationship with parents and with the outside world?
Take a minute or two to think about that list of things,
what your own criteria would be.
What makes a good school?
Well if you were to think of students, or pupils if you like.
What kind of judgments would they make, because after all, they spend five,
six hours a day in the school,
perhaps five days a week in some cases maybe more than five days a week.
They may spend what 200 or so days in the year?
For how many years?
Maybe ten years or more.
So shouldn't they know a little bit about what makes a good school?
And do we ever ask them?
What would be your criteria?
We might not use that kind of language.
But we might say, for example, what do you think makes a good teacher?
Well, here is an example from a school, or
a range of schools, in which we asked that question of young people.
And, here is what they came up with.
So have a look at this.
Have a look at this list.
Which of these set of criteria, in children's language,
which is so fresh and so kind of vibrant.
What kinds of things resonate with you when you look at this list of
what children say makes a good teacher?
The one that I am most fond of out of all of this
is the one that says teacher makes you feel clever.
Now there's an awful lot of research which is often called the self-fulfilling
prophecy that if we tell children they are clever,
they're much more reliable to become clever.
If we tell them they're stupid then they're very much more likely to act
in a stupid way.
So we can learn a lot from what children, even quite young children,
tell us about the nature of teaching and learning in schools.
And if you were to ask teachers themselves.
What would teachers say about what makes a good school?
What makes good teaching?
In this slide, you see some of the things, some of the questions.
About teachers making those judgments, evaluating themselves.
Who do they go to?
Who would they consult for an answer to know if their teaching is good, or
not as good?
Who did they observe, and learn from when they become teachers?
What models do they draw on, and
what criteria do teachers use to judge their own performance?
What criteria do you use when you're thinking about am I a good teacher,
could I be a better teacher?
You might want to ask the same questions students, what makes a good student?
What would be your criteria if you were to ask your class if you're to
ask your students what do you think makes a good student?
In one school we looked at, the teacher had put these things up on the wall.
On the one hand, what makes a good teacher and on the other wall,
what makes a good student.
And you can come back all the time to those criteria.
So the teacher says,
these aren't my judgments of what makes you a good student.
They're your own and therefore when we don't act as a good student,
lets go back and think about the criteria that you have come up with.
And then our head teachers and principals, how do they know?
Where do they get their insights from?
How much teaching do they actually observe?
And what criteria do they use?
To what extent do they evaluate teachers?
And for what purpose?
When we were working in Ghana over a number of years, a lot of head teachers
said, well, we just spend our time in the office doing the administration.
Looking after the books, ordering, looking after the food vendors, and so on.
Some of them never went into classrooms, but when they went in and
began to observe the classrooms they began to see where the good things were.
And also what needed to change.
So, it's very important for head teachers and
principals to be able to walk around their school.
To observe and to make judgments.
And help teachers and
students make better judgments about the quality of teaching and learning.
And then there are parents.
What do parents know?
How do they make judgments about what's a good school?
About what's good teaching, what's good learning?
What are their sources of information?
Their own children?
Do they ever visit?
Do they ever see the school?
Do they ever come in and observe?
Or is it perhaps just by rumor or gossip?
So how do we involve and think about helping parents to develop their criteria
and to think about and make judgements about what makes a good school,
what makes good teaching and learning?
And of course, there are education ministers.
They have their ideas.
But what's their source of intelligence?
Their source of knowledge about the good, the best, good schools?
What criteria do ministers use?
Ultimately it comes back to these questions for you.
Is your school a good school?
How do you know?
What's the source of your evidence?
Whose views do you think count most for you?
How could your school be better?
And the same of course of your classroom, of learning and teaching.
How could learning be better?
And how could learning and
teaching meet in a way that helps young people to be more challenging?
To be more informed.
To be more self confident and to feel clever.
It would be useful to go back and have a look at some of those slides.
In particular the one with the young pupil, what makes a good teacher.
Go and have a look at that again.
And it might be that you want to discuss that with others in a forum.
What would you say are the most important characteristics or perhaps the least
important, or which of those would really apply in your situation?
And would you ask your students that same question, what makes a good teacher?
You will find it useful and stimulating to read a bit more on the subject of
what makes a good school and what makes a good teacher.
And again having read that material it will feed into the forums and
the other kinds of discussions you may have with people either in
your own school or in other schools.
[MUSIC]
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