[MUSIC] There's a wonderful cartoon, in the newspaper of the parent going up to the room and knocking on the door and saying, get up. Get up. Get up. It's time to go to school. Do I have to go to school? Do I really have to go to school? Yes, you do. You're the school principal. Well, doing school often becomes a ritual. And it's often quite difficult to bring yourself to go to school. Especially when you think of children and places where they have to walk four, five miles sometimes to get to school. But before they do that, they have to do the family chores. So doing school can become just a ritual thing, without any further deeper thought about the nature of, why I'm going there and what I'm doing there, what I'm going to learn, and what ways it's going to help me change my life. This quote from Mary Alice White, back in 1971. She talks about imagine you're on a ship and you're sailing across the sea to an unknown destination. Well, wouldn't you want to know where you were going? And she says a child only knows he or she is going to school. The chart is neither available nor understanding and very quickly the daily life on board ship becomes all important. The daily chores, the demands, the inspections, become the reality, not the voyage, or the destination. So the questions we ask, or we need to ask, where am I, we, where am I or, where are we going? And how will I, or we, get there? How will I or we know when we've arrived? How will we know when we've got to where we want to go? Well, the Organization for Economic Cooperation Development, OECD, talk about evaluating that journey, and it occurs when professionals themselves, take responsibility for the destination, and for how to get there. When the professionals themselves reflect on their own performance, and help their students to reflect on their performance, and they say the results of the evaluation inquiry show us what goes well. And where we need improvement. And also from an employer's organization, they take a great interest in what young people are learning and bringing from their schools when they apply for jobs. And they say how important it is that not only head teachers, but teachers, principals, administrators, and the different actors, young peoples and teachers are all involved in that reflective process. There's an anecdote I have been known to tell on a number of occasions in, in conferences about going to take my blood pressure. As I visited the doctor and on this slide you see a depiction of the diastolic and the systolic reading of blood pressure. Now this isn't really terribly good news. Your blood pressure should be a little lower than this. And I said to the doctor who, gave me this information. I said, well could the reading be high because I'm nervous. His response was well you don't look nervous to me. Well that's on the exterior, but he didn't see what was on the inside. What that lead me to do was to go and buy one of my blood pressure monitors so I could take my own blood pressure and this is what it looks like. There's the diastolic and there's the systolic, pattern, wave pattern, that shows over a period of a day, over a period of 24 hours, blood pressure varies considerably. It goes up and it goes down according to how we feel, what we're doing, the pressures, the expectations, how we're behaving. And that's a measure for the last thing, because very important. For evaluation of schools. So we don't come in and just have a one off look, at what's happening in the classroom and make a judgement about that. But we have to understand the long term pattern, the flow of the high points and the low points, in a school's life. In a teacher's life. And as a teacher yourself, evaluating your pupils, your students' progress, you will see high points, low points, progress, regression. It doesn't all occur in a simple, straight line. So when we evaluate ourselves, We have to think of these kind of criteria of evaluation. But it's bottom up. That's in the sense that it engages you as a teacher and your pupils or students as well. That's continuous. Now that's embedded in your daily work as a teacher, that it's engaging and involving a whole range of people. It's a moving and evolving picture, not a static photograph at a given moment in time. And it's flexible, spontaneous, and uses the relevant criteria. Remember, we must learn to measure what we value, rather than simply measuring what's easy to measure. And of course the whole process isn't of any use unless it improves learning and teaching. This jigsaw asks us to look at evidence. How do we get the evidence of the quality learning and the qualitive teaching? What kind of tools do we use? These tools may be sophisticated, or they may be very, very simple things to simply stop to ask and think. To write down so that you don't need a lot of very sophisticated resources to be able to stop, reflect, look at the data, listen to the voice, listen to stories. What stories would you tell? Others about your teaching, about learning. What stories would children tell each other? One of the things that we are very aware of in different countries of the commonwealth, is the story telling tradition. In Malaysia [UNKNOWN] talks about the storytelling tradition which has often disappeared. Because we get too concerned with the contents of data, and we forget the power of story telling, and how do we communicate, how do we tell others and how do we share ideas about what makes for good teaching and what makes for good learning. Here are some of the tools of inquiry that you may use or you may think about. Obviously attainment measures is something that everybody who's teaching uses. In other words testing what have children learned. Observation, your own observation or your colleague's observation. Questionnaires. Do you ever use questionnaires to gauge children's opinion, or to gauge teacher's opinions? Do you use the traffic lights that we've already talked about in other sessions? The spot checks again that we've used are one of the resources that you can, you can look at. Photographs, videos. We will be looking at a number of videos of classrooms and making judgements about that. But do you ever have the opportunity to video your own classrooms and share that or do indeed. Students, ever have an opportunity to use a video camera, take a photograph which can then be discussed? One of the useful instruments. Of evaluations. What's called the force field. And this simple demonstration here of the force field describes the forward movement. The things that help teaching has accelerated. What are the things that help us to get better? To move forward. And then on the other side, the brakes. One of the things that they're impeding and inhibiting us making our classrooms better. Quite useful for teachers to think and discuss together what are the accelerators in their classrooms and what are the brakes, and how do you remove the brakes? So that you can move forward more effectively. Again, something you may want to share with others who're on this course or with others in your own school. Finally, here is another form of evaluation. Which was undertaken, in this case, first of all in English schools. But we've used the same kind of technique in schools in other Commonwealth countries, such as in Ghana for example or in Singapore, in Malaysia and in Australia and New Zealand. Getting children to depict or draw pictures of what they find, what they liked, what they find more difficult in their schools. And in this case these pictures show their drawings or paintings of A head teacher. They were asked, what do you think a head teacher does. Have a look at these. The head teacher writes letters about discourse, she keeps old books, she teaches the children songs, and she talks On the telephone. I wonder what they have drawn there under the desk, or that great pile, that huge column. Is it papers? Is it all these things that the ministry or other people are asking the head teacher to do? And what about this one? That's this is true if your school head teacher does the dusting in the school. We found in many parts of Ghana, where we were working, the teachers, or head teachers, were doing a lot of those kind of daily chores. Which were often preventing them doing the more important things, perhaps, of being able to go into classrooms or have conversations with teachers as well as parents. And here's a very upbeat image from a child. Tells you something about this school, doesn't it? The head teacher comes around and says to the children, very good. How much children appreciate that their head teacher does not remain in the office, but is able to come around and see, and enjoy the quality of their work So as we said right at the very beginning, the three questions. Where am I or where are we going? How will or how will we get there? How will we know when we've arrived? Take those questions and think about them. You may want to go back again and have a look at some of those individual examples. To have a look again, at the kind of things that you might be able to do as a teacher. Look at some of the activities that follow up this presentation. And, before you take the course, you may want to think again and reflect and talk to others, whether in your own school or in forums. With teachers in other schools in other countries. Then taking the quiz when you feel confident that you are able to discriminate the answers, the right answers, from the misleading or wrong answers. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
