Reflective questions

• Professor Timperley says that different groups in a school community have different roles to play in terms of raising student achievement. In your school community spend some time examining what those different roles are and how they work together.
• How will you you using overall teacher judgment (OTJ) as part of your evidence collection?

Transcript

Professor Helen Timperley talks about the tools

This year New Zealand primary schools are utilizing national standards alongside the work they’re doing on the New Zealand curriculum. To help you gage the capabilities and needs of your school. The Ministry of education has developed a suite of self review tools; they will help you to review the implementation of the standards. You’ll be able to use the continuum on the tools to work out where your school is at; at the moment what you need to do to lift student achievement and how to get there. Tools provide a framework for developing a professional learning plan that will help you chart the way. A team led by Professor Helen Timperely from the University of Auckland develop the tools.

The people who worked on the tools were Pam O’Connell and Elaine Hines and myself, we all had different expertise to bring to it Pam knew a lot about the standards and the New Zealand curriculum because of learning media’s role in publishing their publications of those documents and Elaine Hines brought her board of trustees perspective, which was brilliant to have them working with me on this. We based the tools on the inquiry and knowledge building cycle from the best evidence synthesis I’ve got here because we’re seeing self review as a professional learning process. Traditional ideas about self review was to look at a curriculum area and maybe looking at literacy and saying ‘well have we got the right resources there, are we doing what the curriculum suggested?’ and that’s helpful but we know it’s not enough to really get the lift in student achievement we’re looking for so we bought to the self review tool the idea that self review is really about professional learning and by that I mean both leadership and teacher learning, how can we improve the outcome for students in this? And through the self review process and we know from the evidence in the professional development evidence that following around the cycle of inquiry builds the kinds of knowledge that you need to makes a difference for students so that’s why we used, brought the two together so that it was a focus on self review for professional inquiry. But the other part of it was that a lot of people have come back to me and said the inquiry cycle makes sense to them but they don’t know actually how to do it, they don’t know how to unpack it so this was a way of helping schools to unpack what each of those dimensions on the inquiry cycle actually mean so the questions in the self review tool were designed to help schools leaders and teachers unpack, well what does this really mean for us when we look at student outcomes? What does it mean for us when we’re looking at our own professional learning needs, so they were intended as guiding questions to help schools unpack that as well.

By looking at the first part of the inquiry cycle what do our students know already and what do they need to know, this is where the standards must come in because that gives an indication, their flags about, and references points about, well what would we expect at this particular part of this child schooling where would they be at? And then for teachers when we moved to the next part of the inquiry cycle teachers need to know well what they know in relation to their standards do they need to learn how to really use the standards in a formative way.

At the centre of the tools of student learning and achievement the outcomes that the communities in which students are living in and learning in value and, but different groups have different responsibilities and roles in trying to raise that achievement particularly I’d say for the students who are not doing so well that’s why we keep referring to those students throughout so, there’s been a lot of rhetoric about teachers make the difference, because we know teachers do make the difference and I don’t want to retract from that message at all but I think we’ve pushed it too hard in the way that almost where we’re expecting it to be teachers alone, and teachers alone cannot make the difference. They’ve got to have the opportunities to learn the opportunities to help their student learn in the best environment possible so this is where school leaders come in and we know from the leadership best that school leaders who promote the learning of their teachers are the most effective leaders so we had to have a different tool for leaders because they have a different kind of role and responsibility although it’s all directed to the, what I call the touch stone of student learning and achievement and the outcomes we value for students. So, and this is where Elaine was so helpful to us to bring in a perspective ‘well what can the board do to support the whole, to create the environment that leaders are learning, teachers are learning and students are learning, so it was different tools for different groups. And of course the reporting tool, initially we put the reporting tool at the end of everyone’s tool and we thought no this is what schools have to do first, this is what they’re required to do to report to their parents on the students progress and achievement so we took the reporting tool as a separate tool as a way of partly schools to get into the whole idea of reporting, but to really be able to report well you have to be able to do the other stuff well so it all does lead to the reporting some schools will start with the reporting and then probably realize that they need to know more about their students and themselves before they can really report on students progress and achievement. So they all go together.

On each of the tools, we’ve left a space for teachers and leaders and boards of trustees put the evidence that they’ve used to make the judgment. This whole issue of evidence is vexed and I think the idea of the overall teacher judgment is a strong one. We’ve moved from sort of an era where teacher judgment in a classroom was what really counted, and it does count, and it does matter but we’ve found that it’s not the whole picture because teachers inevitably we all bring our idiosyncratic views to what’s happening and so we’ve bought in the evidence of standardized tests, now almost the pendulum swung from that what really counted was the mark on the test and so in some ways we down-graded the teacher judgment and I really think we need both and that’s why I said I like the overall teacher judgment, that idea because bringing the new lots of evidence together. What the standardized tests do is bring an external reference point for the teachers so a teacher might have been teaching in a particular school for years and years and your expectations develop around that after a while. The external standardized tool say well are those expectations about right? Or do they need to be lifted? Maybe your students are doing better than you thought for the national profiles, so bringing in that mix of evidence but what the standardized school can’t do is help the teachers on a daily basis work out well what does that student really need next? What do they know now? And what do I need to teach next? Which is the powerful teaching and learning interactions, so that mix. So then we’re wanting them to bring that mix again to the self review tool which is why we’ve got that extra page there because sometimes it really sharpens up ‘oh yes we do that’ and then you think, where’s my evidence that we really do do that. And then I’ve seen groups working and saying ‘well maybe we don’t do it quite that way’. So it helps to really sharpen up what it is they’re looking for, are we all on the same page about what this means? Because there’s nothing like having to think about the evidence that supports it to work out well, are we really doing it? Are we talking about the same think even? And I think a lot of teachers have found that while they’ve been moderating, writing samples, for example, that they realize they’re talking about different things. And then there’s a bigger picture, I mean as a profession if we want to really move forward and this applies to research as much as teaching leaders is that we have to be much sharper about what evidence we’re bringing to a particular idea, if we’re going to move forward and become really a fully fledged evidence informed profession.

What I’d like the tools to be is a reference point as we’re getting into the national standards, in a way to use the national standards so that they are integrated into a self reviewed cycle. I guess I would see that the tools would be used best by someone else walking alongside a school and using them, some mainly because we don’t know what we don’t know, none of us do, this is not specific to teachers or leaders. And so I would hope the self review process will be, at first it’ll will be someone who, with leadership or management experience, or self review experience walking alongside the schools to make sure the process and the evidence is, that there’s common understandings amongst those.

If it’s for example in writing that they see that the students are not doing as well as they might, then it would be writing, someone with expertise in writing that would be walking alongside the school or going through the process. Or if it’s mathematics that someone with expertise in mathematics would walk alongside the school and I’m not talking about the half-day workshop ‘this is how you do the self review tool’ I’m talking about as you work through the process over time that school are getting the expert help that they need, because we can’t all be experts in everything. So my hope for long term is that this becomes part of a schools way of thinking and maybe they can throw away the tool that’s fine with me, but that inquiry and knowledge building cycle becomes part of how a school goes about self review.