Overview

Erika Ross looks back on the self-review tool meetings and also discusses why she thinks the self-review process is a critical part of school improvement.

Reflective question

• Erika talks about some of the key benefits around using the self-review tools from her perspective. Are any of these these the same for you? Are there others?

Transcript

Reflective comments from principal, Erika Ross

The national standards self review tool gave me a place to start with all of the leadership team at the same place and take them through the same learning about self review. It gives focus it gives purpose and it drove them to look at the need for evidence about what has happened and therefore what needs to happen next, whereas before I probably got a lot of narrative when I asked them to review programmes this review has been a lot more focused in saying let’s actually look at what’s actually happening with student achievement. So what does that mean? What does that tell us, do we need to find something else? And what are the next decisions we need to make as a result of that? And I guess having the imperative with the national standards in a funny way being quite a nice motivator.

I think they bought us together in terms of our understanding, all of us understanding, all of us understanding what self review process is all about. I think I probably had 2 of that team quite strong in that understanding, another two of that team sort of an understanding about what self review was and somebody who’s quite new to the process. So in one really succinct process we’ve got everybody on the same page around self review if they take those discussions down into their teams, their teams are starting to understand the importance of what that self review process is so when they’re participating or being asked for information by other people who are collecting evidence for the particular programme they understand the importance of that evidence that drives what we do next year.

If you think that they’re there are we in the developing column or are we in the integrated column.

It will strengthen some of the messages that we’ve been giving already, you know it’s a bit like that prophet in your own land so where I’ve gathered data before and said we’ve got too many children sitting that’s staying on 5 and 6 and 7, this group of children should have a lot more at 8 and 9. 100% don’t buy into that notion and where I’ve said we’ve got some children here who aren’t moving that we should be moving a lot of that deficit thinking around well, they come from families where they don’t get support or they came with not very much language and so I think the national standards have made so explicit the importance of how students must meet those standards in order to get to where they need to get in order to be successful in NCEA has been quite a driver. And suddenly as we do this work and looking at what other schools are doing you know who’d heard somebody say we’re talking to other teachers and suddenly they realise that actually all schools and all teachers are having these discussions and there are expectations that these children can succeed and there are expectations that the children on the top end can be extended.