Overview

Leadership and Management adviser, Rema Leitch, meets Russley school principal Erika Ross and explains how she will work with the leadership team to unpack the self-review tools.

Reflective questions

• Rema takes Erika through a chart which outlines a planning approach that can be used to work through self-review. Download this chart and its planning templates and consider whether they might be of value to your leadership team as a way of framing how you will undertake your review.

Go to the tool for in-school leaders

Transcript

Working with a Facilitator

This series of short videos looks at how Russley School in Christchurch is using the tools to focus on student achievement. I’m Reima Leitch a leadership and management advisor with UC education plus at the University of Canterbury. I’ve been working alongside the principal and leadership team at Russley as they’ve unpacked the tools. The questions provided by the tools have helped the school’s principal, syndicate leaders and teachers to have rich and focused conversations about the changes they need to make about their professional practice. So all students at the school show progress and achievement in relation to the national standards for reading writing and maths.

At the start of my time at Russley Principal Erika Ross invited me to talk with her about what the tools were for, and how they could help leaders, teachers and the board of trustees.

Reima it’s great to have you working with us, I’m really pleased we’ve got you on board and as you know to work with our leadership team and originally it was to do with a slightly different focus with what’s happening what’s current and the national standards I know that you’ve suggested that we focus on the self review tour for the national standards.

So you may have looked at the introduction to the self review tools? And that explains that this is at the moment this is self review towards implementing national standards but once we’ve got national standards in their right place, it’s a really good self review tool at enhancing student achievement and what are the systems and practices in our school that assure us and the board, parents and students that student achievement is alive and well in our school.

So given originally that the focus was on building our leadership capacity in the school, what you’re saying is by using this self review tool we will build that capability.

Yes, yeah so this is about coaching yourself and your leaders to be able to conduct rigorous and self critical review, so I will be working with you, you will then facilitate it with your leaders and they will go and facilitate it with their teachers. So this is actually an emergent tool so it’s looking at the big picture of student achievement right across the learning areas, right across the school. As we come toward the end of the process it may be that you use a self review for literacy or numeracy to get to the specifics of that learning area. For this purpose it’s an emergent tool.

We will be working through the self review tool with a facilitator or an in-school leader, and we will be able to identify professional strengths and learning needs, then we’ll review and identify professional learning needs which are short term or longer term. So the short term ones will take us down here, and we’ll be developing professional plans to meet individual staff, staff team, and whole staff board. Some of them will be longer term so by the end of the year we will be able to evaluate the impact of professional learning programme approved outcome for all students, identify next steps, and begin planning for professional learning and development.

The critical aim of self review is achieving a step up in the performance of the education system for and with Maori students and other groups of students which may be under-achieving

OK, so at this school that would include the students at the top end who I think are under performing

The under- achieving, it really reinforces everything that’s contained in NZC that you have developed in your school based curriculum and there’s a particular emphasis on teaching as inquiry where the teachers are going to be looking at some data, trying some different practice, reviewing the practice, checking back on the data. Because this is about implementing the national standards we will look at the introductory pages to the national standards, the detail of the national standards in literacy and numeracy is for those people who are better informed about that than I am. I’m looking at how you look at the big picture. But it does lead towards a better understanding of the national standards. So as well as looking at student achievement, as well as we have done in the past we now have this other reference point which is the national sign post that track way back from NCEA level2 , if we want our student s to leave with NCEA level2 these are the signposts that they need to meet on the way, so as well as looking at current achievement , where the child started and where they are now and celebrating that, we now have this future look, so we can start looking at the pace of the progress required, in some cases the accelerator process progress required and once we get through to the reporting tool it talks about that joint responsibility that the school the learner and the home place and keeping this pace appropriate.