Practical steps: how to tackle variation
by Heather Ditch and Ray Tarleton
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Overview
Professor John Hattie has noted that New Zealand has the highest in-school variation in the world and that it is the responsibility of every educational leader to reduce in-school variation. With this in mind, this short article from ldr the research-based magazine for school leaders at the National College of School Leadership could be of value to New Zealand leaders.
Ditch and Tarleton suggest five strategies to use in tackling variation in performance within a school:
- data collection and use
- effectiveness of middle leaders
- teaching and learning quality
- responding to student voice, and
- standardising procedures.
Before embarking on these strategies they suggest that school leaders be strategic and consider the ability of their school to manage and sustain change. Principals do need to be realistic about the amount of change their school can effectively achieve. It is important that there is staff buy-in to the process.
One way of doing this is by recognising the importance of middle leaders within the school. They are closest in terms of working with other teachers. They also work with students in their own classes too. They will be key to the planning, implementation and best use of the findings to reduce variation.
The article stresses the importance of involving students in the process. This connects with the New Zealand findings about the importance of making sure that relationships with students are positive so that they are motivated to participate in the effort to improve teaching and learning within the school.
It will be helpful to share this article with the leadership team and to use it to underpin planning for addressing variation of student outcomes within the school.
Reflective questions
These reflective questions might guide you in your reading of this article:
- How ready is your school to address in-school variation, and what will best motivate your teachers to engage with you and the other school leaders on this task? For example what use can you make of data or case studies to indicate the issues that your school is facing?
- What strategies will you use to engage your middle leaders in the project? Consider making sure that they have time to plan and work together to build and disseminate best practice. Are there any external experts who can help them with this process? What other resources do they need to support their work?
- How can you most effectively engage students to help you with this work? What are the best ways to collect information from them in order to get reliable information about their engagement with school (such as questionnaires or small focus groups)? What do they have to offer in terms of how best to make their classroom experiences of high quality? Do you need to consider protecting their anonymity?
- Make a list of the important outcomes you want from this process for both teachers and students. Consider the timeline that you will need to make the changes that are necessary?
Reference
Ditch. H., and Tarleton. R. (2010) “Practical steps: How to … tackle variation”. In ldr for January.
Other online resources
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