Tamaki College
Tamaki College wanted to regain the confidence of its community. Past principal of the college, David Hodge, looks at methods used to raise academic achievement across the school during his time there.
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ICT drives academic achievement at Tamaki College
Tamaki College seemed to have lost the confidence of a large sector of its community. We needed to do something about that, so we asked ourselves, "What would parents want that would make them choose to take their children elsewhere?" The simple answer is that they want their children to succeed academically. So we had to look at methods we could use to raise academic achievement right across the school.
I think there's a lot of theory to support the idea that, if you can be very good at one thing then, in fact, that gives your organisation the permission to be very good at a whole lot of other things as well. If we could be very good at using ICT to teach then, in fact, it would show everybody that we could be very good in a whole lot of other ways, and certainly that's been our experience.
Teaching through ICT
We took the concept of a magnet school from the United States where some school districts have organised themselves around a specialty or a special flavour – becoming the science and technology college, or the arts college where they may do film and drama better than anybody else in that school district.
We adapted it to our own circumstances. We said, perhaps if we can teach through ICT better than anybody else, then we create a magnet that might be very attractive to our clients and stakeholders. We also felt very strongly that one of the key factors around student learning is having everybody – students, staff, and parents – believe that they could be successful learners.
Promote change
One of the first things we did with the board was to create a vision for the school, and that vision was around academic excellence. It was about students gaining national qualifications at a level that was at or above the national average. ICT was tied into that vision so everything that we did in ICT had to be judged around the basis of, "Was this going to increase students gaining qualifications and was it going to improve their academic performance?"
At the very outset I had a PowerPoint presentation put together professionally, and in showing that presentation we were saying, "Look, the medium's the message."
We tried to create within the school an atmosphere that would promote change. When you bring about change in an organisation you create work, and through that process of change you've also got to see if what you're changing can alleviate workload. One of the other things we looked at was how we could use ICT to dent the incredible amount of 'administrivia' that teachers have to do on a daily basis.
Change is threatening to people. There is that wonderful line, "Good leadership upsets people at a rate that they can stand", and that's certainly what we did. The reason they could stand it most of the time was because we put in just-in-time support and professional development. There was always someone there to help you if you wanted to make the effort.
Experiment
One of the most effective things I think leaders in schools can do is to run ideas past the best classroom teachers. If you have an idea and you wonder whether it's a good idea or if it's a little bit of a fantasy, find your best teachers. Ask them what they think of the idea. If they like it and they're prepared to run with it, then it's probably a good idea.
You need to give people permission to experiment. You need to give people permission to make mistakes. You need to take those people who are willing to try new things and support them and allow them to be able to self-review without a sense of, "Oh my goodness, I don't want to show everybody that this hasn't worked", but to be honest about things that don't work and to spread the news when they do.
What we found with ICT is that many of the best teachers in the school sort of said, "Yeah, I'll have a go at this. I'm willing to try it. I'll give it a shot", and our job really was just to support them in that process. You find your star performers and you just look after them and give them the resources they need to develop the ideas, and those ideas will then spread.
Still digital photography was used very effectively by one member in the English department to capture images for children to write about. I can think of another example where social sciences students going on field trips were taking video and then bringing it back into the school for analysis. These were far more powerful and immediate learning tools than the old method of writing down what you see. It just worked so much better and, you know, both those things have applications right across the whole curriculum.
Empower learners
Student learning is the key. We know that a key to students' learning is attitude, and we have a saying at this school that, "I can is far more important than IQ." If you believe in yourself as a learner and believe that you can learn, then you will, and if your teachers believe that you can learn, then they will teach you, and the whole thing feeds on itself. So one of the important things about developing ICT in the school was this idea that students and staff would see themselves as people who were successful learners.
ICT was seen as being very sexy and modern. It's part of the culture of young people and it's something they really inherently feel that they want to learn about, and it's also something they're not scared of. They've grown up in a digital world, and so they feel very comfortable to get in there and make mistakes. They realise that if they persevered, they got better and better, and so it was very easy to transfer that into the academic field.
This was wonderfully empowering for the students, and if you start to feel empowered then there's nothing really that you can't do. So we started to see a much better attitude towards school and learning. We started to see young people who felt that they could achieve a degree of expertise. We saw that, through ICT, teachers were starting to engage students in their curriculum subjects very often in new ways. It's a little bit like a snowball effect. As those things start to gain momentum, students start to get better grades and then they work harder. We saw at first quite a dramatic improvement in student achievement. It started to level out over time, but we're still winning, which is important.
Measure success
You have to actually be able to show that it's working and so you've got to be able to have data to support that. We've consistently looked at key indicators (test results, NCEA results, student and school successes, roll growth, student behaviour, and so on) to show our trends in achievement, and those indicators have all been on the positive side.
We now have more than 70 percent of our year 13 students going on to tertiary institutions, up from about zero a few years ago. That in itself has been encouraging, in that it tells us that the strategies we are employing are working. You have to communicate those measurements to staff because that's where you get real review and encouragement.
We started to look very closely at how we gathered student information about student achievement in our school and to say, "Can we, in fact, do this as a community? Can we have a continuum of curriculum that might go from year 1 through to year 13, with clearly set standards along the way against which we measure the students, so that by the time they get to year 13 they're ready to go on to tertiary education with all the skills they need?"
Out of exploring the possibilities available through the use of ICT, we've developed this concept of the Tamaki Achievement Pathway, which seeks to build a curriculum continuum for students going into schooling in the Tamaki district. What's happened in the last seven or eight years? What's been tried? What's worked? What hasn't worked? Where are the holes and gaps in their education? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
Foster school pride
One of the things we have never underestimated is how important it is for young people to be proud of their school. I mean, school is really their second family now, and for some students it's mainly their first family. They want to be able to stand tall and say, "I go to Tamaki College", so one of the things that's been very important to us is to build that pride. You can build that pride internally through a whole range of different mechanisms, but you also have to have some sort of community-wide profile in order to build that pride.
In 2001 we won the Computerworld Excellence Award for Excellence in the Use of IT in Education: Primary and Secondary Schools. The award was for the school's development of a new network computer system and recognition of the important relationship between ICT literacy and learning. We were able to go back to the students and say, "Look, we've won a national award for excellence in ICT". They're good for the ego of the adults, but they're even more important for students because, once students start to feel a pride in their school,that carries a lot of power.
I think it's also interesting the way students will take the technology and use it for their own means, or they'll see possibilities for it that you afterwards think, "Oh, I should have cottoned on to that." A really good example is where one of the year 13 students walked into my office, put a CD-ROM down on the table and said, "Oh, there's your copy, sir." I said, "What's this?" and he said, "Oh, it's the year 13 yearbook, sir. We've put together a collation of all the major events we had over the year that we had on film, and you know we printed it on a CD and we're giving it out."
John Graham, the ex-principal of Auckland Grammar, came and gave a speech to students and he talked about his role as manager of the New Zealand cricket team. He instilled in them a winning culture through a concept of 'better than before'. Every time a player went out, whether it was in training or in a match, they had to try to do just one better than before. We took that concept and we made it up into posters and we put them all round the school and said to the students and staff, "It's all about just doing better than before," and if you're in that constant process of improving, then what happens is that you see small changes happening constantly.
