Appendix 7.3 - A workshop for school leaders
The OER4Schools Professional Learning Resource
Values at your school
Whole class dialogue (30 min) on school values Discuss the following talking points. Discuss how true you think they are in the context of your school. For each item give concrete examples of how you implement this. For instance, regarding “We learn from each other and share what we know.”, give examples of what it is that you learn from each other, and say how you learn it from each other. Also give examples of how you are not implementing this. For instance, regarding “We try to save energy and avoid waste.”, you could list ways in which you do not (yet) avoid waste.
In our school:
- Some children or teachers are not treated fairly and do not feel part of a community.
- Everyone in the school has a voice that is heard – senior leaders and administrators, classroom teachers and children themselves share decision making in the school and take responsibility for learning.
- It is important that teachers learn from children.
- We sort out problems by listening to each other and finding solutions together. We speak up when we see that something is wrong.
(Adapted Index for inclusion, p. 27, Figure 3)
Barriers, resources and support
Whole class brainstorm (30 min) with brainstorm on barriers and support Brainstorm about the following questions regarding barriers, resources and support.
- What barriers to learning and participation arise within the school and its communities, and who do they affect?
- How can barriers to learning and participation be minimised?
- Are any additional resources needed to support learning and participation? If so how can these be mobilised and deployed?
(Adapted from Index for inclusion, p. 40, Figure 12)
Activities and techniques for teacher meetings
Question starts
Dialogue (30 min) using question starts Question starts are explained below. Use question starts to initiate some discussion to explore a topic in the teacher meeting.
Question Starts (A Visible Thinking routine) - A routine for creating thought-provoking questions
Brainstorm a list of at least 12 questions about the topic, concept or object. Use these question-starts to help you think of interesting questions:
- Why...?
- How would it be different if...?
- What are the reasons...?
- Suppose that...?
- What if...?
- What if we knew...?
- What is the purpose of...?
- What would change if...?
Review the brainstormed list and star the questions that seem most interesting. Then, select one or more of the starred questions to discuss for a few moments.
Reflect: What new ideas do you have about the topic, concept or object that you didn't have before?
(Adapted from the "Blue Book" of the Leadership for Learning project.)
Critical incident analysis
Dialogue (30 min): Resolve an issue at school using critical incident analysis. The idea of critical incident analysis is explained below. Read the technique below, and use it to resolve an issue in a teacher meeting using the technique.
Critical Incident Analysis is a way of analysing a recent event significant event in order to examine it in detail and learn from the experience.
The group of people involved sit in a circle and firstly go back over the incident in descriptive detail. The aim is to recall the event in terms of what happened, the context, the key players, what preceded and what followed. Everyone will have different perceptions, recollections and angles. This is an important aspect of the exercise and should be recorded in some way. It may hold the key to the way in which people respond, allocate responsibility and decide on a course of action.
- Suspend judgement. Don’t allocate blame.
- Don’t argue for your construction of the event. Listen to others
- Describe from an objective, disinterested, viewpoint what happened.
- Try to remember the conditions – eg time of day, the weather (was it raining? hot? etc), preceding events
- Who was involved?
- What did different people do? And not do?
- What was said?
Having agreed, as far as possible, what happened, now reflect on questions such as:
- What might have been done differently?
- What were the possible options? (allow for wild ideas)
- Who held the options?
- Why were they not used? (still avoiding blame or judgement)
- What have we learned from the incident?
- What might we do differently next time?
(Adapted from the "Blue Book" of the Leadership for Learning project.)
