A few years ago I was approached by a student at the local college of education who wanted a group of stufents to complete a survey of some type. I immediately agreed as I believe that we as teachers have a professional responsibility to help form the next generation(s) of teachers. But this gave me a great idea - how to improve my school's program and its teaching with targetted interventions, for free!
I contacted the heads of the early childhood and elementary teacher programs at the college of education, and the head of mathematics in the college of mathematics. I also contacted the person in charge of graduate rasearch in the college of education, although I do not remmber her title.
I met with each of them, separately, and introduced the school, our mission, our community and our program and I said that we were open to the college's students coming to our school to conduct research projects, action research, individual and small group tutoring and so on. All jumped at the chance and over future meetings, emails and telephone calls we agreed on things like protocols, reporting, responsibilities, agreements such as privacy. From memory, there was an agreed solicitation poster for each area, standard forms and emails, and a handbook which defined the college's expectations and ours. Dress code and punctuality in particular come to mind.
We received a number of these students, half a dozen or more each semester, covering the usual things like reading methodologies or the use of certain questions. One I remember compared elementary pairwork where pairs were assigned to be either same-gender or mixed-gender to see what effect this had. It turns out that girls did well in girl : girl and girl : boy while boys did well in boy : girl but not as well in boy : boy so we were able to target this dynamic. We wnted to be a boy-friendly school so this was important to us, and this was one of the highly effective practices we implemented.
We also received students in areas which were important to our academic strategic plan where we had put out a call to action. For example, we felt that mathematics teaching, particularly that driven by textbooks and schemes (and too frequently replaced thereby), was either too focused on rote and arcane rules or too focused on abstractions, and we wanted approaches which were more realistic or relevant to our students, more problem-based and more applied. This was the area of research interest of one of the mathematics professors so he sent us a stream of students who would come for multiple micro-lessons, and others who ran a math club. They would explore a specific topic or approach and if nothing else, the novelty of these visits led to increased student engagement. Our math improvement was startling with across-the-board performance of at least three grades against state standards.
This program allowed for 1 : 1 or 1 : 4 interventions in reading, social skills, even basketball! We often had more applications than we could accept, which of course gave us more weight in selecting projects which would more directly benefit us. The success was largely due to the dual oversights from the university faculty and the co-teachers, and from the university head of department and my deputy principals, and to the program's clear structure which was defined in the handbook. Most of the college students felt they invested in our school, they came to our end-of-year graduation and other events, and several applied for teaching positions once they had themselves graduated. I have heard that recently one did her PhD research on students at that school which had its genesis on her undergraduate project years earlier.
Our students of course improved because of the dedicated and targetted support they received, and because of the boost which came from being selected to work with the adult researchers. (We stressed that this was not remedial, this was not a punishment, but that this was important research!) They became more engaged in general, and several became very enthususaitc in the areas where they had been supported going much furher than they probably would have otherwise.
What we had not expected and which we later greatly appreciated was the growth in self-confidence amonsgt our students, and the improvment in their expression and their use of more formal language.
Our program improved because we were able to identify areas where we could improve, for example in the social and pairwork skills needed by boys or in math strategies, and to change what we were doing. Our school culture improved because we became more open to outside scrutiny, to critical thinking and evidence-based practise and ro risk-taking without whcih there can be no creativity. Our school's image in the community improved because we were constantly featured in reports, discussed by the college students with thier peers, friends and familty, and help up as innovative and succesful.
This approach to school improvement was not free, there were were costs in terms of time, but it was cheap and the RoI was off the scale. If I were to meet that original college student again, I would owe her a cup of coffee and a large slice of cake!
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