The Role of Local Systems in Rethinking School

12th June 2023Website Admin

The Role of Local Systems in Rethinking School

With thanks Veronica Ruzek, Director of Curriculum and faculty members across the Farmington schools.

As has been said in Holly’s introduction, there are three sections to each issue of this journal.

As has been said in Holly’s introduction, there are three sections to each issue of this journal.

The first is “Rethinking School”, and most of the articles do just that – imagine how school could function differently. However, schools don’t exist in a vacuum and this short piece focuses on the enabling role that the wider system within which the school is nested, can play.

In the final section, “Resources for Schools” you will find some inspiring project cards from schools in Farmington, Connecticut, USA – with many thanks to Veronica Ruzek, Director of Curriculum and faculty members across the Farmington schools for sharing them. Farmington Public Schools has a mission and vision statement to “enable all students to achieve academic and personal excellence, exhibit persistent effort and live as resourceful, enquiring and contributing global citizens aligned to our Vision of the Global Citizen”.

This Vision of the Global Citizen is worth sharing, partly because of the system leadership it displays – a bold, inspiring and invitational vision for all Farmington’s schools – but also because of the direct connection one can make with the moral underpinnings and student agency displayed in the Project Cards.   

Read it, then read the cards, and the connection will be obvious.

Leaving Learners in the Dust

12th June 2023Website Admin

Leaving Learners in the Dust

Authored from the outcomes of a Critical Friendship Group discussion on Assessment, November 2022

Assessment, neurodiversity and some ideas for how schools can do better

For the team at Gesher School, who are committed to personalised, project-based and real-world learning for students with neurodiversity, finding appropriate, reliable and motivational ways to assess learning and to provide the feedback and recognition of learning that learners need to progress is an ongoing and very practical challenge.

Joshua, a recent graduate from sixth form college, explained his experience with assessment – on this occasion his A-Levels – like this:

“The big problem with existing assessments is that they are the be-all and end-all. You either fit the mould or you don’t and, if you don’t, you really are kind of left in the dust. Most people don’t fit the mould – and especially neurodiverse people don’t – so that does lead to problems.”

Unfortunately, Joshua’s experience is far from unique. Too many learners find themselves left in the dust by assessments that test the wrong things, at the wrong time, using the wrong measures.

And the cost of getting assessment wrong can be very high indeed, as Joshua points out:

“So often the pressures of the school system can break a student easily and quickly. And it becomes really difficult to come out the other side and still be a strong candidate when the only important thing is what grade you got.”

So what is so wrong with assessment? And why are these failings especially problematic and potentially harmful for neurodiverse learners?

 

Five Things Wrong with Assessment in Schools

1. Schools assess all learners at the same time

Partly because of the way the school year is constructed and partly driven by the drop-deadlines of national standardised testing at 16 and 18, assessments in schools follow a rhythm that is largely dictated by how much of the curriculum it is possible to cram into any given period. Learners study skills and knowledge through the curriculum and then teachers (or exam boards) use assessments, usually tests, to measure how skilled or knowledgeable learners have become after an allotted time has expired.

This model is so familiar that it feels like the only sensible way to approach the timing of assessment. It isn’t. In most other aspects of their lives where learning features, learners choose, with the help of their teacher or mentor, when is the right moment to complete an assessment. From gymnastics badges to music grades; the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award to driving tests, learners and teachers work together to agree the best moment to assess progress. By assessing all learners at the same time, schools ignore everything we know about how learning happens, specifically that different learners learn different things at a different pace and that the right moment for assessment – the moment that is optimal for learning – will therefore be different too.

What if… individual learners and their teachers could decide together when to begin a formal assessment, at a time when each learner feels ready and confident to “take the test”?

2. Schools only assess what’s taught in school and/or by teachers

“I can make a video game using languages that the curriculum doesn’t even know exist, but none of them get recognition. I can do all this stuff and it doesn’t matter because it wasn’t what I was told I had to do. I didn’t fit that specific guideline and therefore it’s not good enough.” Joshua

Curriculum so dominates in schools that not only does it dictate the pace of learning, it can also constrain the scope of learning too. This may be an unintended (but not unnoticed) consequence, amplified by assessment, which concentrates on learning that is delivered in school and by teachers and ignores learning that happens at home, in sports clubs, dance or music schools, or anywhere where it is unseen by teachers.

What if… schools could recognise learning that takes place in these other settings and celebrate the full range of knowledge and skills that learners have acquired?

3. Schools assess everything that is taught in schools and/or by teachers

In the interests of leaving as many doors open as possible for learners’ futures, schools crowd their timetables with curriculum and assessments, some of which are, for the vast majority, irrelevant to where learners want to go next. This squeezes out other learning opportunities that might actually engage and inspire learners to choose and follow a path they can feel passionate about. Schools waste so much time deciding what learners should care about and what help they might need to get there when, with a little more trust, curiosity and empathy, they could simply ask them. And many learners are exhausted by cramming for tests across a much wider range of subjects than they could ever possibly need.

What if… individual learners could choose to be assessed in specific areas of their learning only where a standardised recognition or qualification is helpful?

4. Schools (mostly) assess learning when learning is ‘finished’

There is no question that many teachers skillfully incorporate formative assessment into their practice, for example, in how they ask questions in class and the assignments that they set. However, it is also the case that most formal assessment of the kind that makes it onto report cards and transcripts happens at the end of modules or units of learning when they are summative and final, often pass or fail, and always too late to act upon.

What if… learners could practise assessments numerous times and get the feedback they need to achieve mastery, before deciding to “take the test”?

5. School prioritises assessments that schools and teachers are judged on, not assessments of most value for learners

In our highly regulated education system, it is unsurprising that the people who lead schools are anxious to demonstrate that their school and their staff can deliver the results that the system demands. Reputations and livelihoods depend on it. Unfortunately, the system, comprising around 24,000 schools serving just under nine million learners in England, also requires those results to be demonstrated with a high degree of standardisation to facilitate judgments about quality, consistency, value for public money and so on. Standardisation also helps keep costs down and makes moderation possible (although not inevitable, as is demonstrated by the removal of several education ministers shortly after results day).

This is all very understandable and has really very little to do with learners and their individual or personal needs, now and for their futures. Worse, it produces assessments and a related culture which, as we have seen, are arguably not in any learner’s best interests and, for some learners, can be horribly damaging.

“Assessments led me into a very unhealthy revision cycle. Assessment as it is now is not actually really a test of knowledge, but more a test of memory, so you end up sitting in a Costa drinking more coffee in one hour than I would in a week normally, just to stay awake, then sleeping three hours a night, cramming knowledge just to end up being tired on the day and messing up the exam.” Joshua

What if… schools were empowered to assess and celebrate learning that was of the highest value to the learners and communities they serve?

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • Which two of these five “What if…” statements most resonate with you?  What would you need to do to introduce practices that were consistent with them?

  • How might you assess and recognise young people’s achievements outside the classroom and at home?

  • How might the agency of young people feature more strongly in the assessment approaches at your school?

What is Crew? We are Crew? Kvutzah at Gesher

12th June 2023Website Admin

What is Crew? We are Crew? Kvutzah at Gesher

Sarah Sultman and Bradley Conway

Valerie Hannon and Julie Temperley (both of whom have been good friends of Gesher School) recently published the book “FutureSchool”, which involved the identification and study of around 50 schools across the world that are doing exceptional things in the education of their young people.

There were a few features of note in common, and three are highly relevant for this piece. They are:

  1. Building a “team” culture of mutual support and ambition amongst and between learners.
  2. Creating a relational climate that promotes motivation and wellbeing.
  3. Knowing learners profoundly well, such that engaging learning can be personalised to their interests and passions.

These are foundational features of Crew, which is what this article is about.

What is Crew?

As parents, we know and value the relational qualities of primary education. Our children are taught largely by a class teacher who knows them really well – and they know that they are known. Parents know it, too.

Rod Allen, who co-hosts the podcast Free Range Humans: how can we make schools fit for human consumption? recently cited an experience from his daughter’s primary-class years. Her teacher loved photography and committed to taking a photograph of each child in her class illustrating who she felt each child really was. At parents’ consultation he and his wife were shown a photograph of their daughter in the playground with other children, which caused him to say: “I didn’t need to hear any more. It was obvious that this teacher understood our child and valued in her what we valued – Maths and English and love of learning – she was in good hands.”

Contrast this with the dominant model of secondary schools where a student is likely to be taught by between eight and 10 teachers a week (or more) for, at most, three one-hour lessons. Few youngsters will feel well known; many won’t even have their names known by all their teachers. Crew is an antidote to this.

Crew is a secondary (and primary) school approach that enables youngsters to feel profoundly secure and well-known by their Crew Leader. It occupies perhaps one hour or more each day, and there are three key features:

  1. It prioritises relationships and wellbeing.

  2. Knowing learners really well enables learning support to be personalised to student interests and passions.

  3. It generates within the “crew” a community of mutually supportive learners. It is not a teacher and 25 students, but 26 learners and teachers working together with their different knowledge, experience and capabilities.

Put another way, Crew is two things. “It is a school-wide culture that supports social and emotional wellness, character development, and academic and life success for students and staff. It is also a unique and transformational meeting structure for secondary school advisories, elementary school morning and closing circles, and for staff collaboration.” Ron Berger, CEO of Expeditionary Learning Schools is considered to be the architect of Crew, and EL schools have been practising it for 25 years. The quote above is taken from the introduction to his book “We Are Crew”.

Ron Berger’s insight into the alchemy of Crew goes something like this: “If you are a member of a climbing team trying to get to the top of the mountain, that is only possible if the whole team makes it to the top. So, your job is to support every other member of the team to make it – and they in turn will be supporting you.” This is it in essence – a mutually supportive community that cares enough to support all members to success.

That is Crew. We are all crew, not passengers. This is Crew.

Crew in the UK

Crew is not part of secondary school culture in the UK. Traditionally, UK schools have short “form tutor” periods involving registration, administration and occasionally some personal and social education. This is nothing like the Crew model, which is at the heart of EL schools and a range of other US school designs. There, it is both a structural component and the foundation of school culture. It “serves as an ethos of inclusion: students strive to reach ambitious goals together as a community. They are responsible for their own wellbeing and their classmates’ wellbeing.”

One UK school that has made Crew foundational is XP School in Doncaster, for which the school maxim is “Above all, compassion”. XP is an Ofsted outstanding school, where inspectors remarked on features that relate to Crew: “Leaders are driven by the conviction that everyone can and should do well. Pupils are kind, generous-spirited and aware of the needs of others, both at school and beyond…..personal development and wellbeing are very well supported and pupils are taught to be considerate, kind and confident.”

Crew at XP is foundational. Students are aware of its impact: “At XP we are not just a school, we are a family,” and “It’s basically a metaphor for us all achieving our goals and we all do it together, so if someone falls behind we don’t just leave them,” and “We don’t just remember facts. We create memories.”

If you are not yet inspired, watch this video. As Andy Sprake (XP’s Executive Principal) says in it: “If you are going to make any difference to young people’s lives, you’ve got to know who they are.”

Crew or Kvutzah at Gesher – Its Origins

Gesher uses the term “kvutzah” instead of the word “crew”. As a faith school, this embodies the ethos, as Judaism is an insistently communal faith. Our sages tell us “do not separate yourself from community” and this notion of living our lives supported, enmeshed and emboldened by others defines our existence. The original meaning of the word kvutzah is “a Jewish communal and co-operative farm or settlement” but over the decades this has evolved into meaning the group you are a part of, or belong to. Urban Dictionary quite wonderfully describes its meaning as “a tight-knit group of crazy kids who spend summers together but will stay close no matter the distance”. And that is the purpose of kvutzah or crew at Gesher – to create a trusted community of people, a social collective where all voices are valued, bonds are created and everyone feels supported and understood.

There is a wealth of literature spreading across several disciplines that shows how important it is to wellbeing, to be surrounded by friends. Having people to talk to makes a difference. We speak of “unburdening” ourselves to others, and the metaphor is exact. There is something about human nature that makes troubles or concerns shared easier to bear. We are, as Aristotle and Maimonides said, social animals. What distinguishes homo sapiens from other life-forms is the extent and complexity of our sociality. Kvutzah encourages and champions this notion of respectfully sharing thought and feelings which in turn creates bonds between teachers and students; student to student, which in turn creates a culture of community at the school. (Adapted from Rabbi Sacks’ Community of Faith.)

The two statements below are taken from the “day in the life” created as a practicalisation of the school and community’s Blueprint vision for the school.

“At the beginning of every day we spend time together. Kvutzah is our secure base. The name provides the clue to how it works – we care about one another and pull together to help each other to succeed. We check in; have learning circles; plan our day, etc. Above all we focus on mindfulness, wellbeing and motivation. We focus our mind and collectively start our day, using tefillah/prayer to help us.

“School day also ends with Kvutzah when we are not out doing community projects. There is check-in and sharing and planning for extended and home learning. There is fun, too.”

It is no stretch of the imagination to understand that the diversity of need and talent amongst SEND learners makes something like Crew or Kvutzah essential. Autistic and neurodiverse young people need to be known; need to have their profile of behaviours understood and accommodated; need to feel valued and respected within a supportive community of peers; need to feel that they belong. This is even more important in a context where many young learners have had damaging prior experiences in mainstream schools.

Crew at Gesher in Practice

In practice, Crew time is an opportunity for the students to focus on, and enhance, any, and all, of the three key relationships in their life – their relationship with G-d; their relationship with other people; and their relationship with themselves. Through prayer, a daily review or quiet contemplation/meditation, the students work individually, and together, to enhance their own mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing. They learn to care, share and be aware of their own needs as well as each other’s, which enables them to develop their compassion, collaborative skills and resilience – key attributes of life.

However, crew time at Gesher is not restricted to the students. Staff have their own form of crew time. Every week, a staff member chooses a key theme which permeates through three morning briefings and enables all staff to be aware, involved and connected with key aspects and events within Judaism, other faiths or none; within SEND or therapy; within education or their environment; and within the UK or beyond. Regularly enhancing our staff’s personal and professional development has had a profoundly positive effect on the camaraderie, cohesion and teaching within the school and ensures that everyone’s inspiration and passion is valued and shared.

Who is wise?

One who learns from everyone!

(Ethics of the Fathers 4:1)

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • Where Crew (or Advisory, or Kvutzah) is practised, there is a school-wide body of practice that supports it. Is that true of tutor time in your school?
  • Watch the XP video as a staff or as a year team. What can we take from that to influence our own practice? What might be easy to do tomorrow?
  • Do your staff “have their own crew time”? Should they? Could they?

Why Gesher is Now an All-Through School

12th June 2023Website Admin

Why Gesher is Now an All-Through School

Sarah Sultman and Sam Dexter

In early 2018, when Gesher was a newly opened primary school, we were focused on primary education and growing the pupil population at the school. Having recently opened in 2017 with just seven pupils, whose parents bravely took a leap of faith in sending their children to a brand new, untried and untested school with no track record, we had not thought about what might happen to our students when they reached 11 and would need to leave to find appropriate secondary schools.

In a meeting with a donor, he suggested that we consider becoming “an all-through school”, a term we weren’t familiar with. It felt like too big a leap, too big a dream to entertain; we were too busy navigating Ofsted and determining our primary curriculum to even imagine that this might be a consideration. But the seed was planted nonetheless.

In the early stages of the creation of Gesher, we had been inspired by the advice and counsel of James Wetz, author of Urban Village Schools (see The Bridge 1). His research was strongly influenced by the small-school movement in the US which provides a fertile environment for authentic peer-to-peer and student-teacher relationships, safety, learner-centred empowerment, and community involvement.

It was not, though, until early 2020, during Covid, that the plans for Gesher to become an all-through school really developed with speed. By then we were fast approaching 40 pupils and were growing out of our space on the temporary site that we were renting. We became increasingly mindful that our oldest learners were approaching year six and that we would have to signpost them to their next school. Yet, the choices were few and the demand for good secondary provision for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) far exceeded the supply in our area and in our community. Our learners were thriving with us, too. And so, the next stage of the Gesher story began in earnest.

All-through schools are not a new idea. There are many of them, particularly in the private and SEND sectors. Private schools often have primary, middle, and upper schools that share a campus, or a private secondary will have affiliated and well-known feeder schools. What this provides, for pupils and their families, crucially is continuity; providing stability and creating a community with long-lasting relationships. The independent SEND sector mirrors this. Over the years we have visited over 50 schools around the country to learn from others, to seek out best practice, to establish which models work and why, and to harness what we have gleaned so that we can implement and incorporate those things that work uniquely well at Gesher.

There is little research on the comparisons between all-through schools versus the standard model of a separate primary, secondary, and sixth form. It is interesting, though, that the private and independent SEND education sector has developed this model as a way to recognise the value of growing and developing their students all the way through. The state sector, conversely, has been driven instead to create huge economies of scale in large secondary schools. The overriding impression we gained from all our visits was that, for children with SEND, all-through schools provide a long-term stable environment where the pupils are well known to all the staff – and where they understand and respect each other, too. Peer relationships are celebrated at Gesher and benefit all of the pupils. Our older students mentor the younger ones; they become role models, giving them a sense of responsibility. As one parent said:

“It’s great for my child to be around older kids who are also neurodiverse. It creates a real community.”

When we sought to expand the school, the views and perspectives of the parents were important to us. We know that transitions are a particularly challenging time for autistic young people and for their parents. In addition, we were aware that for our young people, new environments and their spiky profiles mean that it takes time for staff to know and understand their needs. As two parents at Gesher articulated so well:

“Especially for neurodivergent children who prefer familiarity and routine, having primary and secondary school in the same place makes it a safe space and one they can rely on. Additionally, they won’t ‘lose’ time getting to know a new environment and people and likewise a new set of teachers and peers getting to know them.”

“(We value) knowing all the good work that has been put in during the primary years can be built on and not having to worry about the transition to secondary”.

Thus far, all the families that have attended Gesher primary have chosen to remain at the school, where they feel supported and understood, into the secondary phase. Another parent, whose child is now in the secondary phase at Gesher, felt the continuation of the same curriculum ideas was really important for their son:

“Now Gesher’s an all-through school it is wonderful, especially with the new Life Skills provision that the school now offers. It means that our son will be able to continue to thrive and be happy in an environment that can support his needs.”

Gesher is a learning community, one which puts relationships at the heart of its organisation and design. Attachments and relationships are key to our pupils being stable and happy learners, comfortable in their environment, with their self-esteem enhanced, and confident in their sense of place and space. For our parents, too, it provides security and stability:

“One of the big reasons we chose Gesher is that it is currently a through school. We need a school that will teach kids the skills they need as they become adults, and there’s not really any school like that, especially a Jewish faith one, apart from Gesher.”

__________________________________________________________________________

In designing their secondary provision, the Gesher team has cast their net wide for examples of schools that make being small in size part of their success story.

Since 1991, the New American Schools Initiative has opened 2,600 new small high schools in 45 states across the USA. Two of the most globally influential school models have arisen as a result:

  1. Big Picture schools, founded by Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor (now 65+ Big Picture high schools in 18 states and more around the world). These small, personalised schools, started for drop-out learners and graduate 92% of their students on time, compared to a national average of 84%.

  2. High Tech High (HTH) is a community of 16 elementary and high schools in the San Diego area creating an all-through local school system. Some 98% of HTH’s graduates have been admitted to college or university. About 35% of HTH graduates are first-generation college students and 85% of their free-school-meals students complete degrees.

With their focus on the centrality of relationships and the personalisation of learning that arises from knowing students well, young people in these schools thrive and consistently outperform teenagers in conventionally sized, conventionally structured high schools with comparable demographics.

 

Professional Prompt Questions

All-through schooling is not an easily available option for most schools.

However, some of the features that professionals and parents value in all-through schools – relationships, deep knowledge of learners, security, and personalisation of approaches – can be adapted for more familiar models of schooling.

The professional prompts that follow respond to the question: “How could we help different phases of schooling to incorporate some of the virtues of all-through provision?”

  • Is knowledge transfer about students primarily documented or also face-to-face? How is the more subtle knowledge of children and families communicated?
  • When there are concerns about a student in their first year after transfer, is the relevant feeder school teacher consulted and involved?
  • Does your school have any teacher exchanges with your feeder school to build empathy and to forge relationships?
  • Are feeder school staff invited to events and productions and activities involving their former learners?
  • When achievements are celebrated, is the contribution of the feeder school recognised?
  • On graduation from your school are feeder schools notified of results and destinations – can they share in the successes?

Reimagining Schools By Design: Assessment, Pedagogy and Curriculum

12th June 2023Website Admin

Reimagining Schools By Design: Assessment, Pedagogy and Curriculum

David Jackson

Teaching: the design and facilitation of great learning through relationships

This short article is about the second phase of the process Gesher School undertook to design the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment they knew they would need to do a brilliant job for children who learn differently, as they moved from primary into their secondary education; from childhood into adolescence, from primary to all-through.

The ‘school design lab’ process – eight workshops involving about 100 stakeholders, completed in March 2021 – resulted in a blueprint for this new school ambition. You can see the final version of the Gesher School Blueprint here: https://gesherschool.com/about-us/blueprint/.

It is worth looking at – for its comprehensiveness, its ambition, its philosophical coherence and the obvious seriousness of intent. Beyond that, there is much to recommend in the evident way it unites a school community (internal and external) around a shared mission and sets out the practical requirements needed to achieve this.

The process to develop the blueprint began by asking “What outcomes do we want all our learners to achieve?” We started with a pie chart (six slices), one of which already had “good exam results” filled in, as a given. The task then is to populate the other five slices. (It could be six slices saying “good exam results” if that’s the only outcome that matters – but in a decade of doing this activity, exams have never featured more than once.) The result? Agreement about the purpose of the school and the outcomes for all learners that matter to the school community.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Having agreed purpose and outcomes, the next stage in the process was the development of a set of design principles to achieve these, which form the values and practice architecture – the “laws with leeway” – for the school. In that process the Gesher team engaged with the designs of highly successful schools around the world, in a process known as horizon scanning, to find inspiration and ideas that would help them to learn from the very best that exists and has evidence of success.

You will find more on the Gesher school design process in The Bridge Issue 2.

Having the purpose, outcomes and design principles agreed upon, the next couple of workshops focused on assessment, pedagogy and curriculum.

Assessment

The Gesher Blueprint, then, sets out the school’s desired outcomes. They include: skilled for the future workplace; confident in their sense of self; builders of meaningful relationships; and ethical and responsible citizens. Finding meaningful ways to assess, recognise, accredit and value these – to validate them – is the next stage in the design challenge.

Another desired outcome is qualified for the next stage, and while existing accreditation pathways can obviously fit that bill to an extent, they don’t get close to assessing “meaningful relationships” or “confidence in sense of self”.

Fortunately, there is a different audience for some of these outcomes – the students themselves, their parents, peers, community members, etc – and there are known ways of doing it. There are exhibitions, digital badges, portfolios (real or digital), records of achievement, transcripts or even a unique, composite and personalised School Diploma owned and endorsed by all stakeholders, incorporating a range of such validation methods.

Professionals generally agree that schools should be free to assess what they value, rather than driven to value what is assessed. Gesher’s Blueprint states that it will generate unique profiles… affirm talents… recognise unconventionally expressed achievements… and work of relevance to the community and the world. This ambition is shared by many schools and there are, as we have seen, a range of possible ways of assessing what is valued. However, few schools do. Gesher, in this respect – as in many others – aspires to be a “beautiful exception”.

Pedagogy

Ask secondary teachers about their professional knowledge-base and most will probably talk about subject expertise. This is not their professional knowledge-base: it is what they bring in service of their professional knowledge-base. Lots of geographers or scientists or linguists don’t teach.

Teachers’ professional knowledge-base is the design and facilitation of great learning through relationships. It is the creation of apt pedagogy combined with personalised knowledge and understanding of learners. In other words, teachers are designers. They create great pedagogical designs together.

Only, in most schools, they don’t.

To do this requires scope for interdisciplinary planning; it involves real-world relevant tasks (to make learning matter); it will deploy a repertoire of assessment methods (appropriate to the task, relevant for each person); and it requires time deployment that allows on-site and community learning. This is different from 25 one-hour lessons. It also requires that teachers have time together (to design together).

For Gesher, and for most of the astonishing schools around the world that were studied in the horizon scanning, Project-Based Learning (PBL) provided at least part of the pedagogical solution. Real links have been made with the professional PBL knowledge-base from High Tech High and Expeditionary Learning Schools as international examples and with XP and School 21 as domestic ones. Additionally, Gesher commissioned the support of Imagine If to help facilitate its journey.

Gesher, together with a number of other schools of course, deploys time and space flexibly (the subject of a future article); combines a core of subject teaching with flexible interdisciplinary learning opportunities (PBL); deploys a range of assessment approaches relevant to the task; and, because it is a SEND school (although all schools are SEND schools), integrates into learning designs therapeutic approaches and support.

And these rich approaches, whilst great for students, are also fulfilling for the professional lives of teachers.

Curriculum

If pedagogy is how we teach stuff and how learners learn it, and assessment, broadly speaking, is the range of ways we let students and other stakeholders know how well they are doing, then curriculum is simply the range of material – the content – we want students to learn.

For most secondary schools the curriculum is pretty straightforward: divide what we teach into “subjects” and have specialist subject teachers deliver it in lessons lasting about an hour. The learning week, for learners, is therefore a jigsaw puzzle of disconnected hour-long subject lessons (French, then PE, then English, then Science, then Maths….) and fragmented relationships.

There is another way.

Gesher’s curriculum statement emphasises “the application of knowledge through real-world assignments and projects… rooted in Jewish values… highly personalised and responsive to individual interests, aptitudes and needs”. Much is packed into those 24 words:

  • Application
  • Real-world uses
  • Projects and assignments
  • Overt values components
  • Highly personalised

What all this means practically at Gesher is that the curriculum contains all the subject knowledge required, some of it taught as it has always been taught, but much of it designed into projects, with real-world relevance (perhaps real-world need) within which students express agency, personalise their contributions and also integrate or enact the values from relevant parts of their culture. They might be assessed in a range of ways, singly or in combination – tests, exhibitions, vivas, presentations, peer evaluation, portfolios, or whatever.

Endnote

The Blueprint design shows graphically that desired outcomes (purposes) frame everything and lead to school design principles facilitative of those outcomes. In other words, “Here are the things we want all learners to achieve and to do and so we need our school to be designed with features like this.”

The heart, the driver, the energy source to achieve this is the integrated and interrelated core of assessment, pedagogy and curriculum. Beyond that, there is a range of further features related to technology, time and space; culture, leadership and professional development; parental partnerships and community relationships.

More of that next time, perhaps.

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • If your school was to do the pie chart activity – the six outcome areas that really matter to you – what would be included? (You could try it as a staff workshop activity.)
  • What scope is there in your school for teachers from different subject disciplines to plan learning together? What could there be?
  • Do you agree with the definition of teaching at the start of this piece? If so, what implications might that have for your teaching or your school?

Creating Better Schools by Design

15th December 2022Website Admin

Creating Better Schools by Design

David Jackson

 

Ask most people to draw a house and nine times out of ten the house they imagine will be a square box, with four square windows, a pitched roof with a chimney, and often some smoke curling into the sky.

We share a mental model — a blueprint — for what a house is and should look like. We don’t stop to wonder:

  • Does our house have to be square or could it be a different shape?
  • Should it be one storey high, or two, or three?
  • How many windows of what size should there be, really?
  • What purpose does the chimney serve?

Our shared ideas about schools are fixed in much the same way.

There are variations, but our mental model for school tends to include classrooms, corridors, rows of desks, students grouped according to age, one-hour lessons, subject teaching, tests, and so on. This model is based on schools designed in the past. We don’t stop to question whether the school, which we are after all drawing in the C21, should be — needs to be — very different from the blueprint created decades ago. We might ask:

  • What ideas about learning are informing the layout of our school? What might classrooms look like if we thought of them as places where great learning can happen?
  • Does all learning need to be packaged into ‘subjects’?
  • Are one-hour lessons the best unit of learning?
  • Is one teacher with 25 students better than two teachers with 50 students?
  • Why are all students assessed at the same time when they mature differently?
  • Do we have to assess by written exams emphasising memory?

… and so on.

Designing a new school for real is a chance to ask questions like these, and to ensure that the new school is more than just an improvement on the existing model.

“Gesher undertook a serious school (re)design process that placed the needs of their students at the heart of decisions about their new school design.”

At Gesher School, staff, students and parents know how badly a change to the model is needed because most of Gesher’s learners have struggled in schools like the one most of us would draw. So, Gesher undertook a serious school (re)design process that placed the needs of their students at the heart of decisions about their new school design.

Gesher was transitioning from a highly successful primary school to becoming an all-through learning community and needed to find a new school building and facilities, recruit staff, create a secondary school curriculum and reframe its mission and identity.

The leaders of Gesher School knew they needed to go way beyond improvements on the existing model, to design a whole new way of thinking about and doing school, in ways that learned from and built on their experience with primary-age children. They asked:

How might we design an all-through school that will offer success, enhanced self-esteem, personal efficacy, and progression opportunities for all our young people? 

Secondly, in doing so, how can we involve multiple stakeholders in our design process?

Thirdly, how might we stand on the shoulders of existing practices around the world?

The design process that Gesher School entered into comprised eight workshops, each involving different stakeholders, which resulted in a school blueprint for:

  • A bold vision and purpose; and
  • A set of values-based design principles; which were
  • Brought to life in plans for a range of innovative features that add up to a very different kind of school.

Upwards of 100 school staff, parents, students, community members, and other local stakeholders contributed to this seriously intentional and inclusive school design process.

Each issue of The Bridge will address an aspect of Gesher’s school redesign process. This issue focuses on the first two of the eight school design workshops that Gesher School undertook, which concerned (i) purpose and (ii) design principles.

(i) Purpose

Gesher’s discussions about purpose started with identifying their ‘non-negotiables’. Non-negotiables tell everyone what is and is not on the table; what is and is not within the scope of the school design team to change. Examples might be ‘no selection by ability’ or ‘the school will be co-education’ or, in Gesher’s case:

  • We are a school for a specific cohort of children with SEND, including language, communication and social pragmatic issues.
  • We are a Jewish faith school.
  • We utilise real-world learning and projects to foster curiosity and connect our young people to authentic issues and problems.

These clear non-negotiables influenced design features relating to Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) provision, to faith observance and understanding, and to the design of curriculum and pedagogy.

A further key defining issue for Gesher to articulate was purpose – the vision and outcomes to which the school community would aspire. Being clear about what the school had to achieve with and for students; about the purpose of learning; about what matters for the community of the school — staff, students and parents – was an essential bedrock of the design process.

Within the current system, aiming for good examination outcomes is a given, and if that was all that mattered, then job done. However, during the workshop, through extensive discussion – and many post-its – it became clear that exam success on its own was not nearly enough. In brief, the outcomes Gesher agreed are that young people should become:

  • Skilled for the future workplace
  • Qualified for the next stage (exam results plus)
  • Independent learners
  • Confident in their sense of self
  • Builders of meaningful relationships
  • Ethical and responsible citizens.

These, one might hope, could be purposes shared by most if not all schools, but two things qualify them as exceptional in Gesher’s context.  The first is the inclusiveness of the intent. They are purposes for all students, regardless of their prior educational history or unique needs.  The second is to remember that Gesher is a school for children with identified SEND needs, most of whom have been unable to thrive in mainstream schools.

“Staff engaged with mini-case studies of interesting and successful schools around the world to draw from them the particular design features that inspired them.”

(ii) Design Principles

Workshop two was exclusively concerned with design principles and involved staff at the school considering  the question: What would be the design principles or features of a school that can confidently achieve these outcomes for all its learners?

Staff engaged with mini-case studies of interesting and successful schools around the world to draw from them the particular design features that inspired them. They used this as a basis to shape their own, then tested the resulting principles they created together using personas of children at Gesher, asking: Would this work and how would it work for Amy or Peter?

Next Time — Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment

Agreement on these three components — the non-negotiables, purposes and design principles — precedes work on designing the more practical features of a school. Clear purposes provide a constant reminder of exactly what we aspire to achieve with and for learners and their families. Design principles provide the guiding architecture that relates to these purposes. They are ‘laws with leeway’ that frame what we do and how we do it. They are also the features that unify and inspire those who work in a school, and they guide and discipline decision-making.

With these three in place, the design process moves to consideration of the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment practices that will be informed by and consistent with the design principles and which will enable every student to achieve the outcome ambitions. That is for next time.

Designing New Schools in the USA

In America, there is a long tradition of creating new school designs. Some of the most successful schools in the world have been created in this way – Expeditionary Learning schools; High Tech High (some of whose resources we share later); Big Picture Learning schools; New Tech Network are all examples. The Gates Foundation alone funded more than 2,500 ‘small school models’ across the United States, and New York alone has 200.

Not all of these new school models have been equally successful, of course. However, their students consistently outperform their peers in conventionally sized and structured high schools with comparable demographics. There are some common design features across the majority of these models — and they are very different from the conventional UK school — they all:

  • Focus on the centrality of relationships and personalising learning — have ‘advisory’, where advisory is the soul of the school, symbolising relational support for students
  • Include project-based learning, an engaging and empowering pedagogical model, which also requires teachers to collaborate as designers of learning
  • Have a pervasive cultural identity and school-level ownership of what matters, including what is assessed and how and by whom it is assessed
  • Facilitate powerful and sustained adult learning.

The Cost of Not Having New Models in the UK…

Not to foster innovation in school design means that we constantly focus on striving to improve the existing school model – a model more than 100 years old and out of date.

It is a model with multiple features crying out for redesign. For example, it has failed to achieve equitable outcomes, or to address socio-economic challenges, or to engage disengaged learners — or to fully engage most learners, for that matter. Nor has it provided teachers with an intellectually challenging profession, or excited and involved parents around the experience of their children.

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • The design process described above is effective applied to existing schools as well as new ones — revisiting purposes and design features together as a prelude to reviewing wider practices.  Might this have value for your school?

  • The review detailed above distilled six clear outcomes that Gesher is committed to evidencing for all learners. Does your school have similar clarity about its purposes?

Redesigning Education: What Can and Should Philanthropic Organisations Do?

15th December 2022Website Admin

Redesigning Education: What Can and Should Philanthropic Organisations Do?

Ali Durban & Paul Ramsbottom OBE, The Wolfson Foundation

Paul Ramsbottom OBE is Chief Executive of The Wolfson Foundation, an independent grant-making charity, funding programmes and activities throughout the UK. The Foundation’s fundamental aim is to improve the civic health of society, mainly through education and research. He is also the Chief Executive of a linked charity, the Wolfson Family Charitable Trust.

Gesher School was delighted to receive a grant from the Wolfson Family Charitable Trust in 2021 to adapt and equip a Maker Space in our building. We value enormously our relationship with Paul and with the Wolfson charities because our values and mission are closely aligned and we recognise the important role that philanthropic organisations like The Wolfson Foundation can play in helping schools who want to do things differently to realise their ambitions.

We asked Paul to share with us his thinking about the role of philanthropy in education in the 21st century. Here’s what he told us…

Discussions about the role of philanthropy in the English education system have tended to polarise around two extreme positions.

At one extreme is the view that education in modern society is the preserve of Government alone, and that there is therefore little or no role for philanthropy. This is a view frequently expressed on social media, often by people who are knowledgeable about or involved in education.

At the other extreme is an articulation of a role for philanthropy that in some ways lets the Government off the hook, by plugging gaps that probably shouldn’t be there in the first place.

In between these two extremes, and in reality, there are at least three important roles that philanthropy plays:

The first is to support innovation in education; to fund schools, colleges and universities to trial new ideas. By being the provider and underwriter of risk capital in the education system, philanthropists enable educators to do things that the Government can’t or won’t do or support.

The second is to fund capital infrastructure projects necessary for ambitious organisations to fulfil elements of their strategic vision, which would otherwise be unachievable. Buildings and equipment are difficult to fund from statutory sources and can rarely be afforded from core funding. Philanthropy can provide the additional funding that organisations need to really allow them to fly.

The third role for philanthropy, beyond funding for innovation or infrastructure, is as part of a wider ecosystem of organisations, including Government, professional educators and civil society, who are stakeholders in education and who work, together and separately, to bring about system change that will benefit children and young people.

Some philanthropists take a campaigning and lobbying approach, which can be extremely effective. The Sutton Trust, for instance, with its focus on education for social mobility,   consistently campaigns for better support in our education system for our most disadvantaged children and young people.

The Wolfson Foundation is not a campaigning organisation; on occasion, however, the Foundation funds research that grows system capacity and capability and contributes significantly to the body of knowledge necessary to support system change.

Recently the Foundation has invested heavily in children and young people’s mental health, with significant funding going to school and community-based initiatives which aim to help children struggling with anxiety and depression.

Already a growing problem, the pandemic exacerbated challenges facing children and young people, who are presenting in higher numbers than ever before with poor mental health. It’s a huge problem facing many Western societies, including our own. However, it is also a problem that is poorly understood. Whilst we might all share some intuition about why this generation of young people seems to be more troubled than previous generations — the prevalence and role of social media, for instance — the reality is that we don’t actually know. Even if our hunch is right, we need evidence to be able to take on social media companies and persuade them to make the necessary changes.

The Wolfson Foundation is funding research into a range of practice approaches that aim to build young people’s resilience to deal with the challenges that life unfortunately throws at us all, as well as improving access to high-quality therapy and clinical support.

An example of this is the new Wolfson Centre for Young People’s Mental Health in Cardiff.  Waiting times in the current system are lamentable and the answer can’t simply be to try and provide more counsellors than ever. In the meantime, children and young people continue to struggle without the help they need.

Philanthropic funding should be a resource for everyone.

We need complete systemic change and there is a role for philanthropy in achieving that, both in terms of the research we can fund and providing support for innovators who are trying different ways of working.

Making Philanthropy Accessible to Everyone

If we truly believe that philanthropy can and should have a role in a modern education system, then it becomes really important that access to philanthropic funding shouldn’t simply be the preserve of schools that happen to have an affluent parent community or have professional or fundraising skills in their governing body. Philanthropic funding should be a resource for everyone.

Over the last couple of years, The Wolfson Foundation has been working with a number of partners to create a completely free framework and toolkit for every school in the country. It’s a kind of A to Z  or ‘How To…’ of fundraising for schools hoping to look, perhaps for the first time, beyond their parents and local communities for financial support for their plans.

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • Is there a project in your community that needs transformation, perhaps a physical learning space or a bold idea?

  • Can you capture why it is so critical to your students, and how it will change their outcomes? Will you be able to evidence this?

  • Have you researched the costs to fund the project and produced a budget to support it?

  • Are you aware of opportunities for philanthropic support in your area?  Is your organisation and proposal eligible for funding? Are there other funding opportunities beyond your local community?

  • Could the framework and toolkit mentioned above be of value to your school?

Faith, Education and SEND: The Forgotten Sector

15th December 2022Website Admin

Faith, Education and SEND: The Forgotten Sector

Sarah Sultman

Lost in History: Since the 1990s there has been a growing debate, both inside and outside academia, about the role faith schools should play in a 21st-century education system and whether or not they should exist at all, with strong and divided opinions both for and against. And within this politically and religiously charged debate, there has been a distinct lack of consideration given to the SEND perspective.

In the UK, policy still does not permit the creation of SEND faith-free schools and when challenged or asked why this is, no one we have met on our journey in the creation of Gesher has been able to give a satisfactory or justified answer — other than to agree that this is indeed the statute. Today in the UK 35% of state-maintained schools are faith-based whilst ‘almost all’ (with no definitive numbers published) private independent schools are aligned to a faith but not necessarily practising faith.

Google ‘SEND faith schools in the UK’ and no list will pop up.

The development of faith schools in the UK is historic, from when cathedrals and monasteries began providing an education to boys who were to become monks and priests in the 6th century, whilst the first schools for children, ‘blind and deaf, epileptic, and mentally and physically disabled’ were only legislated for some 1500 years later, in 1918. For many centuries, those with SEND were not deemed worthy of a formal, or even informal education, so it could reasonably be argued that the lack of consideration given to the SEND faith education community is a symptom of the immaturity of the SEND education system as a whole.   

Parents and schools today are thankfully, in general, far more aspirational for their SEND children. Inclusion and neurodiversity have become part of our everyday vernacular and our attitudes and ideas around SEND education are continuously evolving. We are still learning much about how best to differently educate those who are differently able, yet to date, the faith element simply has not been factored in. Seemingly, this group within our society has, at best, been ignored, or it has been actively decided for them that faith does not or should not play a role in how we educate SEND pupils.

There is the old African saying that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. For those with SEND that village is incredibly important. It extends beyond the school gate to the institutions, places of work, places of worship, and welfare systems in the communities that a young person grows up in. Yet there has been very little research done on the intersection of faith, SEND, education and community with no empirical data freely available on how SEND students feel and relate to their faith, how faith impacts their identity, how it shapes and contributes to their everyday lives and whether they and their families feel that a faith-based education is beneficial for them.

Culture and Community Values Matter

No doubt this is a complex area of study and differing cultures and faiths will have different attitudes and views towards their SEND populations. At Gesher, our Jewish religious perspective informs the type of Jewish culture, ethos and core defining principles of the school. Learning about one’s faith is not only concerned with developing the pupils’ knowledge and understanding of each aspect of their Jewish Heritage but also with developing their love for and commitment to its laws and practices, which include moral and ethical teachings and values. With this ideology at the forefront of our curriculum, Jewish Studies is taught at Gesher not as an academic subject, but as a way of life.

I think it’s been the making of her… without it, I think she would feel quite lost.. it’s become her safe space.

Parents Appreciate its Value

Ron Berger said ‘As a faith-based school, everyone who chooses to send their child to Gesher knows that there is more to life than academics. There is the human character of who you are as a human being. You choose to send your child to a faith-based school because your faith and your culture is something that matters to you because you want your kids to embrace values that you care about. And those values mean being a good person.’   

For one parent, who knew that her son’s Jewish identity was important to him, it was a key factor in looking for a school. ‘It’s one of the reasons we chose Gesher in the first place. Because he enjoyed the Jewish side of things, we wanted somewhere that would meet his needs, and also meet his religious beliefs as well.’ For another parent, the faith element of the school, whilst initially seen as ‘a nice incentive’ rather than a non-negotiable, has come to be considered a crucial part of her daughter’s education. ‘I think it’s been the making of her… without it, I think she would feel quite lost.. it’s become like her safe space.’

The value of community permeates throughout the school and informs a large part of our practice. At Gesher, whilst we celebrate the individual: “…for the mind of each is different from that of the other, just as the face of each is different from that of the other.” (Talmud Brachot 58a),  being part of a community means looking out for others, taking responsibility for each other and coming together in unity as a collective: “do not separate yourself from the community” (Hillel).

The power of community transforms the individual and at Gesher, we actively foster community amongst the pupils, the staff, our local Jewish community, the wider Jewish community and the world in the form of Tikun Olam which literally means to repair and improve the world. This concept shapes many of our programmes around social justice, giving to others and caring for our environment. We view school as just one of the structures that supports the young people that attend, so we must recognise that we do not operate in a silo, and the measure of our pupils’ success should not be in isolation. Rather it is our responsibility to understand the communities from which our students come and to work with them.

In a recent discussion with parents, the topic of community was featured as an important factor. All parents, regardless of their religious orientation, spoke in a similar way about what it was like being part of the school’s Jewish community. One said, ‘You feel you’ve got a family, it’s an extended family, you know you are all in it together.’ It would be an oversimplification to suggest that this is exclusively down to the religious orientation of the school but it does certainly contribute greatly to a feeling of belonging that extends beyond the school gates. Other unifying factors, such as parents’ collective experience of having a neurodiverse child are undoubtedly also at play. However, within the discussion around the theme of community, parents regularly mentioned the role that religious festivals play in building and fostering this feeling. Talking about last year’s Passover celebrations, one parent said, ‘You feel involved… everyone [children and parents] is experiencing it together’.

For many, faith matters. For SEND young people too. They will need support to access the texts and tenets and practices and celebrations of their family’s and community’s faith so that inclusion for them is meaningful and supportive. It is a part of their learning and they have learning needs that we should strive to meet.

End Note: To quote Lord Rabbi Sacks: ‘Children who are confident in their identity, know their people’s story, are familiar with its literature and at home in its practices, understand their responsibilities to the wider society and practise the values of tzedakah (charity) and chessed (kindness) are at peace with themselves and with the world. They become a credit to the Jewish people and an asset to Britain. We can ask no more; we can do no less.‘

 

In one recent school project our year 8 students were asked to design a T-shirt which conveys their identity. What makes them who they are? How important is their name? What are the influences that shape their character? For these particular students, faith proved relevant to how they view themselves and contextualise themselves in their world at large.

For my T-shirt, I have made a design which shows my outer and inner self. My outer self is what people see when they look at me, I have drawn a self-portrait of half of my face. I have brown hair and when I am happy, this shows on my face by having a wide smile. My inner self and the other half of my face is a football as well as my future career as a footballer. Inside the ball, I have written the emotions I feel most on the inside which are happiness, excitement and sadness. I also added feeling nervous as this is how I feel before I play a football game. I have also drawn a Kippah, dreidel and Torah as this represents my Jewish identity which is very important to me. — Shamai (Year 8)

My inspiration for this project was to focus on what my passion is and to me, that’s cars. Based on this, I split my face in two and used one half to show how people see me on the outside and the other half to show how I like to be seen by the world. I did this by replacing some of my facial features with my favourite parts of a car. Also, I replaced my brain with a twin-turbo V8 engine representing the power of thinking. As well as cars, I’m very passionate about making people laugh. Coming up with jokes is one of my favourite hobbies and I can make my friends feel better with my jokes whenever they’re hurt or feeling sad. To show this, I gave myself a big smile and added a ‘HAHAHA’ over my head. Being Jewish is a very big part of my identity and it is something I am very proud of so I drew a star of David in the middle of my eye to show my unique Jewish perspective on life. This piece represents my favourite parts about myself and shows everyone what makes me, me. — Ariel (Year 8)

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • Having read this article, what benefits are claimed from having a unifying faith, culture and belief system (across school, family, community)? How might a non-faith-based school generate an equivalent sense of unity?

  • What arguments might you make that there should or shouldn’t be faith-based SEND schools?

Practical Personalisation

15th December 2022Website Admin

Practical Personalisation

Loni Bergqvist

Loni was a teacher at High Tech High before coming to the UK to support the REAL-Projects programme in 2014. Since then, as founder and partner of Imagine If, Loni has worked with schools around the world to re-imagine education. Her project-based learning expertise has been used in several international initiatives and yet she finds time to be a source of friendship and expertise to Gesher.

Differentiation is Not Personalisation…

Ditch the word differentiation. Never use it again. Forget it exists.

By default, using the term differentiation causes us to look first at and make assumptions about what’s different about students before designing assessment or a lesson. We weigh these differences against what’s seen as ‘normal’ and by doing so, we categorise without really properly getting to understand individual students. Differentiation is a quick and inadequate way to streamline the process of knowing or categorising our students. We assign them labels so that we feel as though we understand their needs… but do we really?

Personalisation, on the other hand, begins with the unwavering belief that all students are capable of excellence. All. But, in order really to live out this philosophy, it takes a commitment to dig deep into children who enter the walls of the classroom. Personalisation starts with deep understanding. It’s not a term that is used exclusively with students who struggle to read or have learning challenges, or who are identified as being gifted. Personalisation should be done for every single student, such that we can give all learners access to their gifts and mitigations for their challenges.

This is not an over-idealisation. In adulthood, people find, navigate and express their gifts – intellectual, practical, emotional, and spiritual. We identify with and gain respect for what we can do or enjoy doing. Schools have tended to emphasise, for many learners, what they can’t do.

Personalisation starts in a different and more optimistic place.

Idea One: Create a community of learners

Creating a community where everyone (regardless of perceived academic ability) feels included, valued and comfortable is essential for all students and especially necessary for students who may have been marginalised in the past and felt excluded. At High Tech High, for example, they have a simple mantra: We expect all learners to be successful and to produce beautiful work. It is the responsibility of the entire class to help them do that. THAT is a community of learners.

Things we can do to create these learning communities

Facilitative of Classroom Culture:

  • Knowing students individually
  • Allowing for student voice
  • Teachers openly being learners in the classroom, too
  • Mixed groupings – gender, experience, abilities
  • Encouragement of risk-taking and celebrating it publicly
  • One-on-one conversations with students
  • Celebration, recognition, and affirmation activities.

Techniques, Tools, and Activities:

  • Critique of work activities using peer feedback
  • Appreciations share-out at the end of a class
  • Individual reflection – and perhaps journal use
  • Use of protocols that scaffold learning and contributions
  • Question wall (a Parking Lot for questions and ideas)
  • Think-Pair-Share
  • Ice breakers and opportunities for students to share with each other (non-academic)
  • Show & tell activities that highlight student passions and interests
  • Variety of activities that necessitate different talents (Socratic Seminar, World Cafe)
  • Display of ALL beautiful work where students have invested, regardless of whether it’s ‘the best’.

Idea Two: Focus on what students CAN do, first.

It’s easy to start the year by looking at student deficits. However, any student who has struggled with school in the past, knows whether they’re perceived as being ‘good’ or ‘not good’ at school. The most important thing is to build confidence in students by examining and recognising what students can do, and what they’re already good at, to provide more access points to help with areas that need development.

Ways we can focus on what students can do:

  • Teacher/student interviews
  • Be flexible in the ways students show understanding (dictation, partner writing, pictures, etc.)
  • Take a ‘learning preferences’ survey and design lessons or learning pathways around different types of learners
  • Activate prior knowledge and related knowledge before new knowledge
  • Ask them: ‘What are you comfortable with? What do you struggle with?’ They know
  • Invite other students to celebrate what they value about peers
  • Some of the strategies in Idea One.

Personalisation begins with the unwavering belief that all students are capable of excellence.

Idea Three: Provide scaffolds for students to reach higher. Don’t lower expectations.

When creating scaffolds for students to complete a desired task, it is essential the support matches with the need of an individual student. Determine what the task is, what an individual student may need in terms of support to reach the desired task and provide resources accordingly. We do this instinctively when a student has a visible, physical barrier – a broken leg; a sight impairment – but we are less intuitive about more generic or subtle support strategies.

Ways we can scaffold learning:

  • Graphic organisers (give the option to all students, some will need them without ever officially getting support)
  • Modify assignments to do less if it’s the same skill
  • Allow dictation to a teacher or another student
  • Partner work
  • ‘Workshop Groups’ with a particular task as a theme. (Open these to all students who may need support! They can also be done after school.)
  • Chalk Talk (Protocol available here)
  • Think-Pair-Share (Resources available here)
  • Include visuals with text
  • Untimed Learning Stations, so that students can go at their own pace in a supported context. You can combine this with Daily Checklists.

Idea Four: Honour student interests

This one is really important. Those old enough to remember Barry Hines’s novel (and film) “Kes” will remember the young boy who received no affirmation in school, but who kept, trained and flew a kestrel outside school.  When an empathetic teacher joined him in the fields near his house to watch, he was awestruck.

Our students have rich lives outside our classrooms – they fish, they look after siblings, they go to evening classes, they have collecting hobbies, they are masters at online games, they play the guitar… And the more we can do to bring these experiences into school, the better chance we have of honouring who our students are, what they are passionate about and what they are skilled and knowledgeable about.

Ways we can involve the interests of students:

  • Choice in assignments (what to write about, the theme of a project, etc.)
  • RAFT (Role, Audience, Format, Topic) Resources here: https://www.edutoolbox.org/rasp/840.
  • Conduct home visits and meet with students and their families
  • Have Show and Tell each Friday with different students presenting each time
  • Give open-ended projects where students can include their own ideas for products and exhibitions.

 

End Note: Personalisation, then, is basically about designing learning tasks and environments and classroom culture which optimise every student’s chances of success. It is both as simple and as difficult as that. And if the range of suggested ideas above seems daunting, remember two things:

  • Just as we need to know our learners well to optimise their learning, so we have to know ourselves — and what we feel confident about and where we need help.
  • Teaching is not an individual sport – or at least it shouldn’t be. Teaching with other teachers and/or with support assistants can create a context for dialogue. So, too, can the design and planning process, in which peer critique is as valuable for teachers as it is for students.

Inspired By… Profile of Another School

15th December 2022Website Admin

Inspired By… Profile of Another School

Julie Temperley

In each issue of The Bridge, we will be sharing stories from schools around the world where exciting new learning opportunities are inspiring and challenging us. In this issue, we take a look at Riverside School in India, which was created using a human-centred design approach and where exploring identity and what it means to be part of a diverse community helps learners develop a strong sense of self and agency.

This story is just one of many you can find in FutureSchool: How schools around the world are applying learning design principles for a new era, by Valerie Hannon with Julie Temperley, Routledge, 2022.

Riverside School, Ahmedabad, India

Kiran Bir Sethi, the founder of Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India, came into education with a designer’s mindset, determined to create an engaging and empowering learning environment for her young son, who was becoming disillusioned with school at an early age. Drawing on her design training, Sethi’s focus in conceiving her school was not: What is the curriculum and how should we teach it? but: Who are the learners and what do they need to learn?

A focus on learners — their strengths, interests and needs — led Sethi inevitably to contemplate the implications for learning of the unique challenges and opportunities that each learner faces and the diversity of experience of learners and their communities which follow them into school. Here too, Sethi drew on her own experience of arriving at design school where, for the first time, she met people whose lives and perspectives were vastly different from her own.

I was awed by the sheer diversity in religion, culture, demographics and sexuality on the campus. It was here that I began to believe in inclusion as a right and not the privilege of a select few. — Kiran Bir Sethi, 2018

Through their student admissions and teacher recruitment policies, and over a period of ten years, Riverside explicitly set out to create a ‘mini India’ amongst the 390 students in their school, ensuring representation from all communities, demographics, religious affiliations and gender and welcoming learners with special needs ‘beyond any labels and biases’.

With diversity and inclusion so prominent in the school’s design and ethos it is perhaps unsurprising that identity soon became an explicit focus for learning, and Riverside’s commitment to inclusion found expression in their Inclusive Campus Programme (ICP).

Awareness, compassion and engagement are at the heart of the Inclusive Campus Programme.

Centring on nine aspects of identity, the ICP is made up of a range of workshops and experiences that continue throughout a student’s time at Riverside. The nine aspects, categorised under the headings of mind, body and heritage are:

  • Mind — personality, gender and orientation
  • Body — ability, age and appearance
  • Heritage — religions and beliefs, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic class

Awareness, compassion and engagement are at the heart of the ICP. From stories that challenge gender stereotypes for younger children to intentional conversations between a gay teacher and older students; from a collaborative redesign by students of school spaces to accommodate a wheelchair when a disabled student joined the school to regular visits to heritage sites and culturally significant spaces around the city, the ICP explicitly and systematically engages students with alternative perspectives and experiences to challenge them to reflect deeply on their own identity and the role they might play in the world.

Learners are encouraged to think of themselves as individuals in the world; agents with skills and purpose and a will to change things for the better for others.

As learners progress through the school, the ethos of inclusion and the exploration of identity expands beyond the school walls and out into the real world, to support learners to contemplate what other people’s lives are like and how the privilege — not the entitlement — of an education might equip them as Riverside graduates to help others. Learners are encouraged to think of themselves as individuals in the world; agents with skills and purpose and a will to change things for the better for others. “Doing good and doing well” is the Riverside mantra.

Learners stay in rural communities where the relative luxury of city living — sanitation, technology, transport — is missing from everyday life. They immerse themselves in alternative realities, learning how agricultural workers and craftspeople make a living. And how a life without material wealth might be enriching in other ways.

In their final year, learners assume responsibility for leading a real and urgent change, becoming the CEO of a changemaker programme to make a positive difference in people’s lives. This leadership development is the final stage in growing their confidence and humility to take on ethical and practical challenges as adults and to become a force for good in the world.

None of the focus and time spent on identity comes at the expense of academic excellence. Riverside students have consistently outperformed the top 10 schools in maths, science and English and the school has been ranked the No.1 day school in Gujarat for several years.

FutureSchool: How schools around the world are applying learning design principles for a new era by Valerie Hannon with Julie Temperley

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • What most attracts you in this mini-case study?

  • What most challenges you?

  • Could you use this as a think-piece with your staff?