Centre stage papers – Days 3, 4 & 5: Extending the vision

Deepening support services for learners

 

Much has been written – and spoken – about the personalisation of learning experiences for students. High levels of energy and attention have been applied to providing tailored curricula, wider ranging choices and opportunities to build on skills and talents to gain academic reward in a non-age-related manner. Rapidly maturing student voice initiatives further support these developments.

The key next steps in this area include the genuine co-construction of systems and structures that are required to fully support the modern learner. There is little doubt that the greatest capacity to increase the pace, breadth and depth of learning lies with learners themselves, through sustained engagement, operating autonomously within a relevant, supportive environment. The eternal frustrations of consumers being telephonically directed to ‘select option 3’ or (more significantly) ‘0 to speak to an advisor’ are no different to those experienced by a learner bombarded with offers of help and resources from all quarters. The key roles of ‘new’ support services are to educate and enable the learner/consumer to understand what help is required, how and where to access it and to increase capacity for high quality, face to face support, in addition to wider interaction.

This paper focuses upon the interactions between the changing roles of pastoral leaders; the use of technology to provide engaging learning opportunities and wider services for learners and other stakeholders; the importance of links beyond school and the impact of deeper engagement in the evaluation and development of systems and processes relating to learning.

New technologies offer opportunities to remodel internal and external educational working practices and to maximise efficient resource use to personalise learning experiences for all students. ICT stimulates the growth, sustenance and decentralisation of wider networks, focused upon educational development, action research and the growth of intellectual and knowledge capital. This offers an enhanced personalised professionalism for all involved in education and stimulates a reflective, accountable and open-minded approach to school improvement. Clarity of focus on learning is essential to create the conditions for success.

Philip Morant School and College is a very large school of almost 1600 students, employing almost 200 teaching and support staff. High quality communication is a key challenge within any organisation of this size, as is the distribution of leadership and management responsibilities. By sub-dividing our school into faculty and house (pastoral) groupings the school is split into more manageable chunks, within which students and staff relate to personal and group identities.

In an effort to address some of the needs outlined above, the roles of pastoral leaders have been sharply redefined as student progress coordinators, who have a keen focus on academic progress at all levels. In many respects, this does not differ from the approach of the most effective heads of house. However, it is a conscious attempt to move conversations from the ‘tea and sympathy’ approach very much into the arena of learning. There are, of course, difficult distinctions to make here and the value of social development work in supporting learning must not be underestimated.

Increased use of student progress tracking data by all staff, at student level, is changing the nature of the learning conversations between staff and students. This enables students to negotiate and set much more focused targets for improvement, emphasising the role of self and peer assessment. This same data is used to generate minimum and potential (stretch) targets for all students, to illustrate current performance and is aggregating as a ‘learner’s reference view’ for all students via student planners and online. A strong impact has been seen through dialogue between students and form tutors, who have a key monitoring role, alongside student progress coordinators who support students to review and electronically update individual learning plans.

Narratives have become much more sophisticated and both teachers and students report more reciprocal interactions, within which interim goals and landmarks are easily defined. These interactions have become much more ‘progress focused’, cycling with our whole-school data collection regime. Student feedback indicates that these combinations are having a positive impact. It is vital not to underestimate the extent to which students think about their own learning and self-analyse performance data. This ‘internalisation of standards’ indicates growing levels of metacognitive control. That students may choose not to do this openly, or publicise the fact, does not remove the potential impact of this action.

Accountability is further supported through discussion between student progress coordinators and the head teacher, extending to discussions between students and parents, based upon web-available data.

ICT is a key strategic lever in maximising the development and spread of good practice, both within our school and through exchange with wider networks. These networks are essential to support and extend the work of students and staff. A current collaboration is focused upon involving students in judging the quality of learning experiences and effecting improvement. This is further supported through the developing strategic roles of students within our systems of curriculum pathway renewal and standards monitoring.

Collaborative web-based stakeholder communities have been established for students, whole staff and staff sub-groups, governors, parents and partner schools. Our stakeholders are increasingly using RSS facilities to obtain latest information and our ‘news feeds’.

A great advantage of a web based system is the ease of access wherever and whenever internet access is possible. This offers the potential to extend the learning time, mode and method and we are developing ways in which we can meet students on their own technological ground, employing SMS, blogs and email. Web-based academic mentoring and the storage of substantive details of support given to a targeted group of students has saved huge amounts of time and proved invaluable in assessing student progress towards short-term targets, introducing a motivating, individualised focus and further promoting learning conversations.

We are involved in wide-ranging collaborative work throughout our extended connected learning community, linking curriculum and new technologies through activities such as science and mathematics master classes, cross-phase scientific investigations, sports festivals, a Control Technology Roadshow and Technology Activity Days. We broker the provision of electronic languages learning resources for primary schools within, and beyond, our region and are using electronic channels to share expertise in 'learning to learn' and the development of alternative curricula. Initiatives such as the incorporation of year 6 students as users of our Learning Gateway offer students greater personalisation and security at the time of transition. The developing use of electronic individual learning plans to conduct personalised learning self-reviews will add to teachers’ understanding of students' capabilities, prior to joining secondary school. The impact of consistent ICT application and hardware availability are currently the subject of further action research. In summary, we are using the 'new' technologies to aid communication, and provide wider and easier access to learning resources. We encourage students to be more reflective, autonomous learners and the support services outlined within this paper are designed to accelerate skills in this area.

Pilot research to extend assessment, offering students elements of choice linked to learning styles and personally identified areas of need, is currently underway in two faculty areas. The framework of this initiative is designed to encourage autonomy, creativity and imagination within learning, challenging students to go beyond minimum requirements and allow sufficient time for meaningful team and project work. Initial outcomes are extremely positive and, together with feedback from our outstandingly successful project learning week of July 2006, are stimulating our work on developing flexible curriculum pathways. In addition, our next timetable will include sufficient flexibility to allow ongoing project work, extended interaction with form tutors and the opportunity for students to work beyond conventional groupings. We are also considering how ‘vertical tutor groups’ may best meet students’ needs, supported by the ability for students to complete qualifications when they are ready, rather than in age-defined cohorts.

Our community newsletter is available online, in both text and audio format. Together with our ‘infoweb’ display screen network and Technology College Hall of Fame, this showcases student achievements. Feedback confirms that this celebratory atmosphere is very important to students, is a key motivator and builds confidence for learning. We have extended our provision to provide additional informational messages. Students particularly like the competitive edge of graphics illustrating weekly house point comparisons. Our environmentally focused challenge to tutor groups to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is also very popular. Nominations for our gifted and talented register are instantly achieved through our Learning Gateway framework, enabling rapid attention to be drawn to specific curriculum needs and appropriate action taken.

New technologies are also enabling international student partnerships, such as Australian e-penpals and iDAM (International Design and Make), designed to simulate modern design and manufacture processes and encourage greater international partnership working for students. The ability to produce high quality, real products is a key motivating factor.

Individual learning plans support our work to develop a curriculum to meet individual learning needs and connect parents more closely to the process of academic review, encouraging independent learning. Further work with VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol, ie, internet telephony), digital audio and online competitions reaffirms our efforts to provide a technological framework, which engages and links to students' social learning experiences.

These approaches are designed to maximise energy for learning and the climate for reflection and improvement. The work of students in our ICT Innovations Group stimulates new approaches and is a good model of students driving learning developments. This approach is extended through subject student focus groups and mutually supportive peer coaching.

Technology encourages students to evaluate and add maturity to their learning process and to plan and act for further improvements. Each student is developing an electronic ‘My Personal Learning Space’, linking analysis to assessment data and its use to support school-based learning.

Services for parents are designed to support student learning, enhance the availability of information regarding our school and to streamline communication. We are further developing the online ‘learners’ view’ of collated performance, personal academic targets and planning information. This is designed to assist parents in providing personalised support that is very much in tune with that provided in school, working from the same data sets, thus energising wider support for students. RSS feeds, together with our correspondence archive, enables parents to obtain letters electronically, to replace missing or damaged correspondence and to receive prior notification that important documents are en route! This encourages learning conversations between student and parent. A fully searchable parents’ calendar integrated with the school calendar, enables effective planning.

Our supportive web architecture encourages staff to deepen both their own professional learning experiences and those for students and re-emphasises our development as a ‘learning community’. The momentum of self-directed innovation has increased and our central community area has become an invaluable resource for all staff, hosting a weekly newsletter, a library of forms, a virtual pigeon-hole, a staff handbook, and much more. An electronic teaching and learning bulletin provides staff with up to date information, ‘top tips’, means of further collaboration and support.

This support is essential as we challenge and support colleagues to deepen learning experiences for students. In addition, work is underway to provide wider external access to our ideas, resources and services, within and beyond the networks of which we are currently members. We hope to spread those aspects of our practice that art considered useful as widely as possible and to cross-fertilise our work with excellence from elsewhere. We are also using new technologies to create and support a cross-school group of student researchers. These students have a brief to investigate and publish a route-map towards more engaging learning.

Our experience confirms that the interactions between the emerging themes of engagement, responsibility, autonomy, confidence and maturity are crucial in enabling students to advance learning. We are also convinced that genuine co-construction of learning, in partnership with students, provides the fertile atmosphere within which these themes can flourish. It is therefore incumbent upon us to manage resources of environment, systems and time, including the support which we can garner from wider networks beyond the school boundary, to enable this tailored coaching.

Technology can play a key role in releasing time for such learning conversations but, as we remodel our approach and support mechanisms, we must become more adept at discarding outmoded systems and practices and to develop new styles and standards of learning leadership. Consistent, evidence-based interaction must become the norm, with ‘academic’ and ‘pastoral’ approaches fused so firmly that it becomes impossible to classify performance support solely in either category.

These are perhaps the greatest challenges of all in organisations that are all about people, as one person’s anachronism is another’s sacred cow. True partnership with students will be crucial in ensuring that we both ‘innovate and abandon’ in the areas of maximum positive impact and leverage, resulting in support mechanisms that encourage all students to develop the capacity to deepen their own learning.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr Simon Brennand (Bachelor of Science with honours; PGCE: Post Graduate Certificate in Education; MA: Master of Arts, Strategic Educational Management; FRSA: Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; and NPQ: National Professional Qualification for Headship) is Deputy Headteacher at the Philip Morant School and College, in Colchester, Essex, UK. He is educated to honours degree level in agricultural science, has a higher degree in strategic educational management. He is a chemistry subject specialist. Prior to embarking upon a career in education, Mr Brennand worked in land-based and equine industries. Within education, he has held pastoral and curriculum leadership positions and current responsibilities include whole-school strategic developments in curriculum, ICT, Technology College and Leading Edge status. Mr Brennand is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), arising out of his curriculum development work within the Opening Minds initiative. He is a member of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust Futures Vision ‘think and action tank’. He takes a keen interest in educational trends and research in Australia and New Zealand and was a delegate at the iNet/VASSP (Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals) conference in Melbourne, in July 2004. Mr Brennand has visited a wide variety of schools in the ACT, New South Wales and Victoria and maintains working and research partnerships with Australian education professionals.

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