This term we have been reviewing our teaching and learning, reflecting on our effect, identify as well as strengths and focus for development moving forward. It was important for SLT and myself that this was done collaboratively as recent evidence has demonstrated this has the biggest impact on pupils. It is important to clarify at this stage that Skippers has created a safe, secure and happy environment which is the essential foundation we build our teaching and learning initiatives on.
John Hattie, eminent Professor of Education, and his team presented back in 2016 the number one influence related to pupil achievement is Collective Teacher Efficacy. Collective efficacy, originally named by psychologist Albert Bandura, was defined as “a group’s shared belief in its conjoint capability to organise and execute the courses of action required to produce given levels of attainment”. Please see below for his extensive list of what are the biggest impacts on your child’s achievement.
In John Hattie’s studies he found that the zone of desired effects on pupils’ outcomes is small at 0.2, medium at 0.4 and large above 0.6 and as you can see below Collective Teacher Efficacy is 1.57! The evidence clearly suggests that it is the collaboration of teachers’ shared beliefs and actions that affects pupils’ achievement most highly. This appears to be counter intuitive as common perception is teachers work alone in a classroom with the door firmly shut.
This is not the way we work at Skippers, we create time in our staff meetings to focus on this. We have an environment here for productive teacher collaboration by initially collaborating and agreeing on teaching goals across the whole school. In our phase groups we analyse and reflect against these goals specific to the age groups we teach. We followed this up with a series of observations conducted by SLT as well as their peers, discussions and book based monitoring to collate the evidence to demonstrate our progress against the goals we have set and the impact of them on our pupils’ outcomes.
We have included in this process the people who are most heavily involved in all we do, our pupils. All pupils from reception to Year 8 completed a survey focusing on these agreed goals and we followed these up with pupil interviews to delve deeper into certain areas. We have also used this in conjunction with previous surveys to ascertain progress in our pupils’ confidence, outcomes and how they see themselves as a learner, therefore analysing the impact of our initiatives. As you can see we also include our pupils in the process . Could this be something new, Collective School Efficacy?
This process has been productive and insightful and will allow us to improve our teaching and learning through Collective Teacher Efficacy / Collective School Efficacy, the biggest influence on your child’s achievement. And as we said above this is built on the incredibly strong foundations here which are safety, security and happiness.
Phillip Makhouli
Categories: School Blog
