Interview transcript

head teacher

Extract from an interview with a head teacher

© Keith S Taber: this material is not to be copied or retained after use, and should not be passed on to any other person.

Interviewer: Dr Keith Taber (KST)

Respondent: Headteacher (H)

Involvement in a research network

KST: …So one of the things is to your knowledge what research activities are going on in school at the moment?

H: For the minute I believe we have (staff member) completed some work on the relationship between achievement and age. (staff member) and (staff member) completed some work on ethnic minority students and (staff member) did some work on ICT. That is I believe the three that we have running just now. (staff member), I think has also completed one but not I think when she was here at this school. I maybe wrong about that. (staff member) also ran one in parallel with a girl called (staff member), who left. She’s now gone to another school as Head of Science and they did some on gifted and talented.  [see transcription conventions]

KST: Were they all for these BPR scholarship records?

H: Yes.

KST: …what structure do you have in place in school at the moment to support people who want to do research within the school?

H: Well, there were none until we set up these structures with the SUPER project so we have a steering group which consists of (members of staff). A larger steering group and (staff member) has now subset that into a smaller, instant response team with himself, Geoff and Pam, who are focussing down on current work going on and targeting new people to get them on board. (staff member)’s also given a presentation for the whole staff and given the SUPER outline - what our aims and ethos of the research is all about. The short answer is we’re in the process of setting up support structures.

KST: Yes, reasonable. So what’s your perception of the role of the Best Practitioner Research Scholarships can have?

H: Well, I think they can have quite a wide role in different senses. Perhaps the noble thing to say is it can bring schools to work together. I’m yet to be convinced that’s going to happen but I’m open to the possibility. My more utilitarian interest is that it will focus - I think what will already be good practitioners on good practice. I think the people who opt to do these things are likely to already be quite successful because of their interest in further reflection and development but my vision will be that in perhaps a year’s time or so we may have 4 or 5 research projects which will perhaps fertilise an INSET day where my teachers talk to my teachers about things they’ve found out and creating part of our best practice spreading agenda, which is pretty much the central part of our school development.

KST: Right, okay. Central to the NLC in their research threads, so we’ve got these three research threads, how to do you see, I mean obviously (school) for context, firstly the work on independence and learning?

H: Really, critical. We’ve done some work already on assessment for learning which is coming through to part of the Key Stage 3 strategy which we picked up before that strategy hit us actually. I’d already done quite a lot of work through enrichment and our challenge programme on learning styles and really developing meta-cognition for learners, so it’s at the very heart of what I want to do. Our teaching and learning policy which we wrote about 18 months ago also looks at that, looks at independent learning as being the key to developing learning so really Keith I want to try and thread the whole thing together to be a coherent school-based operational plan really, which has all we professionals looking how children learn and actually how we learn as adults as well but then beyond the theory moving that into practice and actually seeing that working in the classroom day to day. We’re not there yet. I think we’re well in with the theory now, the accelerative learning cycles, some of the learning styles work. It’s happening piece-meal around the school, it’s not coherent and that’s one of my big aims for this project.

KST: So at the moment would you say that it’s just touching a minority of pupils and minority of classes or most of them you could almost say something at the moment.

H: Really hard to say. If you take something like, for example, mind mapping, one thing out of the blue. If you were to introduce mind mapping across a year group and say we’re teaching this through a pastoral programme now, a good number of the kids in any year group would say ‘we’ve done this’ and a good number wouldn’t know what you were talking about and it would depend entirely on the interests and knowledge of the individual teachers. Instinctively I’d guess, you know, if you’re looking at entitlement coverage, we’re looking at about 20-40% of kids who get this stuff if you’re lucky and get the right teachers. You may have more but that’s not good enough is it? We need a common set of expectations really about what children are going to be asked to do.

KST: But that figure is significantly more than it would have been a few years ago.

H: Yes, definitely. At my last school I created a Learn to Learn course which was an hour a week for a year in year 8, which was very successful. More successful with the brighter children which was unfortunate really because it was very much not orientated towards - well it wasn’t not orientated towards them but it was supposed to be a way of allowing more children to understand their learning and to be more independent but it went very, very well and is still running in that school 4 or 5 years later. It didn’t export to this school and this school wasn’t ready for it actually and you know how hard it is to take a good idea from one school and to just fast forward - you know, it just doesn’t work that way so we went back to basics and regenerated the interest in a different way and that really has come through a Teaching and Learning policy and the Assessment for Learning policy but there is still a missing piece which I think might evolve as part of the research actually. So, you know, it’s never a job done, is it? You’ve got to create the idea, you’ve got to create the belief and understanding and then most importantly you’ve got to wrap it into your induction and training processes because year on year with a school this size you can lose 4 or 5 new enthusiasts every year who go off to be promoted elsewhere and what have you so you need every teacher coming in to know what our Teaching and Learning policy says, what our Assessment Policy says, what the school’s vision is for independent learning and at least 2 of those things have already happened but the whole thing doesn’t happen yet so that’s part of my development process. I’m just in the process of finishing the creation of what we’re calling our [school name] Best Practice Model which will be a collection of the 4 or 5 key policy documents, could be 6 or 7 key policy documents, which all teachers will be expected to read and revisit every year and that is not something I’ve written. We’ve written them in different ways. The teachers have written but what they define, taken in their entirety, is what a good student should do at this school and what they should do and what they should have at the end of their time here and how that should happen.

KST: So reading between the lines - or this may be more explicit than that - but this is something that was happening, was going to happen, was very much a priority anyway and the fact that this particular project has particular thread to it is something you can latch on to and use to sort of develop your ideas, but really probably isn’t facilitating very much because this was something that was definitely on the agenda anyway.

H: I think it accelerated and I think the reason I wasn’t interested in - I shouldn’t say this really - I wasn’t interested in the SUPER project for the sake of research, I saw it as a tool (unclear) my agenda which was raising the awareness of the teaching and learning issues so it was just a really nice opportunity to jump on a band wagon that was already going the way I wanted to go so, yes, just an expedient (unclear) [see transcription conventions]

KST: Okay, what about the Student Voice thread?

H: Very interested in that. It’s more of a - it’s a newer area for me. It’s something I’m very pleased with again to have identified here because it’s not something we do very well here. We have school councils which go through the normal motions of the school council - need better toilets, need a swimming pool, you know, that sort of stuff but we don’t really engage with our consumers in helping them shape their own learning process. We’ve got some work going on now with (staff member) whose working with the sixth formers to help Year 8 with their learning but I would like to go quite a lot further now and I’ve been toying with the idea for a couple of years now of having what I call a Children’s Curriculum Committee. You know, we have an adult, we have a Governors’ Curriculum Committee and we have a Middle Managers Committee which deals with the curriculum so you’ve got a strategic body, you’ve got a managerial body. We’ve got a teachers’ group called the Talent Group which looks at all the teaching and learning issues but we don’t have anything below that so the people who are actually supposed to be doing the learning have no say at all in the process and you know, you’d clearly identify that as a gap wouldn’t you? What I don’t really know is how to do it and that’s one of the - you know I talked about doing some research so that’s one of the things I’d be really interested in setting up, you know, how do you effectively go about finding out what children think and then doing something about it.

…

(from SUPER project:

McLaughlin, C., Black-Hawkins, K., Brindley, S., McIntyre, D., & Taber, K. S. (2006). Researching Schools: Stories from a Schools-University Partnership for Educational Research. Abingdon: Routledge.)

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