What is the organisational culture (collective values/principles) that underpins your practice? How would you contribute to fostering a positive professional environment in your community of practice?
The organisational culture of our school very much focused on meeting the needs of the emerging adolescents we teach. We aware that students of this age are going through a period of change and are finding their way from childhood towards adulthood. In this, we are trying to develop their independence and encourage positive decision making in a supportive environment. As a staff we are encouraged to build positive relationships with our students in order to help them reach their full potential. We also work collectively as a school community to support each other in meeting those needs.
In order to contribute to fostering a positive professional environment I ensure that I am developing positive relationships with the students and with the staff. In terms of the staff, this means sharing resources and ideas, providing support, helping solve problems where required. The better you get to know your students and colleagues, the better able you are to support them.
What are the current issues that you face in your community of practice? How would your community of practice address them?
One of the biggest challenges for our cluster at the moment is creating our innovative learning environment and developing a coherent, future focused learning programme for our students. We have the problem of how we go about creating this programme but also the challenge of our perception among the rest of the school. We have given the students much more choice about what they do and how they do it and others in the school have commented that it appears chaotic and lacking discipline. Our way of addressing these issues are through educating and involving the rest of the staff in what we are doing and why we are doing it. By engaging others in the conversations about our learning programme we hope to bring them into the community, enable them to learn about what we're doing and also hopefully get further ideas from them about what changes we could make. Developing a sense of what Stoll and Fink (cited in Stoll, 1998) describe as collegiality or a sense that "we're working on this together" (Stoll, 1998) should help to engage the wider school staff and mean that they're involved, rather than critiquing from the outside. It will also help develop a sense of openness - "we can discuss our differences" (Stoll , 1998) as ideas can be properly discussed in an open forum.
Another issue we are facing as a school community is how to better manage behaviour of our students. In the last year we have had a number of staff changes throughout the school and as an intermediate school, half of our school population changes every year. In order to better support our students to make positive choices we've implemented the Positive Behaviour for Learning programme (PB4L). This has very much been a school-wide initiative which has incorporated a number of Stoll and Fink's influencing cultural norms of school improvement (cited in Stoll, 1998), particularly : “Shared goals - “we know where we’re going”, responsibility for success - “we must succeed”, collegiality - “we’re working on this together”, continuous improvement - “we can get better”, support - “there’s always someone there to help” and celebration and humour - “we feel good about ourselves”” (p.10). All students and staff are involved and it has also required us to develop our school values which are now embedded in everything we do.
References:
Stoll (1998). School Culture. School Improvement Network’s Bulletin 9. Institute of Education, University of London. Retrieved from http://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Culture/Understanding-school-cultures/School-Culture
No comments:
Post a Comment