The pride of private schools

Tshwarelo Hosia | Monday January 23, 2023 06:00

In the private school space continuity and a business as usual atmosphere are likely to reign supreme.

This is because private schools take pride in having a proven track record of successfully pushing to proficiency many if not all learners under their care.

This is not, however, to mean that accomplished schools should sit on their laurels.

Sustaining a culture of achievement requires a continuing process refining the grain. And perfection is what private schools strive to do to keep their patrons happy and lure more.

In many public schools the story is a different ball game involving an on-going struggle to find the right strategy.

There still remains more work to be done to raise and place the public education system on the same pedestal as their counterparts in private hands. In the interest of our children, public schools must swallow their pride and explore ways of collaborating and exchanging notes on matters of school governance and instruction with private schools.

Struggling and underachieving schools cannot afford the luxury of maintaining the status quo. For them change is a complete necessity and it must be pursued with everything that schools have. It is urgent and therefore cannot wait. Every school system is busy doing things it deems necessary but not all things a school does produce intended and desired learning outcomes.

The trouble with many struggling schools is lack of courage to try new things when the chips are down. There is a propensity to stick to the beaten path rather than get into the risk of venturing into unchartered territory.

Change in schools should be leader driven and it can only begin when those in leadership can summon courage. It goes without saying that the appointment of a school principal should be accorded the respect and sensitivity that it requires. It is an exercise that can make or break a school. The present selection criterion is not delivering as expected and this calls for the revamping of the process of hiring principals. The powers that be should consider setting up special Advisory School Administration Board manned by accomplished former principals who have distinguished themselves on matters of school admiration and instructional leadership.

The board would assume the task of not only taking care of issues of professional development but also playing an advisory role on selection and appointment of school leaders. Our children deserve the most able leaders this country can offer. Charisma, fearlessness, confidence and innovation are some of the key competencies that must be in the arsenal of every school principal. Many schools are stuck in survival and compliance modes because their leaders are too afraid to experiment on new things.

Improving teaching and learning involves a soul searching process seeking to establish the connection between current initiatives and teaching and learning. At the centre of the process of change should be the interest of students. The big issue is that schools often fall into the trap of wandering about without a clear focus. Wandering is defined as a haphazard implementation of a wide range of disparate and disconnected shopping list of initiatives.

This happens where there is no clarity of purpose. Schools without a clear strategy run the risk of being wasteful. Unwisely, they spread their already overstretched resources thinly across a wide spectrum of initiatives, which have no direct connection to the instructional core.

It is important at all times to remind those in charge of schools that the purpose or day to day business is monitoring and closely watching the complex triangular interaction of teachers and students in the presence of the curriculum. The relationship between the teacher, student and content is the core responsibility of a school principal and this critical area should be protected jealously and not subordinated to any other endeavour.

Any strategy wandering about and skirting the classroom cannot sufficiently support students and teachers in the quest for improved learning outcomes. Prominent educationists, Rachel E. Curtis and Elizabeth A. City, have observed that “every school system we know that is rapidly improving student learning places its bets on strategic objectives and initiatives with direct connections to the instructional core. Individual and organisations can only ensure deep sustained attention on a few things at any given time. Therefore effective strategy consists of a few high leverage ways to improve instruction and student learning and creating a strong coherence in a system’s work.”

Positive change in a school system is possible if the school principal can play a leading and exemplary role. The role of the principal is even more critical at the planning stage to ensure adherence to protocols and rubrics associated with strategy formulation. A strategy should be trimmed to size to bring it much more closer home to the classroom environment. Efforts should be made to guard against a focus on peripheral matters, which have a vague and weak relationship with teaching and learning. One fundamental aspect of teaching which should enjoy primacy over other aspects is assessment. More often than not when authorities come close to asking questions about instruction they ask about syllabus coverage.

Completion of the syllabus is overrated and mistakenly equated with quality delivery. Assessment hardly receives sufficient attention. But this is a crucial area. Assessment can be both formative and summative. But I choose to focus a little more on the formative one. Formative assessment is a pre-teaching diagnostic test administered so that the teacher can know in advance the strengths and challenges of students. It is used to guide and inform instruction. The grave mistake that schools make is to define instruction before getting data about the learners they are about to teach. Collecting accurate and reliable data to help in formulation of targeted interventions can address issues of underachievement.

When observing actual learning in the classroom principals should shift attention from what the teacher has taught to what the learner has learnt. Traditionally lesson observations made the teacher the centre of attraction in the classroom. The question was always what the teacher was doing and how he was doing it. Conscious of the fact that they were being watched, teachers did their best to impress the observers. This often happened at the expense of students. Now there should be a shift of focus from the teacher to the learner.

The observer should pay attention on whether students are gaining something from the teacher. At the end of the lesson the students should have demonstrated the skills they have mastered and where they need support and based on lesson drawn from assessment the next lesson should be improved.