Some insights into my book on School Effectiveness

I provide these insights so that any excerpts from my book that I post on this blog may be better understood.  The book is small and practical and may never be published.  I just enjoy writing it to keep me in touch with a profession I loved and continue to love.  I am not spruiking potential sales of the book as it is still in draft form and I may never publish it. I just hope that my practical experiences as an educator may spark some ideas and assist any readers in their work as educators.  I enjoy talking with practising educators about how it is all going out there in school land.  I also enjoy chats with colleagues with whom I worked during my career days.  If you want to chat post some comments.

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The insights: 

Tom is a revered retired educator who is narrating to me as the recorder of his ideas on what makes an effective school.  We are on Tom's launch which is moored at a beautiful spot on our local river.  Corny hey, but it just made me feel that this was the way to present the credentialed academic yet highly practical educator talking straight to any reader.  The anticipated audience is school principals and teachers.  I did it this way because I am a bit fed upon with some of the jargon of educational administrative theory.  One more paradigm and I'm out of here.  This is not a denial of the value of evidence based research into education : far from it.

The book is focused on primary/elementary and secondary/high school students in the main stream of the schools. Tom recognises the brilliant work of the special school teachers who educate those with severe cerebral palsy, Downs Syndrome, blindness, hearing loss and various multi-disability scenarios but leaves this as a topic for another time.

Within the main stream he identifies from his practical experience three broad groups of students which he describes as follows:

The Panthers who proceed rapidly to master the learning outcomes of the prescribed curriculum for their age/grade in less than an academic year and need extension.  A small proportion of this group would be classified as academically 'gifted'.
The Jaguars who proceed to master the learning outcomes of the prescribed curriculum for their age/grade taking the whole academic year.   Tom doggedly resists any terms like 'average' student as he finds such labels rather useless.
The Leopards who proceed to master only a proportion of the learning outcomes of the prescribed curriculum for their age/grade during the academic year.

Primary/elementary school teachers would identify with these groups.  They soon show up in each new school intake and the skilled junior school teachers are frequently found to be teaching to these three groups specifically, especially for the development of reading and writing skills.  Cross setting can be used but in Tom's experience this is not common in the junior school grades and he would avoid it until the later years of upper primary or early secondary schooling.

You will probably find the labels a bit corny but there you go that is how Tom is.

In the book Tom refers to the Australian National Curriculum (ANC) which can easily be found on the internet if any reader feels the need for this detail.

Trust this explanation helps.  I am uncertain how much of the book's content will be revealed in my posts as they do not follow a logical sequence overall.  We'll see what comes up.


May the Force be with you!


GD