Teach Middle East Magazine Sep - Dec 2020 Issue 1 Volume 8 | Page 8

Administrator's Corner
KEEP SOARING: DEVELOPING A STRATEGY
FOR SCHOOL-LED SELF-EVALUATION
BY: LESLEY HUNTER AND MAGGIE WRIGHT
T
he concept of self-evaluation
was
initially
introduced
to schools as a means of
driving the agenda for
school improvement. As inspection
regimes developed around the
world, the accuracy and robustness
of a school’s self-evaluation began
to inform judgements on both
the effectiveness of the school’s
leadership and the school’s capacity
for
further
improvement.
This
approach meant that self-evaluation
became intrinsically linked to external
evaluations, most typically inspection,
and therefore became a necessary
evil for many schools to undergo at
regular intervals. The problem with
this is that when viewed purely in this
way, self-evaluation becomes an event
that creates a bureaucratic burden
and additional workload with little
meaningful return for teachers and
students.
a very specific purpose.
We all know that schools are complex
dynamic organisations that need to
be able to adapt to ever-changing
circumstances. In fact, the only real
constant in most schools is that change
will happen … student populations,
parental communities, staffing profiles,
curricular requirements, governance
and legislative demands, to name
a few. As a result, the success of a
school often hinges on the ability of its
leaders to filter competing demands
and influences to make the right
decisions and take the right actions,
at the right time, in the context of their
own school. This school-led approach
is critical and hinges on principals
having confidence and credibility in
their self-evaluation process and the
people that carry it out.
The Keep Soaring philosophy for
Experience has shown that when
school leaders change their approach
to embrace and integrate self-
evaluation into the day-to-day life
and work of a school, they begin to
see tangible value benefits for all
stakeholders that go far beyond the
original perception of simply judging
what the school is doing well and where
it needs to develop and improve.
In these schools, self-evaluation is
not simply an event triggered by an
external stimulus, but is a continuous
cycle of reflection and analysis that has
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self-evaluation has evolved from our
work with schools over the past ten
years, and in particular with schools
subjected to frequent external
evaluations, such as those in the UK
and UAE. We aimed to strip away the
layers of jargon and bureaucracy and
create a streamlined approach that
made self-evaluation a truly valuable
part of a school’s work, rather than a
bolt-on process where schools simply
went through the motions. To achieve
this, we believe that a school’s most
senior leaders must be explicit about
the why and what of self-evaluation
with a shift in thinking and focus
from how they will do it. They must
share this with all stakeholders so that
everyone understands the purpose of
self-evaluation in their school – which
areas will receive focussed attention
- and everyone is clear about their
contribution and accountability within
the process.
One of the biggest problems with self-
evaluation is that schools often try to
do too much without sufficient focus.
A pattern has emerged where staff
typically pick up external frameworks
(such as inspection rubric) and use
these templates or blueprints against
which to evaluate their own practice.
This approach has a lot of merit …
but only if you were implementing
self-inspection! Self-evaluation is an
entirely different process – the focus for
each individual school will be different
because it should hinge on the current
priorities and leadership decisions in
that school rather than on a generic
framework that could be applied to
any school. By adopting the typical
“cookie cutter” approach, a school
will basically dilute the effectiveness
of its evaluation because it will not be
targeting all its available resources at
the areas that really matter.
The purpose of self-evaluation is to
measure the impact of the leadership
decisions that have been taken and
the subsequent actions that have been
implemented in the school.
The basic principle of Keep Soaring
is that self-evaluation has to start
with the key leadership decisions that
the school has taken and is currently
implementing. In other words, you will
be evaluating against tightly defined
areas that have immediate relevance
to your staff and students rather