Sharing Good Practice

BY ALYAS ALI

Use of Data :

Everyone has data , but the trick is always what to do with it and what angle to look at it from , coming from a background as a Business Analyst , data is second nature to me and something I and the school give a great deal of thought and attention to . What we do as a school , is to track every element of what a student is doing in three main ways :

1 . Baseline Data : We baseline all our students at the beginning and end of each term . Our spreadsheets automatically colour code student performance and students are set appropriate targets . This gives us our starting and end point data and enables us to know where the students began and finished .

2 . Continuous Assessment : We give students a simple score between 1 and 4 during lessons , once a week and input these into our systems , this colour codes our students ’ performance and enables us to pick up on students who require further support and those that require more challenge .

3 . Other data : As a school we have our tests and our innovative Integrated Learning Projects , we collect data on all aspects of a student ’ s performance and this also feeds into our analysis .

Overall as a school we look at where students began , how they are doing in their classes , how they ’ re performing in formal tests and projects and where they ended . The Heads meet once a month with teachers to review this data and to discuss individual student performance .

Development of Middle Leadership :

In the school we ’ ve had a significant focus on our Middle Leadership , essentially they are the engine of the school and they should have a significant role in running the school on a day to day basis . We wanted to develop their overall leadership abilities . An appraisal process was designed with input from the staff that outlined very clearly all the aspects of Leadership what we expected from our Middle Leaders . High expectations with clear rubrics were set , an initial target setting meeting is held , a midterm review and an end of year review are held to discuss performance towards the targets and the Appraisal .

Along with the Appraisal , we very specifically wanted the Middle Leaders to lead Professional Development ( PD ) across the school , it was very important that this process was designed so that it supports and empowers them .

Stage 1 : PD was initially led by the Principal for all staff , Middle Leaders were participants along with other staff

Stage 2 : PD was delivered directly to the Middle Leaders by the Principal , Middle Leaders now had to deliver the same PD to their respective departments with support from the Principal

Stage 3 : Middle Leaders now designed their own PD with support from the Principal

Stage 4 : Middle Leaders design and deliver their own PD without support and have complete ownership of the PD they deliver

Social Contributions

We feel as a school that if you want to have an impact on someone ’ s life , it has to be done through small consistent deeds . one off events tend to fizzle out as quick as they tend to appear . We wanted to have something that the students are consistently involved in , to ensure that Social Contribution becomes a part of who they are and how they see themselves fitting into the bigger picture of the world .

Every month we have a different project in conjunction with the Red Crescent , the project lasts for two