Search results for "School development"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
DESIGNING & PILOTING ONLINE TESTS AS PART OF A TEACHER COMPETENCE ASSESSMENT
2019
Approaches for competence assessment are becoming increasingly important to plan school development goals, especially during complex educational changes. This paper outlines authors’ experience and recommendations from the designing and piloting of teacher online tests as part of a wider competence management process. A developed theoretical model of a universal teacher competence profile is presented. Tests represent four thematic parts related to teacher performance in classroom to facilitate: student cognitive activation, student self-regulation, student collaboration, and leveraging digital. Test questions were developed based on a framework of teacher performance assessment that consis…
The School Programme: A Key Link between Contextual Influence and School Development
2018
ABSTRACTThis paper is designed to contribute to the discussion on how to conceptualise and study contextual influence in local school development. We propose a theoretical framework and an empirical illustration to supplement former research on rural school research. Focusing on what the school perceives as important in its community may explain why schools are different, based on the concept that the place where the school is located has its own expectation structures. This interaction between school and place creates the concept of the school programme, representing the role of teacher expectations within the school and the teachers’ encounter with the expectation structures of the specif…
School Staff-centered School Development by Communicative Action: Working Methods for Creating Collective Responsibility - From the Idea to Action
2020
School development is often seen as a concerted (re-)action to educational policies, curriculum development, and change in education laws or regulations, and sometimes, as stakeholders’ reactions to low school performance. Generally, school development incorporates organizational, managerial, and educational activities and measures. This is done to adapt to the new situation to achieve the desired changes and goals initiated by a given curriculum reform. In contrast, this paper focuses on school staff–driven development: It describes how teachers together with paraprofessionals contribute to school-development. Using collective responsibility creating working methods of communication, the e…
Organisational Challenges for School Development and Improvement : The Obstructing Role of Sub-Groups and an Overly Positive School Culture
2020
The purpose of this study has been to identify and analyse obstacles embedded in the school organisation that impede organisational development and improvement. The general findings show that the school structure comprised sub-groups and had characteristics of a diversified organisation. This led to dysfunctional discussions that challenged school development and improvement. Second, the findings revealed that the nature of the school culture may challenge school development processes. Positive features of the school culture, such as engagement, good relationships and high self-esteem might deter the effectiveness of the schools, e.g. the schools’ ability to prioritise and improve the pupil…
Understanding teachers’ mental models of collaboration to enhance the learning community
2022
This study examined representations of Finnish basic education teachers’ mental models of collaboration to reveal the background features that enable or hinder changes in a school community and teacher collaboration. In this case study, we explored 41 teachers’ mental models of collaboration in a one-school community to identify and understand the features that enhance or challenge collaboration. The findings raise the question of how collaboration can support a school’s transition to a unified comprehensive school, when teachers are accustomed to working alone with a strong sense of autonomy and diverse mental models of collaboration. The findings revealed that collaboration is mainly limi…