[MUSIC] "How good is my classroom?" Have you asked yourself that question? And if you have, what are some of the responses you've come up with? Have you asked your peers about your classroom? Or have you asked your learners about how good is my classroom? What have some of those responses been? So, in the session today, we're going to tease out this question. How do I know how good my classroom is? What are my sources of evidence? What are my criteria and whose views count the most? So, these are useful questions. What are my sources of evidence? You could ask your peers, or you could to ask your learners? Do you ask yourself? Do you just launch into asking these questions, or do you have a criteria of questions that you can respond to. And of course, who's views are going to count most? Your learners, your peers, your own? Or will you triangulate using all these views and positions? Perhaps you may even call in somebody from outside your school as a critical thinker or an assessor. Now, a culture of inquiry. "It is through a culture of inquiry and self-evaluation deeply embedded in the daily routines of classroom life, that schools gain strength of conviction to expose what constrains authentic learning and, with an enhanced sense of agency, able to show how things can be different." Now, what is some of the indicators of quality and performance in your own context. Let's look at measures. Most schools look at measuring usually through hard data, and they can get assessment of how much learners know. Perhaps you may want to think of things differently. Maybe you'd want to use the metaphor of warning lights, like when you're driving a car and you see a flashing light on your dashboard. You may open your bonnet to look at your engine and try to establish where the smoke is coming from. Likewise in your classroom, you might look at how you've taught. You might look at the lesson preparation. You might look at some of the methodologies you use or perhaps even the multiple intelligences or maybe lack of multiple intelligences that you've used, to try and establish, where is the smoke? Where is the problem? Another metaphor, which I really find is a lovely, lovely metaphor is the tin openers because opening a tin opens many possibilities. By opening up dialogue, by opening up discussion. You can even be opening up deeper inquiry into what was really going on. Opening up new questions to try and establish what you've been doing. So, what are our indicators? We have listed a couple of indicators, and perhaps you may have more. But what is your classroom climate or ethos? Your resources for learning? Their levels of participation, or the nature of collaboration? What are your indicators? Let's look at self evaluation as a process. This self evaluation is not something that happens just once. It's continuous. It's also a process that happens over a period of time. What are some of the forms of self evaluation that you could use? Measures of attainment, which most people rely on a lot of the time, is an assessment to establish how much we've achieved, or how well we've done. But there are other examples or other forms of self-evaluation you could use. Attitiude questionnaires, peer observations, feedback from students, self assessment. How many of you are fearful of feedback from students? Initially, it's quite scary to think "What are my students going to say about me? Are they going to be rude? Are they going to be nasty?" In your own self-assessment, what do you say to yourself? Do you just put "This lesson went very wrong"? Or are you going to say "At this moment there was a bit of a warning light, I wonder what I did differently today."? Or "What is it that I did, that just didn't seem right? And there was a flashing light there. What was it?" With peer observation, there has to be an element of trust there. I know I won't necessarily just feel comfortable by just getting any of my peers to come into my room and observe and help evaluate me. Sometimes that can be quite destructive, so developing an element of trust with somebody, developing a very clearly defined criteria. Get it? Having a conversation with the person first, and saying "I want you to pay attention to the way I sequence my content. I would like you to comment to that, because I think I have a flashlight there." Or, you may say, "I'd like you to pay attention. To the pedagogies that I'm using in my classroom. Do you think I am using too much of drama? Or perhaps maybe I should pay attention more to getting group work in my class to be done, where learners can problem solve?" So, setting up a good set of criteria might be useful for you, and for the peer observer. A question of trust. And a teacher from Nauru who talks about how fearful he or she was when they asked for student feedback. And I share this anxiety and I'm sure that many of you would, but look what positive response this teacher got, the honesty and how helpful the feedback was to the teacher. Sometimes maybe the feedback is not something that you really want to hear, and that might be the flashlight. And perhaps it's something you may want to pay more attention to and try to glean and unlayer and find out more about that aspect about your teaching. So, in the long run what might seem as criticism initially might really enhance and excite your own teaching. Teachers hold the solution. How true is that? "To reformers, teachers in many ways, are both the problem and solution. Precisely because of this paradox, reformers in every generation have dreamed of teacher-proof curriculum, texts, and other materials to promote designs that leapfrog the teacher and get students to learn." What do you think about that? But "No classroom reform I've ever studied from reading, through using computers or participated over the last half century has ever been fully implemented without teachers understanding." And that is so critical. So, school evaluation. And most countries increasingly use a range of techniques for school evaluation. Often a lot of difficulty is encountered, but this may arise as a result of poor policy design, lack of analysis and unintended consequences. So, does your school have a policy for school evaluation? What is that policy? What does it say? Who are the very stakeholders that we try to ascertain or establish the evaluation from? What are the issues in your school? And what could you do differently in your school? [MUSIC]
