I listened with all of my might (Laura Marling)

Tuesdays mean a meeting at 9am with the Principal. Today is Tuesday.

We have just had a great session for 40 minutes on the data analysis that informed our School Improvement Plan (see previous post).

I went through the process of tracking each grade in Arabic Reading and Arabic Writing for our school compared to all schools in Abu Dhabi and boys schools of our status.

Basically our boys perform really well at writing but poorly compared to other boys in reading (actually it's more specific than that - it's that our middle ability boys are not making improvements into better grades).

Their scores in writing are far superior.

So I went through this process with Mohammed.

Mindful that he is tired and preoccupied with family things. One of his daughters is in a hospital in Dubai. Poor guy - for some weeks now he has been travelling each day and spending long hours with his family and daughter there.

He told me this morning that he was leaving for Dubai after our meeting today which is why I restricted it to 40 minutes.

It was a good 40 minutes though. Less is more (always).

Made me think about how difficult it is to listen with all of our might. All the time.

Our boy brains are zapping from thing to thing and it's often difficult to sustain an attention span.

Boys in class are no different.

Jacky asks me sometimes, "What are you thinking?"

I usually answer - billions of things and I'm not lying.

I think we need to remember that the people we work with have a number of things on their minds and giving us some undivided attention is at times impossible.

Basically we need to cut each other some slack!

If you don't dig the jive you better scat (Joe Montgomery in Cool Cat)

I have just finished the School Improvement Plan (aka SIP) for Ali bin Abi Taleb for this year.

I didn't write it all. I compiled a lot of it.

It runs to 22 pages.

Yikes!

22 pages! The cynics among you will have a field day.

But it's actually a really good document. It details our action plans for the year as a school and for the individual subjects.

The trick of course will be to monitor the progress and adapt as we go.

Cognition has turned me into something of a data analysis junkie. I actually enjoy sifting through the screeds of data we collect to determine where the gold is.

School improvement depends on pertinent data analysis, then an action plan, then revision and reviews (that progress thing), then more action plans.

From what I've read the Inquiry process (summarised in that last sentence) is the way to go. So that's the way I'm going.