What is it good for? (Edwin Starr) Part 4 of 4

I came across this article recently while I was looking for material on vertical tutor groups (did I mention that I love vertical tutor groups and House systems as a key part of a school's organisational culture?)

Vertical learning - teaching pupils of different ages together - could help your school reach new heights.  According to its advocates, “vertical learning” - getting pupils of different ages to work together - is one of the most powerful interventions you can introduce into the classroom. Breaking away from traditional year groups can, they say, have a remarkable transformative effect on the quality of teaching and learning, as well as attendance and behaviour.
There is a surprising lack of in-depth research into the benefits of vertical learning strategies, but the number of schools going vertical in some form is growing fast.
It began with vertical tutoring; the idea that smaller form groups comprising pupils of different ages can improve relationships and have a knock-on effect on everything else. Now more and more schools are adopting vertical methods for teaching, too.
This “stage not age” approach is becoming more common at GCSE level in England and a particularly popular model has Year 9-11 (S2-4) pupils sharing lessons in non-core subjects. 

Try here for the full article: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6260076

I really really like this idea - it is something I've blogged about for years - removing barriers for learning and moving away from fixed year group social promotion systems.

There will come a time every school does this and people will shake their heads when they think about the bad old industrial models school used for learning and teaching. What WERE we thinking? They will say.

What is it good for? (Edwin Starr) Part 3

Let's turn from the dark side and embrace the good in vertical forms.

Advantages

1. Creates a more cohesive and friendlier school community where students know and work with students from other years ("like a family").
2. Emphasises students as individuals, not just members of a large group.
3. Bullying is reduced, as older students see younger ones as members of their tutor group with whom they associate on a daily basis.
4. More opportunities for student leadership within their tutor group and house.
5. Easily accessible positive role models for younger students.
6. Increased opportunities for students to develop their social skills through working with students of different ages, in preparation for adult life.
7. Students support one another and understand the stages that they will go through as they move through the school. This has the potential to increase aspiration and motivation.
8. Tutors get to know information for every year group, which is often of great relevance during their teaching sessions.
9. Tutors can attend to small numbers of students at once, at critical times for them, e.g. new intake, option choices, work experience.
10. Tutors develop a "whole school" experience and understanding of progression that makes them a stronger tutor.
11. Reduces opportunities for "gangs" to form.
12. Enables greater flexibility for intake numbers, as a new vertical tutor group can be more easily created than a tutor group all of one year group.
13. Enables greater flexibility for the curriculum as learning groups will not need to be based on tutor groups.
14. In conjunction with a House system creates a deep sense of belonging.
15. Positions the House system at the heart of the organisational culture of a school.
16. Allows all staff to share in the experience as usually smaller tutor groups mean more need for non teaching staff to become tutor group leaders. 

The testaments to success are many and varied. Here are some from Principals in the U.K.

• Vertical tutoring has had a “dramatic” effect on pupils’ behaviour and, most importantly, their aspirations.
• “It is the single most transformative thing that we have done in school,” she says. “The relationships and dynamics have vastly improved.”
• “What vertical tutoring does is provide a new learning support operation that replaces the factory model and adds operational coherence. It builds value in and requires no social programmes and no cost other than time to learn. It transforms the culture of schools by positively building inclusive learning relationships and partnerships.

 WOWIE ZOWIE!!!

This had me at 'creates' but replacing the factory model? Yeah baby!

What is it good for? (Edwin Starr) Part 2

This post continues my BIG PICTURE look at the organisational culture within my current school.

Last post I considered 'socialisation' and my pursuit of bananas. Today it's a look at our status quo horizontal situation.

I Googled 'advantages of horizontal tutor groups' and nothing came up in the search. Nothing! Go on - see for yourself!

Instead a few billion entries on the advantages of vertical tutor groups came up!

I tried other variations of 'horizontal' and still nothing.

I'm not as green as I am cabbage looking - I know horizontal forms are popular beasts but clearly the bully boys from the vertical forms have bounced them off to the outer rim.

So I decided to use the interweb's 'disadvantages of vertical groups' search results to see if that made a case for horizontals.

And here they are:

Disadvantages of vertical forms

1. Reduces opportunities for same-age students to be together.
2. Older students may not be good role models.
3. New intake may be intimidated by the presence of older students in their tutor group.
4. Tutors may need support to manage the breadth of issues within their tutor group.
5. Communication is more complicated, e.g. having to send out notices to every tutor group in order to reach a single year group.
6. Tutor group activities must be widely differentiated to enable all members to participate.

Let's go through them:

1. Reduces blah blah - well yes - that's obvious. Horizontal forms are same-age forms. As I said -  I haven't read any research that says it's inherently good to have that opportunity.
2. Sure - that could happen - there is good and bad in all of us and in any situation. But so what - horizontal forms have that capacity as well.  
3. Yes - that could happen. Some schools I worked in chose to use a horizontal format for their new entrant cohort but I've also worked in schools that successfully vertical formed everyone.
4.  Tutors may need support. Yes, I guess they may but I'd argue they may need that support no matter what the format.
5.  Communication - yes this is probably better with a horizontal group.
6.  Activities - yes I can see this too.

So - what is the horizontal system good for? On the whole - not a lot there apart from some bureaucratic advantage.

The organisational culture at my current school is heavily weighted to horizontal year groups. The Deans' structure is a very powerful presence. 

How do I know this? 

Last year's staff photo. 

Most staff photos I've been in have the great and the powerful in the front row. Usually this is the Principal - centre front, flanked by senior leaders, then further out - senior Heads of Departments - the middle managers.

Who sits in the front row in our staff photo? 

Senior managers and the YEAR LEVEL DEANS! That's who.

Changing the organisational culture to vertical forms would affect the Deans' structure. A change to vertical forms would mean a change away from year level Deans  towards...THE HOUSE structure. 

Currently no one knows who leads the House structure - in fact the staff take a back seat to the students in this regard. But why couldn't the House Leaders (staff member and student) share that role?

I'm all for strengthening the House system in terms of giving it a pastoral care role. Would the school be brave enough to tamper with the status quo? Not on current evidence.

That bunch of bananas looks like it's set to outlast me.

What is it good for? (Edwin Starr) Part 1

I threw down a bit of a gauntlet at school this week to a distinctly luke warm reaction.

Not only did I support a move away from the old Teacher Parent Student conferences (you know - the ones where only a few of 'the good' parents attend for a 5 minute feel good slot)  towards longer more holistic meetings with form tutors (10 minutes with, ideally, every parent and student in the form class) but...and I couldn't help myself...I also put in a plug for vertical forms.

Shock horror. I know - what was I thinking?

It went down like a cup of cold gravy with a hair in it!

But WHY?

Well I know why. I was messing with the organisational culture of the school. More specifically I was messing with the socialisation of the culture.

• To explain how socialisation works consider this experiment. A caged group of monkeys is confronted with a bunch of bananas on bungling from the ceiling. There is a ladder placed invitingly just under the bananas. Immediately some monkeys rush to the ladder. As soon as they start to climb it they are all hosed down, not just the monkeys on the ladder but all the monkeys in the cage. As they don’t like water they leave the bananas. One hussy monkey tries again but the same thing happens, all of the monkeys are hosed. Now they watch each other to make sure no one comes near the ladder. Then one monkey is replaced by a new one unaware of ladder-water misery. He sees the bananas and rushes to the ladder, but to his surprise is beaten up by the other monkeys. Now a second monkey is replaced by a new one. He approaches the ladder and is beaten up. The first new monkey who himself had been beaten up participates in the mugging because he wont permit another monkey to do something he himself was not allowed. This continues until all the monkeys are replaced by new monkeys none of them having the experience of being hosed down or even having a faint idea about it. The reason why they wont permit each other to reach for the bananas has become of a metaphysical nature, it is simply not done.

This is the area where I'm a new monkey, a relative outsider and the long standing members of the culture are protective of what they've established over time.

Nevertheless - over the next couple of posts I will be looking at the advantages and disadvantages of horizontal (same year level in the tutor group who may or, usually, may not stay with one tutor during their time at school)  AND vertical forms (a mixture of form levels make up one tutor group who stay with one tutor during their time at school).

First up - horizontals! The status quo. The bunch of bananas in question at Woodford House.

When we were at school our games were simple (the Hollies)

How it was done in the sixties...

Phew!

Mid term break and wowie zowie - what a term so far. I hate it when people complain about how busy they are so I won't do that! Suffice to say that I definitely feel like I need and have earned a break. 

The school ball was on Friday night and you need to know going in that I'm NOT a fan of school balls. 

...and the seventies.

I feel I'm qualified to say that. Since 1976 (my own at Mt Albert Grammar School) I've attended a large number of school balls over the years - as a student, as a teacher, as a Deputy Principal, as a Principal and now as a Year 12 form teacher at Woodford House.

My over riding thought - teachers make lousy wall flowers. Standing around in an amazingly awkward way watching the amazingly awkward mating rituals of adolescents is NOT what I want to be doing of an evening.

The whole thing went well last night (I'm not about to criticise anyone involved in getting a school ball off the ground - it's a thankless task and the only reward is another huge 'PHEW!' that nothing happened that will make the newspapers). 

Some random quizzical thoughts that raged around in my brain as it unfolded (and the hormones raged in the youngsters): girls dancing with girls? Boys dancing with boys? Big cheers for songs like Lynyrd Skynyrd's Home Sweet Alabama and other seventies songs that emerged decades before they were born?? No one approaching staff for a dance? The Gay Gordon? No chicken dance? Cell phones everywhere? The girls' table manners were fine but the boys'? Dresses that cost nearly 2,000 dollars? Can she really walk in those heals?

Unfortunately the ball is another reminder that while I continue to age, the students remain forever 17 or 18.

The school ball next year! Oh sure - it's a date!

Even the cover looked like Catcher In The Rye (Jerry Maguire)

My report into the 2013 English department results and so on is done. I aimed to meet the March 7 deadline and that's been accomplished.

It clocked in at 33 pages in the end which I'm picking may be a record! It certainly is for me (see my last post for the less-is-more rant).

The actual writing and researching of the report has been a positive (albeit exhausting) experience for me in that I know have a much firmer grasp on the department's strengths and weakness. But not only that. I now know stuff. More stuff.

Luckily Jacky had a number of evening duties over the last couple of weeks so I was able to sped some long hours writing those 33 pages.

I have to do a board report in person later in the year (I did one at the end of last year as well) and I now feel on much firmer ground making generalisations about stuff. Confidence in this case comes from living the job and experiencing the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

I am mos def a visual guy. This is not news to me. I find it really difficult to read tables so I need to create graphs from the information to draw trends and inferences. I guess it's more of that Occam's razor principle.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. (Henry David Thoreau)

Among other things the last two weeks have been consumed by a subject report on last year's results and plans for 2014.

So far it's weighing in at 28 pages. It seems extreme. On the extremo continuum I'd put this at one end. Our neighbouring girls' school apparently doesn't require Heads of Departments to write a report at all. Clearly this is at t'other end of the extremo continuum.

I try hard not to do the 'when I was a Principal' bit but I recall being asked about what I wanted my Heads of Departments to report on when I was a Principal at Stratford High School and my response was basically twofold - ONE = where are the gaps in performance and whatcha gunna do bout it? and TWO = where are the strengths in performance and how yer gunna build on it?

So strengths and weaknesses basically.

Less is more!

I'm a big believer in occam's razor - the principle that you should go straight to simpler theories so that simplicity gives you a deeper understanding. 

Twenty eight pages and counting is not simplicity.

[Side bar - couldn't a done my 28 pages without the stellar support of my English Department colleagues and fellow HODder and regular reader - Toni Dunstan - you rock Toni!!]