Of course doing these kinds of things without a huge amount of technical knowledge always throws up problems. So I’ve been scouring the internet to find solutions, some are easier to find than others. I’m finding myself halfway between becoming a web-guru and pulling my hair out.
Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.
Albert Schweizer, French philosopher, physician and winner of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize (1875 – 1965)
It doesn’t matter who you’re teaching, training or working with, this is true; so we’ve made it central to everything we’re trying to do with involver. We know that if we don’t make participation fun, there’s no way we’ll get everyone involved, so we’re trying to have fun whilst we do it, present ourselves in a light-hearted way and use what we do as an example for school councils and other forms of participation.
With that in mind I’ve been working on little bios of me and Greg today, and it gave me an idea of a fun way to get people to know who their reps are. You can read our quick guide here and download for your own use with these links:
involver [ engage | impact | enjoy ] involver.org.uk Have fun getting to know your reps It’s much easier to get things done in your school if you know the names of the people who are supposed to be helping you. Everyone has a school council notice board (What? You don’t, shame on you, get one up now!). Here’s an even better way to make sure everyone knows who their reps are on all the different councils you might have in your school (e.g. school council, year council, eco council, class council, governors). 1. Create one card for each rep with their picture on and a few funny facts about them. GET EACH PERSON TO CHECK THE CARD ABOUT HIM OR HER. Print them out (check how many with an adult) and cut them up. Hand cards out around school. People can swap them or play games like Top Trumps with them. Don’t worry if people lose them, remember it’s just a bit of fun. 2. 3. 4. 5. Asher Jacobsberg Job title: involver Age: 30 Height: 192cm (6 foot 4ish) Greg Sanderson Job title: involver Age: 28 Height: 173cm (5 foot 9ish) Shoe size: 8 Musical instruments : 5 (guitar, bass, piano, trumpet, vio lin) Children: 0 Top speed: The spee d of sound (about 1,225 kph / 761 mp h) Special skills: Banter ; chat; citizenship guru; th inks in music. Shoe size: 10 Musical instruments: None Children: 1 (Ayla, aged 2) n his Top speed: 64kph (40mph—o bike) ut Special skills: Can speak abo ert anything with authority; exp ; hairy. trainer; talks to computers
As involver develops there’ll be more and more like this, so keep checking back, follow me on Twitter (I’ll always let Twitter know about new free resources), or subscribe by RSS.
On one side is Chris Keates, the head of the NASUWT, on the other is Schools Minister, Vernon Coaker. Unfortunately it doesn’t actually do a very good job of this. Chris Keates puts forward a clear, reasoned argument, but essentially based around the idea that ‘advanced pupil voice can be bad for teachers where it isn’t done well, so it shouldn’t be done at anywhere.’ Vernon Coaker’s counterpoint unfortuately doesn’t address this argument directly at all, it just reads like a Government press release on current policy. I’d love to see someone like Vernon Coaker, an ex-teacher and real advocate for children and young people, address the NASUWT’s arguments head on.
However, the other article I came across put the other side of the arguement very well in an incredibly practical way. It from the blog of a couple of teachers (one which I’ll be following closely from now on) and talks about how getting students’ feedback on their schemes of work is an essential part of improving learning and teaching. They’ve got a great name for it too:
Anyway, the point of these days (if you ever hear about them) is to spur you into action. So what are you doing to help young people today? The 2009 theme is ‘sustainability’:
Sustainability does not only refer to maintaining environmental balance and renewal.Sustainability encapsulates three facets of life: the environment, society and the economy. We live our lives in the overlaps and intersections of these facets, and our actions and attitudes help shape them. Their changing shapes in turn affect the way we are able to live our lives. The negative effects of unsustainable behaviour are not easily contained. As has been proven by the global crises in food, the economy and the environment, the concept of the global village has gone beyond being a useful analogy to being a hard reality, making clear the need toadopt a global sense of social responsibility.
This chimes in very nicely with what we’re trying to do with involver. We’re interested in sustainable participation, and using participation to improve sustainability. We’ve all seen apparently amazing school councils crumble when a great student or teacher who knew how it all worked and was helping steer it left. We want to ensure that schools put structures in place to ensure that things don’t rely on one person, but are established in such a way that everyone shares the load, benefits and the ability to run it.
One small thing you can do to help young people is just tell us your ideas about what support you think involver should be offering to schools, LAs and young people to help them enjoy getting involved. Post a comment below.
We’re sending off letters and plans to a whole load of people at the moment, but it somehow feels like a letter without a logo or a letterhead isn’t a serious one. We’ve already got someone to agree to help us do something really cool when he comes back from camping (thanks Steve), but in between writing business and project plans I’ve been fiddling around with a few temporary ones. What do you think?
Greg’s coming over in a bit, so I thought it would be useful to get my thoughts down about what we need to get done. Then I thought, “and why not put them on the blog?” It puts a bit of pressure on us to actually get things done.
I’d suggest this is an excellent thing for school councils and other action groups in schools to do: Make your action plans public. You could set up a blog for your team (you can get free and easy to use ones at Blogger, WordPress.com or Edublogs – specially for people in education) and take your minutes directly into it. It allows other people to comment on them too, which is a great way to get some extra people involved. It also makes you realise that you need to keep things interesting and relevant, there’s no point writing a blog if no one’s going to read it and there’s no point doing something on your school council if no one outside of the council thinks it’s worthwhile.
Anyway, back to what we’re going to do today:
Write a communications plan. Think we might start this as a mindmap and put it on the site so others can contribute to it too, we’ll probably use mindomo as I’ve used it before, but open to suggestions for better software/apps.
Add stuff to the website. We’ve had some great ideas for little bits, like a simple ‘how good is your school council’ quiz that provides customised help afterwards – want to get that up today.
Create a survey. We hope this will give us a better, broader insight into what people involved in education (staff, students, policy-makers, etc.) want in terms of support for genuine pupil involvement.
Phone meeting with Futurelab. I love working with Futurelab, their approach to education is very closely aligned to my own. I’ve been on the advisory group for the Greater Expectations project so I want to hear what Alison, who’s running that, thinks the learner voice field needs.
Visit Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT). I’m doing some research for the SSAT on mapping pupil voice in the curriculum and I need to take some info in to them today. Hope to get the final report up on here in the new academic year.
Start working on two (or more) funding models. We need to have a couple of different plans for how this site is ging to keep going, they need to be fully costed and have their risks assessed. I very seldom see school councils looking at risk, but it’s very important and a great lesson to learn. Don’t assume that becuase you put something in a budget that it’s going to happen. What other possibilities might there be? Might you sell more tickets, or fewer, will you be able to cope?
Wow, now I’ve written that all down, it seems like a lot to get through, so I’m glad you’re there to hold us to it.