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.
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?
Simple, might be nice to have the 'i's round the outside each a different colourInterlocking circles, a bit celticA really condensed version of the previous one, also interlocking circles, but not very obviously so
Yesterday our ‘mobile office’ moved from Wood Green Library Business Lounge to the British Library:
Lovely place to work – good atmosphere and lots of power points to hook up my nearly dead laptop. Roaming offices have their drawbacks though = paying for coffee. I reckon we could sneak a small kettle in next time.
We continued work on business plan stuff (sadly it takes more than a day) and also a mind map on key messages, audiences and concepts. Useful way to collect and organise thoughts. I wish my mind had an actual map though. Not sure what that would look like, but it sounds helpful. Is that what organised people have?
Enough blogging – off to Argos to find the smallest and most inconspicuous kettle on the market…
Asher and I spent yesterday’s amazing hot Saturday afternoon in my garden working on our business plan. Was pretty good, but I realised that not having written anything for a month and a bit, I’ve completely forgotten how to write well. Some would say I never could, but it’s definitely not good!
involver hq:
Feels like there’s a lot of work to be done in the next couple of weeks (some of which in Asher’s list below), but it also feels exciting to be doing it.
Anyway, back to business plans, 6music and instant coffee. Sunday working rocks. Hope you guys are all enjoying the sun!
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.
So, we’re into week 2 of this involver experiment. I’m feeling a little more confident about saying what we’re going to be doing now – and about letting people know what happened to School Councils UK (SCUK).
It’s now set who the team is going to be. It’s me and Greg, a great former colleague of mine at SCUK and also a former member of the Citizenship and PSHE Team at the DCSF. Whilst we think we’re pretty good on all the school council and student involvement stuff, we’re aware we don’t know it all, so the last week has been about us setting up meetings with a range of people in the field and we’ll also be setting up an advisory group (or groups) to guide us on an ongoing basis.
So far the response has been very positive and there’s been a lot of help available from a variety of sources, all of which will be listed on our Partners & Supporters page.
Here are some of our initial scribblings – just to prove that we’ve actually been doing something:
Issues mindmap - what are the problems we're trying to address?Solution mindmap - what should we be offering?
The other way you can see that we’ve actually been doing stuff, is by how this website’s developing. Although that said, a lot of what I’m doing at the moment seems to be a bit more behind the scenes stuff, making the search effective and stuff. Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
