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Tag: International
School council training for primary teachers: We're running a one-day CPD training looking at the best ways to overcome the obstacles that school council coordinators come up against.
Here’s a few presentations from teachers telling us about their school councils.
NB. Some are in Czech.
We’re just back from a week in Prague helping to train school councils link teachers from schools across the Czech Republic. The words “Žákovské parlamenty” are very important to us now :)
We worked with a GREAT organisation called CEDU who support school councils over there. Having showed Kamila and Tomas from CEDU school councils from around London a couple of years ago, it was lovely to do the return trip.
CEDU have been supporting a number of schools across the Czech Republic to set up and maintain effective school councils.
They had put on a three day course for teachers from 13 schools across the whole country. Three teachers came from each school, including a head teacher – great commitment from the staff. Our contribution was to give a one-hour presentation on how school councils work in the UK, and to deliver a couple of training sessions for the 40ish teachers (number not age).
Things I learnt in Prague:
- The obstacles that school councils face in the Czech Republic are remarkably similar to the ones that we face in the UK.
- Training through a translator is difficult but a good challenge.
- Prague is an amazing city and rabbit hearts taste really good.
- Jackets from Top Man don’t keep you warm in -20 degrees temperatures.
- If a teacher offers you a green drink with cream on the top in a Czech bar, don’t drink it.
Things we did:
Anyway, we started the trip with a visit to a local primary and secondary school called Táborská. After a lovely tour of the school (which you can see here, we sat in on a school council meeting which was translated brilliantly by one of the students, Max. Their school councils is called ‘3 Oko’ which means ‘Third Eye’.
The school council were talking about having a bigger role in supporting learning for younger students and working closely with teachers. It was a really useful start to see a school council meeting.
The next day was the first day of the conference. We had the amazing Honza as our official translator for the training – he was quick, concise and knew his stuff on participation. The whole week was a lot easier because of Honza – thanks!
After some warm up exercises, and three of the teacher participants turning up in traditional Moravian dress (plus shots of slivovitz for everyone!), Tomas gave an update on the programme. We then gave a speech (through Honza) on school councils in the UK. You can see this below; though the fonts are a bit messed up.
It became clear that the obstacles to effective school councils were very familiar to the Czech teachers. Around half of them had been involved in the CEDU programme for two years. They were also very interested in the students being excluded in UK schools, which doesn’t seem to be as common in the Czech Republic.
To give us a flavour of some of the student voice work they’ve been doing, the teachers each gave a short presentation on what their students have been up to. Here’s one of the presentations (you can see a few more here):
The next day we delivered two workshops to the teachers aimed at helping them to overcome some of the difficulties they were having with their school councils. Asher sensibly suggested that the workshops should be in Czech so that the teachers could share ideas, with Honza translating things back to us. This worked out well, and there was a sigh of relief from the teachers when they didn’t have to hear everything in English.
It was a really interesting day, and many of the teachers had made really good progress. We helped them to support one another, and chipped in with our own advice too. I found it difficult not to be able to support the teachers once they were in small groups though, due to the language barrier – often that’s when you can go into more detail and give some tailored support. We did out best though, and the teachers seemed to get a lot out of it.
After a lovely end-of course celebration, and some exciting discussions about future collaboration, our trip to Prague came to an end. I also did a short interview on Prague radio. If you can’t speak Czech, it’s probably not worth clicking :)
And if you’re interested, here’s the programme that we ran: involver session outline – Prague Feb 2012
So we’d like to say a big thank you to the CEDU team: Tomas, Kamila, Karel, Filip, Honza, Jaroslav and Eliska. You were amazing hosts and we’re very grateful. A massive thank you to all the teachers we worked with too!
Hello from involver: Newsletter number 3!
The summer break is almost upon us (or already here, depending on where in the UK you are), so we hope you’ve had a great year!
Here’s a round up of what we’ve been up to over the last month:
Blog: School councils and student voice: why bother?
Greg says, ‘I’m working from Scotland for most of this week, which meant a very long eight hour train journey! After a double espresso, I was feeling a bit reflective about some of the things that we’re doing with involver and why we’ve been doing them.’ Here are his thoughts:
http://involver.org.uk/2010/07/school-councils-and-student-voice-why-bother/
Training: Making your school council READY!
Lots of schools are thinking about how they can improve their school council or student voice next year – we can help you make it READY (yes, that’s an acronym, have a look here if you want to know what for):
http://involver.org.uk/2010/07/school-council-training-get-in-touch/
Resource: Great set of student voice resources from Australia
Asher came across this series of presentations and supporting resources, which was created by Nick Rate, a trainer from Australia. He’s recorded it all so the people he supports in far flung places down under can access them, but of course it means we all can, we love the internet:
http://www.jogtheweb.com/run/AlhYPd3PMcUd/Student-Voice
Video: Make Your Voice Heard: Discover Democratic Education
A great video from the States about why ‘doing democracy’ in schools is so important. It is included in the set above, but worth a special mention:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_LbZ3XcfK4
Project: Speaker’s School Council Awards 2011
After a hugely successful opening year, you can now register your interest in the Speakers School Council Awards 2011. It’s a great way to get your achievements recognised, so to get involved, hop over to:
http://www.speakersschoolcouncil.org
Evaluation: Student voice/school council progress this year?
How have you been getting on with student voice, this year? It’s not easy to get right, and it still takes work and support even when it’s a success. We’ve built a very short audit tool to help you reflect. Fill it out and we’ll even provide you with personalised feedback and ideas if you want us to:
http://involver.org.uk/participate/simple-student-voice-audit/
Network: A new Student Voice and School council Linkedin group
For those of you that use Linkedin (for those who don’t: it’s kind of like a professional Facebook), we’ve set up a group to connect and inform people about student voice and school councils. We’re still finding our way around LinkedIn, but our teacher friends tell us it’s very useful. So take a look, and join at: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=3089339
Networking-fun: Fantasy Democraball!
We’ve set up a fantasy football mini-league for our friends, colleagues and contacts, so please join and invite oithers. You don’t need to know anything about football, just how to add up to £100,000,000. It’s a head-to-head league, so each game you’ll be playing against another person from the citizenship/student voice/youth democracy world (your skill in beating them will be a good ice-breaker topic for when you next meet them at a conference). It’s free to sign up. Once you’ve picked your team use this code to join the ‘Democraball!’ league: 116742-35727
http://fantasy.premierleague.com
So have a great summer!
And remember, if you want to get in touch about anything we’re up to, then please email us at info@involver.org.uk. We’re also always keen to hear about and share good practice, new resources or developments in student voice.
Greg and Asher @ involver
I just read this really interesting article on how schools in Colorado are finding that in the quest to raise standards and achievement that data alone is a blunt tool; student voice sharpens this.
Their recommendations are excellent, especially:
Utilize student-led outreach to capture feedback from disengaged students.
Have a read: http://blog.ednewscolorado.org/2010/01/05/in-r2t-student-voice-will-sharpen-blunt-instruments/
Culture is a great thing, it gives us a sense of identity, place and often purpose too, but it doesn’t do much for progress. In many ways culture is the embedding of a certain way of doing things through unquestioning repetition.
All major changes in industry, science, religion, society and thought have come from people or ideas that went against the prevailing culture. For the purposes of this blog, I’m going to call this counter-culture; it sets out with one maxim:
- We do not accept a view simply because it is stated by someone in a position of authority; it has to be proved to be of value to us.
Counter-culture is absolutely necessary for any society (or institution) that wants to learn and improve. Having assumptions challenged means the good ideas grow stronger and the poor ones are done away with. It recognises the need for constant re-evaluation (which is very different from constant change).
It seems to me that this is what should be at the heart of all education: working out from first principles what is valid, not basing our ideas on assumptions. So to what extent are our educational institutions counter-cultural? How do they inculcate this approach? I would argue that in most cases they don’t, they in fact do exactly the opposite.
In almost every school in the country there is a school/pupil/student council (or it may go by some other name on a similar theme). The aim of each of these is ‘to improve the school’, but how many really have the tools to do it? Most are given a narrow set of responsibilities and very limited scope in which to carry them out. Will this ever excite, represent or challenge most of the students or staff? If not, why are we doing them in school?
A number of questions I have been asked or that I have had to ask myself over the last couple of weeks have really brought this into focus for me:
- From secondary school pupils:
- Should staff set the agenda for our school council meetings?
- Should we (the school council) be allowed to talk about and make statements on whatever is important to pupils?
- Should staff play a role in selecting school council members?
- From other researchers/practitioners in the field:
- Are school councils merely there to deal with issues as they arise or should they create policy to pre-empt issues?
- Does the headteacher lead the pupils in a school or does s/he just manage the staff?
- Is it better to have a ‘learning council’ than a ‘pupil council’? (The suggesting being it puts learning at the heart of what it does, but I ask, ‘why demote pupils from being at the heart of what it does?’)
- From discussions with an ex-school student leader from Greece:
- What can a school council do if it’s not listened to? (In Greece they go on strike or occupy the school)
When staff allow students space to challenge they are forced into a real debate and both ‘sides’ have to question their own assumptions. Where schools just get students to help them with the things staff want to do there will be positive change, but it will be limited, never revolutionary.