Abstract
School improvement is an ongoing challenge. The articles in this special issue of Improving Schools provide insight into the manner in which organizational coherence empowers schools to make a difference in their communities and improve student outcomes. Coherence within the case study schools whose stories are shared has been achieved through collective commitment to a set of shared values and beliefs captured in the form of a school’s Vision and Schoolwide Pedagogical Framework (SWP).
These artefacts serve to sustain focus on priorities pertinent to a specific school context. Collaborative practice and reflection across a school professional learning community ensure that shared meaning making results in shared action and intent, the very basis on which coherence is built. When a vision and set of guiding principles become embedded into practice over time, the resulting meaning system enhances the distinctive culture of that school.
Synergies generated by shared norms and assumptions produce unconscious culturally appropriate responses to a complex variety of everyday needs. Teacher isolation within the four walls of a classroom diminishes and the social and intellectual capacity built through continued and enhanced collaborative practice within the school staff and community enhances school goals and transfers into improved outcomes for students.
Read individually, these articles encourage the reader to reflect on each school narrative, the impact of the findings, and how these relate to personal teaching experiences. When read in sequence they portray a collective story about teaching passion and commitment, sustained capacity building and schoolwide coherence.
In ‘School meaning systems: The symbiotic nature of culture and ‘‘language-in-use’’’, the strong reciprocal link between a school’s context specific vision and schoolwide pedagogy and how the development, exploration and ongoing commitment to these artefacts of shared knowledge creation produce shared meaning and coherence is explored in detail.
‘Activating the “language for learning” through schoolwide pedagogy: The case of MacKillop School’ clearly illustrates how coherence within the case study school resulted in student outcomes improving significantly in the areas of numeracy and literacy. With a community of 98 percent ‘English as an added language’ students, the research explores the impact of the schoolwide pedagogical principles on practice and the emergence of a language for learning.
Building on the concept of a language for learning, ‘Metalanguage: The ‘‘teacher talk’’ of explicit literacy teaching in practice’, examines the metalanguage related to the pedagogy of explicit teaching that is evidenced in both teachers’ collegial professional conversations and the pedagogical dialogue used by teachers and students in classrooms.
In ‘Metaphor: Powerful imagery bringing learning and teaching to life’, the ways in which metaphor may make cognitive connections that enhance learning are articulated. The metaphor-enriched artefacts of Vision and SWP within each of the participant schools convey cultural and pedagogical messages to those new to the school and help to align and sustain shared understandings focussed on the achievement of shared goals.
‘Raising the pedagogical bar: Teachers co-construction of explicit teaching’, reinforces the emphasis being placed in Australian schools around what Hattie (2005) calls ‘visible learning’. The explicit teaching focus here reports on the perspectives of a large group of educators who were exploring this concept as part of their professional learning. The findings reflect a new broader conceptualization of effective teaching.
Using a case study approach ‘Shared pedagogical understandings: School wide inclusion practices supporting learner needs’, demonstrates how aligned pedagogical understandings and a strong culture of inclusion have seen the rapid increase of students with high levels of special needs successfully integrated into a large primary school. Underpinning the approach to inclusion taken within the school is a strongly shared belief in social justice and a sense of collaborative commitment to improve outcomes for all students.
Finally, in ‘Creating enduring strength through commitment to schoolwide pedagogy’, the unmistakeable thread running through each article around teacher and leadership commitment to a schoolwide pedagogical framework is unpacked in detail. Once schoolwide pedagogy was a term rarely heard and yet, certainly within an Australian context, it has now become a part of any serious discussion about school improvement and can be seen as the central force leading to school coherence.
Many of the case studies within the articles refer to capacity building processes which fall under the banner of the Innovative Designs for Enhancing Achievements in Schools (IDEAS) Project developed by Emeritus Professor Frank Crowther and the Leadership Research Institute (LRI) team at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. Essential constructs related to building organizational capacity through the creation of learning organizations and the belief that school capacity directly influences student outcomes underpin the project. Key artefacts resulting from engagement with the project are a school’s vision and schoolwide pedagogical framework, which together reinforce a school culture and create coherence. Both these powerful concepts are clearly woven throughout each of the articles within this special issue and much can be learnt from the practical nature of the examples provided. This issue was stimulated by the authors’ presentations of their research in a special featured theme on school capacity building at the islPAL Second International Conference on Leadership in Pedagogies and Learning in Brisbane, Australia, August 2012.