Strengthening partnerships ; Empowering parents & children through building social skills

Collaboration between a team of teachers digging into the data from children and parents led to a recent parent event. Here is a reflection around the process and outcomes so far. Thanks to the St Patrick's staff and Lucas Tuan-Mu for their valued contribution to the event and this post.

School Community Sphere

Goals	Target (Index figures for 2018)	Actions	Evidence of change	Outcomes
To strengthen partnership within our community	Community Engagement 77(Community Engagement Variable)	-Review and analyse feedback from parents/action learning events -POPE parents as open partners in education meetings -Develop Learning Community Site	-Creation of targeted goals and actions from feedback to promote school community partnerships -Increased attendance at school/ family partnership events eg Family Masses and Host Family nights, Information Nights -Learning celebrations, open sessions for the community and utilise skills from parent	Parent engagement in student learning is strengthened

The above actions form part of our St Patrick’s Annual Action Plan 2017 Here is the link. The School Community goal provides a context for our purpose to engage parents.

Research around the value of collaboratively sharing expertise and using the Spiral of Inquiry framework as a guide going forward, lead to the engagement of parents as partners in a “Building Social Skills” initiative.

Based on playground data and conversations with children, teachers and parents; staff innovatively created a renewed approach to supporting the development of positive social and emotional skills in the Middle Years. This commenced with the Year 4 children.

The inquiry began with the Deputy Principal, Student Support Leader and Principal. This grew to include the Year 4 teachers, Student Well Being Leader, teacher librarian and registered school psychologist. Many planning meetings took place, leading to the initial parent evening. Details around the specific wording of the invitation to parents, the format of the evening, proposed outcomes, the best venue and necessary resourcing evolved, as part of the depthening of this inquiry.

One goal for the evening was to allow time for parents to interact and share their experiences with each other as part of the planned parent activities.

Parent’s participated enthusiastically as they shared and discussed social challenges for their children and families at home. Common issues rose to the top of the ranking ladders. These included answering back/ arguing, sibling rivalry and electronic devices.

Our Deputy Principal, Liz Hills, spoke about the social challenges some of our children may face at school. Liz explained that we want to empower all children to take ownership of any issues. If children are feeling anxious or worried, for example, about school friendships, they may not be able to focus on their learning.

Together, parents and teachers can help empower children to develop the life skills to handle worries and concerns. Instead of writing an email directly to the teacher, when a child shares a concern, parents can ask the following questions and support children to solve issues:

How did you manage that ?

Who did you tell ?

How did you feel ?

Our Year 4 teachers, mentioned the ongoing support for children in classrooms. In particular, the work with Friendly Kids, Friendly Classrooms. There is a display outside the Year 4 classrooms.

Our Student Support Leader, Kerryn Oliver, explained the importance of a holistic education. We have a large team of dedicated staff who want to support all children to succeed.

Kerryn introduced Lucas Tuan-Mu, our school psychologist, an expert in this field of work.

Lucas explained his day to day work and the importance of supporting all students to develop positive social skills. Developing social skills will enable children to be more successful and confident in relationships now and in the future.

Thirty four parents attended the evening. This is 70% attendance from the Year 4 parents. Feedback from parents was overwhelmingly positive with a request from parents of other year levels for a similar event.

Potentially, a follow up event to this initial parent evening will be planned to continue to strengthen parent partnerships to support learning through building social skills. Supporting parents and children until the end of Year 6 at St Patrick’s will ensure a strong, positive transition to secondary school.

The Spiral of Inquiry is ongoing. We will continually collaborate to strive for successful outcomes for the whole community.

A collaborative needs based coherent approach to innovative, professional learning

How do we ensure professional learning is connected to the identified needs of our young learners and that everyone - leaders, teachers and support staff, are motivated and engaged in the learning ?

How do we create the conditions for all teachers to collaboratively learn in deep and systematic ways about improving outcomes for young learners ?

How do we shift from student voice to learner agency and genuinely involve families and communities in the process ?

There is a well researched framework for transforming learning in schools, leading to innovation, known as the spiral of inquiry. You can read a succinct account of the paper entitled A Framework for transforming learning in schools: Innovation and the spiral of inquiry by Timperley, Kaser & Halbert (2014) on the Educational Leaders site. The paper was published by The Centre for Strategic Education, Melbourne.

Spiral of inquiry framework image. Acknowledge source: Timperley et al, 2014

For those of you not familiar with the 'teaching as inquiry' model. It is important not to confuse a purposeful inquiry by teachers into the impact of their teaching such as the spiral of inquiry with the 'Inquiry Based Learning' approach. The latter is used by teachers to motivate young learners through questions, problems and scenarios to develop their thinking skills.

In 2016, I wrote a post reflecting on the spiral of inquiry process.  The process compliments research around the seven principles of learning summarised in the OECD (Dumont et al, 2010) publication The Nature of Learning. You can read the post at this link.

Box 2 on p8 of the framework has key questions related to each of the seven principles of learning.Acknowledge source: Timperley et al, 2014

In the different phases of the spiral; trust, and engaging learners and their families, are a recurring theme. Here is a brief summary about each phase of the spiral:

Scanning (p7- 9): This is about digging deeper, going underneath the data to get an understanding of the experiences of learners to drive change. Teacher observations and surveys of social, intellectual and emotional engagement are valuable. Using the questions in Box 2 (p8) helps to get a bigger picture for the learners.
Focusing (p10-11): We determine which area to concentrate on to start to make a difference. It's about asking the question - what's going on and how do we know ? It's about talking with the learners and identifying a common area many people can buy into.
Developing a hunch (p12-14): Intuition and hunches, together with evidence, inform and guide the scanning and focusing phases. We take responsibility for the areas we have influence and control in. We have the confidence to share ideas where it is safe to question our own behaviours and beliefs. Checking assumptions for accuracy is important before moving ahead.
New learning (p14-16):  This phase motivates us to explore new ways to change the learning experiences for learners. We explore deeper forms of powerful, professional learning connected to the inquiry focus and become motivated to act on these new experiences.
Taking action (p17-19): Informed actions are taken to make a difference. We learn more deeply about new ways of doing things, informed by a deep understanding of why new practices are more effective than others. We evaluate the impact on learners.
Checking (p19-21): Have we made enough of a difference as a team? We provide information on the impact of actions and set the stage for what will come next.

This process is based on a rich understanding of what is going on for learners. Success with small change leads to more radical changes and transformation takes place. Evidence informed, systematic inquiry becomes a professional way of life as one inquiry leads to another within the spiral.


Further resources to support this authentic process for developing collective professional agency within a school or across a cluster of schools are listed below:

Guide to the six phases of the Spiral of Inquiry framework 

The resource poses 50 questions for staff to consider during the inquiry process. Acknowledgement - Halbert & Kaser, 2013.

Another resource is a planning template to guide the process : Teaching as Inquiry planning template Acknowledgement - Janelle Riki and Ray Burkhill. Source: Virtual Learning Network

Acknowledgement to the Association of Independent Schools (AIS) of New South Wales for an excellent publication supporting this framework: Inquiry Learning Networks and Spiral of Inquiry.

A shared, collaborative inquiry approach provides coherence for needs - based, personalised professional learning within schools and across schools and transforms learning through innovative and curiosity - driven practices. 
Our community will begin the spiral of inquiry journey with small steps in 2017.

Please share any further resources you may have used or success stories from your schools using the Spiral of Inquiry framework.