What Makes A School Effective?

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What Makes A School Effective?

• Devika Nadig Vijay Gupta
• Shikshangan

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School effectiveness.

• Effective school is one which enhances learning
  achievement of every student
• Reasonable infrastructure, sufficient number of
  teachers and learning resources are necessary but
  not sufficient to make a school effective
• Factors beyond these which make a school
  effective has been an area of intense research
• Here is one such proposal from Robert Marzano,
  and its critique and relevance to Indian schools

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A bit of background.

• Marzanos framework is based on hundreds of
  researches done by othersthat is, it is a
  meta-research
• He categorizes the factors contributing to school
  effectiveness into three
• School level factors
• Teacher level factors
• Student level factors

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School Effectiveness Factors

• School level factors
• Guaranteed and viable curriculum
• Challenging goals and effective feedback
• Parent and community involvement
• Safe and orderly environment
• Collegiality and professionalism
• Teacher level factors
• Instructional strategies
• Classroom management
• Classroom curriculum design
• Student level factors
• Home environment
• Learned intelligence background knowledge
• Motivation

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5 School Level Factors

• In order of the impact they have on student
  achievement
• Guaranteed and viable curriculum
• Challenging goals and effective feedback
• Parent and community involvement
• Safe and orderly environment
• Collegiality and professionalism

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Guaranteed Viable Curriculum

• Simply, whether students had adequate time to
  learn what we want them to learn
• Attempt is to minimize the gap between intended
  curriculum and implemented curriculum
• Do we have adequate time for instruction? How
  much time is available theoretically, and how
  much actually gets utilized? (Highest estimates
  are around 70)

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Challenging Goals Effective Feedback

• Establish challenging goals for students set
  high expectations - and track the extent to which
  goals are being achieved
• Give timely feedback to students - which is
  formative and specific to the content being learnt

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Parent Community Involvement

• Extent to which parents and community are both
  supportive of, and involved in school
• Marzano suggests three features of this
  involvement
• Communication between school and parents
• Participation in day to day working of the school
• Participation in governance of the school

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Safe Orderly Environment

• Refers to school climate and disciplined
  environment conducive to learning
• Establish clear school-wide rules and procedures
  for general behaviour, and enforce appropriate
  consequences for violations of rules and
  procedures

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Collegiality Professionalism

• Manner in which school staff interacts and extent
  to which they approach their colleagues as
  professionals
• How supportive they are to one another openly
  sharing their failures and mistakes
  demonstrating respect for each other
  constructively analyzing and criticizing
  practices and procedures
• Professionalism a sense of efficacy that they
  can effect changes in their schools
• Valued and critical part of schools policy
  setting
• Reasonable level of subject knowledge and
  pedagogical knowledge

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3 Teacher Level Factors

• Instructional strategies
• Classroom management
• Classroom curriculum design

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Instructional Strategies

• More effective teachers use more effective
  instructional strategies
• Marzano lists following nine strategies as being
  found to be most effective
• Identifying similarities differences i.e.
  compare, classify, metaphor analogies
• Summarizing note taking verbal/written
  summaries, taking notes
• Reinforcing effort providing recognition
• Homework practice specific feedback on
  homework homework for practicing
• Non-linguistic representation mental images,
  pictures, graphic organizer, acting out the
  content, physical models etc.

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Instructional Strategies (contd.)

• Other effective strategies
• Cooperative learning
• Setting objectives and providing feedback
• Generating and testing hypothesis
• Questions, cues and advance organizers prior to
  presenting new content, getting students to
  recall, provide links and represent previous
  knowledge

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Classroom Management

• In order that instruction and learning can take
  place
• Establishing and enforcing rules and procedures
• Carrying out disciplinary actions
• Maintaining effective teacher-student
  relationship
• Maintaining an appropriate mental set for
  management

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Classroom Curriculum Design

• Sequencing and pacing of content in the
  classroom three principles suggested by
  Marzano
• Learning is enhanced when a teacher identifies
  specific types of knowledge that are the focus of
  a unit or lesson
• Learning requires engagement in tasks that are
  structured or are sufficiently similar to allow
  for effective transfer of knowledge
• Learning requires multiple exposure to and
  complex interaction with knowledge

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3 Student Level Factors

• Home environment
• Learned intelligence background knowledge
• Motivation

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Home Environment

• As per Marzano, home atmosphere comprises three
  elements
• Communication about school i.e. parent discussing
  with children about school work encouraging
  children regarding school work and providing
  resources to help children do their school work
• Supervision i.e. extent of parent monitoring and
  controlling childs behaviour to optimize
  academic achievement
• Parental expectations and parenting style high
  expectations and high achievement are correlated
  parenting style authoritarian, permissive
  authoritative

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Learned Intelligence Background Knowledge

• Intelligence has two aspects as knowledge
  (crystallized intelligence), and as cognitive
  process (fluid intelligence)
• Crystallized intelligence is learned while the
  other is largely innate Fluid intelligence is
  instrumental in developing crystallized
  intelligence
• Crystallized intelligence is same as background
  knowledge for all practical purposes
• Experience-rich environment helps in enhancing
  background knowledge
• Experience-rich environment has a direct
  correlation with vocabulary

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Motivation

• Refers to student motivation to learn the content
  in a given subject
• Students are motivated when there is autonomy,
  mastery and purpose

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A Critique

• Marzanos framework is silent on what is a good
  curriculum (or syllabus) perhaps because there
  are learning standards in place in most of the
  states of the US
• Framework is similar in spirit as Balance
  Scorecard and quality models which attempt to
  discover input parameters, controlling which will
  ensure quality outcomes
• Framework can possibly be enhanced by using the
  idea of levels from Capability Maturity Models
  (CMM) used in software business

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Our experience with Indian schools

• Factors which require major pulling up
• Guaranteed viable curriculum
• Collegiality professionalism
• All three teacher level factors
• Learned intelligence background knowledge
• The quality of an education system cannot exceed
  the quality of its teachers

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Thank You