I like Bruno Mars . I like listening to his songs and shoogling around much to the horror of other family members. This song is particularly nice and I really like the lyrics about counting on folk, being there for them and knowing that they are there for you. It came on my playlist as I sat down to do some work and I quite fancy the idea of us bringing it into our school songbook. Pity I can’t sing or carry a tune but that’s where the teamwork will come in!
Team effort is a big thing for any group of people and in many ways our school community is just like our family. We know each other, support each other, fall out, argue and then get on with things again. That is human nature. This week I was asked what I was proud about our school. Well, I explained that the answer was never ending but, actually at the heart of it for me, since we didn’t have all day, the first thing that came to my mind was our team. Everyone in our school is respected and listened to. That doesn’t mean to say that we all get on and agree- far from it. For me though it means consistency and shared goals. WE have been focusing this session on Pupil Voice. We adults in school had no doubt that our young people had a pupil voice however, it wasn’t consistent and, more importantly we didn’t think that the young people themselves actually knew that they had a voice in our community! The awfully clever DHT set about exploring this more involving all sorts of interested folk (even if they didn’t know they were interested at first). We have been on a really interesting journey that has helped shape the future journey of our learning community. As with a lot of things we do, it is a journey and we don’t see an end point. We will continue to journey on and use experiences and knowledge to make us an effective place to grow and develop.
We looked at our planning and worked on ways to show the young people their part in what we do. That was really interesting and informative. How the different ages and stages perceived the way in which we learn, what we learn, what is learning and how we use different learning in different ways was exciting and challenging. For us as facilitators and learners ourselves we were taken by surprise by the twists and turns the discussions took and how indispensable sticky note s and coloured pens could be! Then we made some sweeping changes that seemed to happen overnight because we had a collective “lightbulb” moment over planning/tracking and evaluating that took us further along the road. For me, I was struck by how the fear factor diminished because we were all involved and, most importantly, people were comfortable enough and felt supported enough to question, disagree and just say “I don’t see that” (that was usually me). Are we finished? No way, but we never expect to be. We have goals and milestone checks to ensure that we continue on the journey and if we take a wrong turn or come to a dead end we can work it out and reroute.
We staff are already thinking about next steps, ways to engage more of our friends, families and colleagues. We are so aware of all the demands that life puts on us all so we need to be innovative and solution focussed to involve more of our stakeholders and we are open to all and any suggestions so if you are reading this and have some ideas let us know. Thanks to the awfully clever DHT there are loads of ways to get in touch with us if you aren’t actually near our building and able to do my favourite things- talking and listening! Ways such as this website! And now we have a twitter account where P7 were tweeting last week. We are all in this together! Join in!