Is what you're doing making a difference?
This blog focuses one way or another, on working out how well we are doing. There are lots of good things going on in school, but only some of them have a very big impact on pupils’ learning and so really help us meet our aspirations for them. There are obviously a lot of variables to take into account in weighing up what to focus on and do really well, and each of the news stories and details about research has been selected to help people think about just that.
Often when we think about evaluating we look for very hard and direct evidence. We have found that building evaluation into the design of new initiatives as a formative part of the learning and development process usually provides better quality and more meaningful evidence. This is true in both our large-scale research and evaluation work and the small scale evaluations we do for individual schools. Teachers and leaders who are using evidence on a day-to-day basis to fine tune what they do, as in coaching relationships or Research Lesson Study, tend to engage with it more deeply and collect it with more care. See if the examples in our latest E-news give you ideas about how to increase your intelligence about how things are working and how you can improve them as a natural part of the development process.
Philippa Cordingley - Chief Executive