His conclusions are that teaching schools have a double challenge, one local and one national.
"The local challenge is to be exemplars of how to co-develop professional practice that raises standards across an alliance. This requires the headteachers to confront head-on the challenge of how to arrive at a healthy competition, one that can be combined with the collaboration that drives the co-evolution of the partner schools to alliance success. Only with the right ingredients, namely high social capital, joint practice development and distributed system leadership, do you get the combination in which competition is healthy. Only then will the strategic alliances expand local capacity. And all this has to be accomplished within unstable local environments as local authorities react, often in very different ways, to the changes introduced by the 2010 white paper.
The national challenge is for teaching schools to work with one another, as a form of distributed intelligence, to co-develop innovations that set new standards of professional practice, thus moving the whole system to a new plane. The alliances should not be islands of excellence, a small-scale initiative that is irrelevant to most schools. If the whole is to add up to more than the sum of the parts, the proposed network of teaching schools must be an ambitious venture aimed directly at generating a huge increase in system capacity. There have been various schemes to create innovation networks in education over recent years, some of which have been substantial and heavily funded. All have, in my view, fallen far short of their ambitions and promises. They have done valuable work with parochial impact, but have not transformed the school system. Can the alliance network break the mould and prove that innovation networks in education can make the genuine breakthroughs of their equivalents in business and industry?
In short, will the teaching schools network help all the alliances to meet both the local and the national challenges and so finally make the difference at the system level?"
"The local challenge is to be exemplars of how to co-develop professional practice that raises standards across an alliance. This requires the headteachers to confront head-on the challenge of how to arrive at a healthy competition, one that can be combined with the collaboration that drives the co-evolution of the partner schools to alliance success. Only with the right ingredients, namely high social capital, joint practice development and distributed system leadership, do you get the combination in which competition is healthy. Only then will the strategic alliances expand local capacity. And all this has to be accomplished within unstable local environments as local authorities react, often in very different ways, to the changes introduced by the 2010 white paper.
The national challenge is for teaching schools to work with one another, as a form of distributed intelligence, to co-develop innovations that set new standards of professional practice, thus moving the whole system to a new plane. The alliances should not be islands of excellence, a small-scale initiative that is irrelevant to most schools. If the whole is to add up to more than the sum of the parts, the proposed network of teaching schools must be an ambitious venture aimed directly at generating a huge increase in system capacity. There have been various schemes to create innovation networks in education over recent years, some of which have been substantial and heavily funded. All have, in my view, fallen far short of their ambitions and promises. They have done valuable work with parochial impact, but have not transformed the school system. Can the alliance network break the mould and prove that innovation networks in education can make the genuine breakthroughs of their equivalents in business and industry?
In short, will the teaching schools network help all the alliances to meet both the local and the national challenges and so finally make the difference at the system level?"
If you want to read the complete publication you can download it for free at the National College website http://www.nationalcollege.org.uk.
Chris
No comments:
Post a Comment
More than anything else, feedback helps us improve and develop.
So, please let me know what you think?
Chris