BESA CORNER
This month in our ongoing feature highlighting the work of members of the UK education suppliers’ trade body BESA, we hear from BLUESKY and NETSUPPORT.
How Saracens High School streamlined staff development
The key to school EdTech progress? Maximising your technology
Comment by MARK ANDERSON, Head of Education at NetSupport
With the advent of AI in education, now, more than ever, education systems worldwide are starting to see the promise of classroom EdTech and the impact it can have on learning, teaching and workload reduction.
As we’ve seen for some time though, children are all too often distracted when using technology. Let’s not get started on young people’s use of mobile phones – that’s a big topic in itself – but when schools (rightly) consider giving children a learning device, to maximise them, it’s imperative that they also provide teachers with the tools to help their students benefit from the opportunities for learning in the classroom.
Apply pedagogical thinking
As educators, we know the importance of metacognition and self- regulation. We apply that thinking when it comes to our teaching without technology, so why is it the case that this is often forgotten when we add technology into the mix?
Too often, devices are rolled out without asking important questions such as, ‘How will we keep children focused on their learning?’, ‘How will we make sure that they know where their learning resources are?’, ‘What will we do about what they are searching for, or what they are typing into their devices?’. The truth is, without considering classroom instruction and management software that can help children with their self-regulation when using technology, the chances are that many deployments will run the risk of failure.
As any teacher who has entered a PC suite to work with children will tell you, it can often take quite some time to get them all to the same web page.
Real-life use case
Orla Weaver, Assistant Headteacher at The Grammar School at Leeds, knows how important using a dedicated classroom instruction and management solution is. She has shared about her school’s use of one such tool,
classroom.cloud: “
classroom.cloud is sort of a two-pronged attack. It has the teaching and learning features which enhance the learning in the classroom – I have absolutely no doubt about that. But it also offers us that monitoring, that peace of mind, and for me, it’s security for the students. They come in and they know what they need to be getting on with, and they aren’t then tempted to drift off task, check their emails or go on a website that they shouldn’t be on. They know what they need to be doing and they have the security and support to get on with their learning in the classroom environment. I think it just encourages focus, concentration and self-regulation in the classroom. The ability for the teacher to see what the students are doing and to adapt their teaching – responsive teaching – they can immediately feed back to students on particular things they’ve done very well but, equally, little corrections that they might need to make. The teaching opportunities there are really important. So that I think for us is why it’s a game-changer and why we’re so fond of it.” Move your school and students forward
With so much focus on ensuring children use technology for its intended purpose of learning, if your school isn’t already using a classroom management solution, is it about time you asked yourself: if not, why not?
For more information visit
https://classroom.cloud/ 20
www.education-today.co.uk
Saracens High School is the first school linked to Saracens Sports Club and since launching in 2018, it has grown very quickly. “We focus on supporting and
developing our people, in line with the Saracens ethos,” says Dr Matt
Stevens, Principal at Saracens High School in Barnet, a particularly deprived area of North West London.
He explains: “One of the things I was most invested in when we started the school was the CPD allowance. So when people ask if they can do a training course or CPD activity, we just say yes. “At the start, I was doing all of the paperwork for performance reviews and CPD training requests manually, spending a good few hours every weekend going through all of the applications,” says Matt. “Then growth took us by surprise. In 2019 we had 40 staff, but after Covid we had over 170 staff. Managing everything manually at that scale was impossible. I realised I needed a system that could streamline the workload.” Managing CPD effectively
Matt continues: “I had first seen BlueSky when it was introduced at a school I was working at years ago. We wanted a system that allowed us to manage all of our CPD processes as well as linking this to objectives and quality assurance. We looked at other solutions and concluded that BlueSky was the only platform that could do this effectively.”
Matt and his team use the CPD and Training modules in BlueSky to process and approve all staff requests for training, as well as sharing internal opportunities for training.
He explains: “We have a quality of education team that is very strong on pedagogy and subject knowledge, particularly science. We also do a lot of work on culture, as this is important to supporting our students, given the demographic of the school.
“We do a lot of internal training, but we also want people to bring ideas in from outside. Using BlueSky not only helps us to track training requests, but also who is not engaging with professional development, so we can encourage them.” Linking objectives to school priorities
“One of the things that BlueSky has allowed us to do this year is link performance objectives to school priorities,” says Matt. “We wanted teachers to have at least two performance objectives that were connected to wider school goals, so we uploaded these and asked our staff to adjust them to align with their own practice.” Evaluating quality of teaching
Matt concludes: “We see a lot of good things going on in our classrooms, so we make a note on BlueSky and share the feedback with the individual. Our BlueSky account manager created a bespoke form for both types of Observation in the system, which makes it easy to make a note at the time and use that as evidence of people’s development.
“BlueSky is very, very time efficient. It saves us hours. It has simplified a lot of tasks around CPD and appraisal. It’s given us consistency. It’s given us more control. It’s given us a better capacity to track what’s going on, so we can respond quicker where we need to intervene. Ultimately, it’s been really useful for us.” Read the full case study here:
https://bit.ly/Saracens_High_School
To find out how BlueSky could work in your school, talk to the BlueSky team at Bett 2025 this January on stand SH 62.
December 2024
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