Self Evaluation and Learning Action Planning - Essay Example

Introduction Self evaluation is an important tool to use in order for schools as well as officials who hold various positions and especially in the education sector to come up with helpful information on how best to conduct education activities. However, as important as it is many still find it a pressing issue on their time and resources. It is known to be quite invaluable in ensuring good school management. This paper shall focus on self evaluation from the perspective of a SENCo (Special Education Needs Coordinator) and the various processes involved in self evaluation that are relevant to the coordinator’s roles. Evaluation in schools is of interest to various stakeholders in the education sector i.e. the government, parents, teachers, media and the wider society (Bracey 2006). Government inspectors have in many cases taken the roles of evaluation on schools’ performance in many countries although the new trend that is widely gaining prominence is that of schools doing self evaluation. Inclusion is one of the aspects of self evaluation that has been seen to have a wide range of positive outcomes if well implemented and it is for this reason that this paper shall seek to further on its impact on the evaluation process and how this can be facilitated by the SENCo (Swaffield and MacBeath 2005). It is a basic understanding that leadership should not be detached from the organs it is leading and it is for this reason that the process of inclusion is quite important in the cases of self evaluation for schools. All the stakeholders mentioned above need to work together and share ideas as evaluation is mostly the basis for school improvement and appraisal of standards of education. Valuable outcomes have been seen to crop up in instances where the school management and the various stakeholders come together and give ideas or good as well as bad areas that need improvement and how best to do it. SENCo has the best chance and has their work well organised when such a scenario is in the offing. On basic terms the teaching staff for example should monitor leaning activities, manage performance of pupils, conduct department reviews and become actively involved in improvement and development activities of the school. Students with special needs have various disabilities that affect their learning and for this reason there are more aspects that need to be looked into more than the case would be in other schools. This is quite an interesting aspect to explore into and the findings of this paper shall come from various methods applied to collect data. Focus and Context There are many links that are there between self-evaluation, good management of the improvement initiatives and the responsibility frameworks that all the stakeholders have. As a SENCo it is important to note that one of the roles is to ensure that all the relevant stakeholders work together and should liaise all towards achievement of a common goal. In many situations that call for many people to get involved in achieving a common objective, various hurdles emerge and it is therefore for the SENCo to provide the guidance and monitor their performance (Hall and Noyes 2009). Teachers need to be vigilant in indentifying the fault lines in the already working system and come up with suggestions of their own on how to work them out for more desirable outcomes. Pupils’ involvement in self evaluation has also proved to be helpful a great deal. School council for example is a good avenue through which a SENCo can use to collect pupils’ views on the prevailing circumstances that impact on their learning. It is important however to keep in mind that when conducting interviews or collecting and compiling data from pupils age is a factor to highly consider. The reason for this is, pupils of different ages seem to react to situations differently and in cases where a selective group is involved then the outcomes are also selective and subjective for that matter rendering them unreliable. The schools governors on the other hand take a huge stake in ensuring that self evaluation process is a success. They act as facilitators of the whole process and this forms part of their statutory duty (Swaffield and MacBeath 2005). This being a statutory duty to them means that their management is also under inspection therefore their role in the evaluation process is vital. They need to also have their own self evaluation in order to uncover their strengths as well as weaknesses. Parents on the other hand are supposed to offer the necessary guidance to their children and contribute actively towards the development agenda of the school. In this respect where the children have special needs, parents need to involve themselves more in the self evaluation process. The case in point is that these children require huge attention and some may pose learning difficulties and other disabilities that hamper learning and parents stand the best chance to provide the way forward. The larger community is also one to consider when conducting self evaluation as an aspect of inclusion. The larger community being a stakeholder gives a rather broad based perspective on how best to carry out this kind of evaluation. Under this there are institutions and organisations that act as partners with the school and they may wish to have the school’s performance evaluated so as to know the viability of their partnership. The roles that have been highlighted above are those of the various stakeholders and they are quite relevant to consider for a SENCo more so in the primary level. These roles integrate quite well with those of a SENCo. Evaluation and inspection go hand in hand and making self evaluation for schools to support the roles of the coordinator (Wroe and Halsall 2001). The quality of education that the children receive in schools is of important to all the stakeholders meaning that they must all work together in order to achieve the best results. Identification is the various learning needs of individual children one of the processes involved. These problems may range from failure to read properly to slow comprehension problems. The teacher on noticing this is supposed to contact the SENCo and inform them on the specific issues facing the child. After this the SENCo is supposed to carry out a detailed assessment on the child or children based on the teacher’s findings. The assessment is done to uncover the exact problem with accuracy. The problem may be hearing loss or visual impairment. These two scenarios can be disastrous to a child’s learning meaning that if not accurately detected the learning process will not be as efficient to the child (Hall and Noyes 2009). The SENCo is supposed to conduct these duties with utmost objectivity and collect all the necessary data in a rigorous and a scientific manner. This process of evaluation is a project on its own and the SENCo needs to use a professional methodology to come up with findings in relation to adequacies and inadequacies in the individual children with learning difficulties as well an overhaul of the school’s performance. Methodology Monitoring a project is not an easy task for a SENCo and more so in where many stakeholders are involved. Therefore, in coming up with a good project the coordinator needs to develop a reliable approach that will see to it that all the stakeholders have been involved in order to increase the reliability of the results. The coordinator is also supposed to approach the research in a manner that is to provide answers that will enable the school to implement the various recommendations after evaluation and supervision. The approaches should also facilitate the cohesion and support from the school society and LA in trying to be in line with LA practices (Hall and Noyes 2009). The first approach involved interviews with pupils particularly those who experienced difficulties in learning. The pupils’ age in this respect was quite an important factor to consider and in doing so, interviews were held under different environments and under different and separate conditions. For children whose age was 10 years and below, playful interviews were conducted. The interviews were later extended to the rest of the children, parents, governors and teachers. Questionnaires were the other important tools used because of their high reliability scores. Interviews are regarded as less reliable as a result of their subjectivity if not recorded although in this case they were. Examples of questions for teachers were as follows (School SEN Self evaluation Toolkit 2010): : Number of years in the current school Number of years teaching From a range of 1 – 5, 1 being the lowest agreement score and 5 the highest: Is literacy development dependent on the quality of teaching? Should literacy be integrated in other key learning areas? Does group activity meet the needs of the outcome? Children learn best by being involved in listening, speaking, writing and reading I am aware of the literacy performance of the school Findings and analysis Investigation of the outcomes was not a simple task in trying to collect all the data and interview responses to come up with coherent results that would be used for decision making. The area of self evaluation that seemed to attract more attention was that of the individual pupil performance (Bracey 2006). This means that in the learning process it came out that the attention made towards and individual learner’s needs goes a long way in solving learning difficulties. This is a widely accepted scenario as the evaluation especially in the SEN schools should focus on the role of the stakeholders in improving the learning process of the learner and the school as a whole. The pupils commented that they understood the content better when the teaching process focused more on their individual abilities. For those who had hearing problems they wished that they be placed in the front of the others in the classroom so that they hear their teachers better. These sentiments were echoed by the ones who had visual impairment. They all lamented that their position in class affected their performance a great deal as they were not able to cope with the rest in achieving the learning objectives. On this issue the teachers commented that they were working to indentify all the necessary difficulties that hampered these pupils’ progress in learning. The other key issue that was discussed in details was that of having regular visits by medical specialists to the school. It is an issue that was raised and supported by the adult stakeholders i.e. the teachers, parents and the governors. The parties raising this issue commented that as much as the teachers would notice progress or otherwise in a child’s learning process and the relationship that this has with the child’s physical challenge, it is up to a specialist to assess the extent of this progress or otherwise. The aspect of including specialists is one that will engulf the management in coming up with more strategic development of special education needs. This is one area that will in no doubt raise and support pupils’ achievement in the learning process (Swaffield and MacBeath 2005). Tests provided by teachers to the pupils give information that is essential in analysing the leaning process and progress. Self evaluation through this research shows that it is one of the best methods that can be used to achieve desired results. Pupils after they evaluate themselves through explicit criteria are able to assess the quality of the work they do. It was found that this form of self evaluation increased the pupils’ intrinsic motivation as well as self efficacy which were more of a scenario when they perform difficult tasks with special needs pupils. Fig 1 Source (Bracey 2006) This method where pupils evaluate themselves is one was also criticised as not to have the teacher’s control especially when it comes to the learners progress or otherwise. The other big issue with this is that the pupils need to be taught how to self evaluate themselves effectively. In this whole issue of pupils’ self evaluating themselves the teachers take the onus of ensuring that the process is as effecting as possible so as to produce the desired results. This is one of the major weaknesses affecting self evaluation in respect to pupils doing it themselves. The other important finding was that self evaluation was not a well embraced aspect by the various stakeholders. It is taken to be a burden to the time and resources of the school. This was noticed by the response rate of the questionnaires by the teachers. 38 percent of them did not return the questionnaires within the 24 hours given and of the ones received, 16 percent were not fully filled. The governors’ responses also took time to be compiled as they were always busy attending to other school matters. It is only the parents and the pupils who cooperated fully in the whole process. This showed that the teaching staff and the management need to be sensitised more on the importance of self evaluation in schools although they are well aware of the issues underlying the practice as well as benefits. This was evident from the responses they gave when the chance called for them to do so but the urge to intensify the process of self evaluation was the lacking aspect that the above statistics prove. Conclusion Self evaluation in schools is a helpful tool that enables easy monitoring of performance for both individual teachers and students as well as for the school as a whole. For self-evaluation to be successful the various stakeholders need to be involved and their contributions taken seriously in improving the standards of service offered by the school. It is here that the services of the SENCo come in handy so as to monitor the evaluation programme while coordinating the approach to the exercise and harmonising the efforts of all stakeholders (Bracey 2006). The school governors are taken to be vital as they act as lower lever coordinators while the teachers are the facilitators. Self-evaluation for a school takes time and resources and therefore should be conducted in such a way that it is not inconveniencing to the core purpose i.e. teaching and learning in the school. Self-evaluation’s key aim is to uncover the schools performance and assess whether this is on the upward, downward or stagnating level. For this reason after evaluation is done the stakeholders i.e. the school governors, teachers, parents, pupils and the wider community analyse the findings. In the event that the performance is falling or stagnant the parties come together and devise corrective measures. Where the situation is on the upward trend the measures taken are those that aim at ensuring the upward trend. Self-evaluation is more so important in the scenario discussed above where special education needs are of essence. Students in this school setting are in most instances requiring special attention and their challenges limit their learning abilities. Teachers as the ones mostly involved with them in daily learning activities should be vigilant enough to ensure they detect problems early enough. They are also the ones to design how to best evaluate performance on the part of the pupils. When all the stakeholders are involved and their efforts harmonised the outcome of self-evaluation is a success. References Bracey, Gill 2006, Self-evaluation for school improvement, Optimus Publishing. Hall, C and Noyes, A 2009, School self-evaluation and its impact on teachers’ work in England, Research Papers in Education. School SEN Self evaluation Toolkit, 2010. Plymouth LA Swaffield, S and MacBeath, J 2005, School self-evaluation and the role of a critical friend. Cambridge Journal of Education. 35, 2, 239-52. Wroe, A and Halsall, R 2001, School self-evaluation: Measurement and reflection in the school improvement process. Read More