International secondary education schools

Ana Magdalena de la Torre Gascón and Gabriel Ochoa Trujillo – Instituto Pierre Fauré, Guadalajara

The Pierre Fauré School and Secondary Education Centre in Gualajara is a private centre that encompasses all educational levels from nursery to upper secondary school. In addition, there is a teacher training centre.

We identified the centre thanks to one of our external experts, Laia Lluch, who knew their work in the field of self-regulated learning and feedback from other research projects. After an initial contact with the director, Nora Bross, she facilitated the interview with two secondary school teachers, so that they could tell us about the concrete implementation of the centre’s practices in very different classrooms. Male is a teacher of civic and ethical training, was a student of the centre and is a mother of pupils. Gabi is a mathematics teacher, studied and worked in other centres before arriving at Pierre Fauré, has been working there for 20 years, was a mother of pupils and is also a trainer in the teacher training centre.

During the interview, the two teachers share a series of centre and classroom practices, which arise from the philosophy of the centre.

1) Continuous improvement

The basis of all practices is the search for continuous improvement in all aspects and all people. This improvement is based on a process of pupil awareness gaining that empowers and puts them at the centre of their development process, which goes beyond academic learning. The means to achieve this are personalised and community work, including accompanied work, helping other people and receiving and accepting help from other people. The accompaniment of the pupils is at all times individualised, and feedback is given continuously, often in an oral and dialogue format, although different formats are combined. In addition, it is not only the pupils who are encouraged to seek improvement. The same teaching staff also looks for development opportunities, the centre collects the feedback of the students about the work of each member of the faculty and they also receives feedback from the management team. Similarly, the teaching material is constantly evolving, every week there is an afternoon of work of the teaching staff, which is dedicated, among other objectives, to talk and document possible improvements and each course the materials, such as the agenda, are reviewed, based on this continuous observation.

2) Individual work plan and structure of working time

Each pupil chooses a member of the teaching staff as an “animator” (tutor). The pupils who share an animator work in weekly group sessions on their personalised agenda and their individual work plan, including personal objectives, employing different monthly, quarterly and annual self-reflection tools. In each subject, the teaching staff shares the programming of the course and a guide for each topic. The first indicates to the pupils the proposed thematic sequence, allowing for their own decisions such as the moment in which they ask the teachers for approval to be able to move on to the next topic and, in some cases, the order in which to dedicate themselves to the different topics and the time they want to dedicate. The guide specifies the tasks, assessment criteria etc. and pupils need the teaching staff to sign it to move on to the next topic. The work is carried out in “collective classes” (it is a center with 2 lines, so the collective class refers to wokring in the classroom of group A and B of each year) and “academies” (spaces of 1h 45 minutes in which pupils from 1st to 3rd grade of secondary education mix to work individually on a subject. In these “laboratories” they can carry out their individual work with the accompaniment of the teachers of the area. In addition, working at home is encouraged, accompanying time planning to prepare submissions and exams outside the centre. This practice includes, therefore, many stimuli for self-regulated learning, with accompaniment that progressively gives more autonomy to pupils and adapts to specific needs to guarantee moments of success in each student. In this sense, for example, the level of difficulty of an exam is adapted according to the observation of the pupil’s process during the individualised work on the topic. These non-significant adaptations are part of the personalisation and can mean that the same person is asked for a little more in one submission than the majority of pupils, and in another a little less.

Natasha Adam – Stewart’s Melville College, Edinburgh

Stewart’s Melville College is an independent school in Edinburgh. We identified Natasha Adam through one of the experts we consulted, David Nicol, who had accompanied her throughout her Master’s a couple of years before. Natasha teaches Business Management as well as Economics in Secondary Education and developed for her Master’s thesis an intervention study introducing internal feedback steps into the homework process. Her findings, showing an increase in academic performance and self-regulated learning, encouraged her to continue the practice after completing her studies and beginning to work at Stewart’s Melville College. 

In EFICCA3 she shared several of her current practices: 

1) Homework practice. The practice she developed for her Master’s consists of splitting exam-practice homework into several steps. Before answering the past paper questions, the pupils have to go through several comparators, e.g. a textbook excerpt or a video example of a similar question, and review the concrete instructions for the command words used in the questions. Her findings show that, though pupils first feel reluctant to complete extra steps, they soon see them as useful, achieving a better result in the homework and overall learning. In her Master’s the participating pupils even started to incorporate this process into their learning habits, seeking comparators in subjects where this was not a requirement. From the teacher’s perspective, the workload is shifted towards the preparation and revision of comparators, while the homework revision becomes smoother as many issues are already solved. 

2) Self-reflection and action plans. Natasha identifies the preparation for the national exams as a main objective in her teaching and thus offers unit tests under exam conditions in class. After the exams, she hands them back with her corrections and then walks the group through all the questions, documenting the correct answers on the board. Afterwards, she asks her pupils to fill in a reflection sheet, in which they have to scale for each topic how well they are doing and count up the number of questions they got correct per command word. This allows them to visualise topics and question types requiring improvement. In a one-on-one session, Natasha speaks to her pupils about their exam and reflection sheet, encouraging them to set themselves goals. These goals are then shared with the family at the parent evening, representing an action plan with community involvement. Over time, pupils embed the practice naturally to decide and plan their autonomous learning.

Paula Hoonhout – OBS Wereldwijs, Amsterdam 

The OBS Wereldwijs in Amsterdam is a public centre in a highly complex neighbourhood that is recognised in the Netherlands as a school of excellence and receives visits from teachers from all over the country and also from other parts of the world, such as the Peralada Secondary Education Centre, which facilitated this contact.

Paula Hoonhout, the director of the center, tells us in our interview how years ago she felt that national evaluations were not fair to schools like hers. Instead of recognising the often enormous progress of their learners over the years, only the overall score of the school compared to the national average were considered. Paula gave this a twist by looking at the test results from the perspective of individual pupil progress, showing that they actually obtained results much higher than the average. The OBS Wereldwijs is an example of how successful evidence can affect a system and turn a school from a marginalized neighborhood into a centre of excellence with national recognition.

So what do they do at OBS Wereldwijs to achieve this impact? Here is a video in which the school itself explains its practice. As you can see, it is a matter of pupils learning to identify their competences with regard to a new task and then choosing the right path according to this identification. Already at the age of 4, pupils are able to explain why they identify a need for more or less help for a specific task. When asked how they knew what to do, Paula explains that they saw families struggling to support their children in an education system they often did not know. “It’s not that they don’t want to, they just can’t,” Paula said. To bridge the gap between students with and without adequate family support, Paula and her team began studying self-regulated learning, convinced that their students needed to learn to learn autonomously as soon as possible. They began reading academic publications and working in teaching staff groups, the so-called improvement groups, to set realistic goals and find evidence-based practices to achieve them. The implementation is carried out in a continuous process of improvement and evaluation, with key characteristics such as co-teaching and feedback from students. They’ve started this work already several years ago and although they continue to introduce new improvements year after year, aspects such as continuous feedback and the commitment to self-regulated learning are part of the nature of the school and they have diverse evidence to show its positive impact.