THE TRAITS OF THE BEST SCHOOL.

‘When a society changes, so then must its tools.”

A good school values its teachers and administrators and parents as agents of student success. A good school favors personalized learning over differentiated learning. A good school makes technology, curriculum, policies, and its other “pieces” invisible.

One paragraph doesn’t tell the story of a book. Similarly, one test doesn’t tell the tale of a school. The recent spotlight on school quality should help ensure a better education for all students. However, using one tool, and one as limited as a one or two day test doesn’t accurately portray schools. Although test scores are important, rarely do you hear about examining all the factors that make a school successful.These characteristics make a school good:

1. Students Want to be There

Effective schools have a warm climate. Students feel welcome and know that the staff cares about them. Although there is pressure to perform, it comes in a way that promotes learning, with an expectation that students will excel and the support is provided to make it happen. Room heat waves to snow rage, we are at the mercy of Mother Nature. But a comfortable classroom climate can make the school year much more productive, and reduce feelings of fatigue, irritability and depression. All of us can live IN A HYGIENIC ENVIRONMENT.

2.Highest Expectations For the School, Teachers and Students

Only the best is good enough. Quality is expected, and nothing less is acceptable. Passion for excellence is a driving force each and every day. A good school has an involved staff working together, pushing themselves and their students to be the best. Failure is not an option for the teacher or the students.

3. Dedicated Teachers

The best teachers work to improve their ability to teach. They read and explore the techniques used by others in a never-ending effort to better themselves and their skill. Effective teaching demands that the teacher be knowledgeable in the subject area. The teachers must have a detailed understanding of what is being taught.

4. Effective Discipline

Discipline should not be an issue. Students must respect others and failure to do so cannot be tolerated. Students must understand school and class rules and expectations, and adhere to them. When discipline is necessary, it is not vindictive, but just a consequence when a student does not do what is required.

5. There is a Variety of Instructional Techniques

No two classes, or two students are identical. An effective school has teachers that understand this and differ instruction to best help students be the successful. Key concepts are presented in ways to enable visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners grasp it. Students are actively involved in learning with a variety of opportunities to grasp key concepts.In a small school with a flat structure, all teachers can be involved in shaping the direction of the school, but when you scale that up, there is always the worry that some things could get knocked out of shape.

6. Individualized Instruction and Approaches to Students

Students’ abilities and needs are different. To effectively teach all students, the school staff must understand this. The teaching and interactions with students must reflect the needs of each, with the understanding of each as an individuals.Coming to work every day with people with a can-do attitude, people who believe that anything is possible and have a shared vision about what they want to achieve is a real pleasure. The kinds of things people are calling ‘innovative’ about these schools – different term times, longer school days, a wider range of subjects – much of it is possible for local authority schools, and certainly all of it for academies. So they might be good ideas, but ultimately they’re ideas that any teacher, working in any school, might have, How schools are designed and what students learn–and why–must be reviewed, scrutinized, and refined as closely and with as much enthusiasm as we do the gas mileage of our cars, the downloads speeds of our phones and tablets, or the operating systems of our watches. Most modern academic standards take a body-of-knowledge approach to education. This, to me, seems to be a dated approach to learning that continues to hamper our attempts to innovate.

7. Leadership

The building principal must have the respect of students, parents, and staff with a vision, high expectations, and the ability to help others succeed. This person must be able understand people, and motivate them, creating a positive attitude throughout the building. Successful schools have a sense of trust built on the back of an honest and caring leader.

Many factors go into helping a child become a productive adult, and there is no way one assessment a year can measure success or failure. The fact that so many people believe that one test on a couple of mornings each spring can determine school quality, teacher quality, and student learning shows an alarming lack of understanding in what makes a good school.

This factory model of assessment would have been great 50 years ago, when schools were modeled after and trained students for work in factories. However, that day has long passed. Leaders in education need to look at what it takes for students to succeed and help create schools to educate the students of today and tomorrow.

8.CLASS ROOM CLIMATE

• Install fans or safety windows that open
• Rearrange classrooms (e.g., move desks away from windows)
• Create shade by planting trees near windows
• Schedule classes that use heat-generating equipment (e.g., computers, ovens and Bunsen burners) in the AM
• Allow students to bring bottled water to class
• Adhere reflective film to windows
• Avoid strenuous activity in PE on the warmest days.

SCHOOL OFFICE SHOULD SHOUT “WELCOME!”

No matter how well your office space is set up, the main ingredient for a successful office experience for visitors is to have the right people working there, Parents’ impressions of schools, for better or worse, are often formed by their office interactions. If you are greeted warmly and promptly, then your overall mindset toward the school is accented toward the positive. parents are not as knowledgeable as the rest of us are about the school district and its policies. “Parents get frustrated with the system, so we must be patient with them as we help them work with the system

The COMPONENTS Of A WHOLESOME GOOD SCHOOL.

A good school will improve the community it is embedded within and serves.

A good school can adapt quickly to human needs and technology change.

A good school produces students that not only read and write, but choose to.

A good school sees itself.

A good school has diverse and compelling measures of success–measures that families and communities understand and value.

A good school is full of students that don’t just understand “much,” but rather know what’s worth understanding.

A good school knows it can’t do it all, so seeks to do what’s necessary exceptionally well.

A good school improves other schools and cultural organizations it’s connected with.

A good school is always on and never closed. (It is not a factory.)

A good school makes certain that every single student and family feels welcome and understood on equal terms.

A good school is full of students that not only ask great questions, but do so with great frequency and ferocity.

A good school changes students; students change great schools.

A good school understands the difference between broken thinking and broken implementation.

A good school speaks the language of its students.

A good school doesn’t make empty promises, create noble-but-misleading mission statements, or mislead parents and community-members with edu-jargon. It is authentic and transparent.

A good school values its teachers and administrators and parents as agents of student success.

A good school favors personalized learning over differentiated learning.

A good school teaches thought, not content.

A good school makes technology, curriculum, policies, and its other “pieces” invisible. (Ever go to a ballet and see focus on individual movements?)

A good school is disruptive of bad cultural practices. These include intolerance based on race, income, faith, and sexual preference, aliteracy, and apathy toward the environment.

A good school produces students that know themselves in their own context, one that they know and choose. This includes culture, community, language, and profession.

A good school produces students that have personal and specific hope for the future that they can articulate and believe in and share with others.

A good school produces students that can empathize, critique, protect, love, inspire, make, design, restore, and understand almost anything–and then do so as a matter of habit.

A good school will erode the societal tendency towards greed, consumerism, and hoarding of resources we all need.

A good school is more concerned with cultural practices than pedagogical practices–students and families than other schools or the educational status quo.

A good school helps student separate trivial knowledge from vocational knowledge from academic knowledge from applied knowledge from knowledge-as-wisdom.

A good school will experience disruption in its own patterns and practices and values because its students are creative, empowered, and connected, and cause unpredictable change themselves.

A good school will produce students that can think critically–about issues of human interest, curiosity, artistry, craft, legacy, husbandry, agriculture, and more–and then do so.

A good school will help students see themselves in terms of their historical framing, familial legacy, social context, and global connectivity.

• We should continue to build on the ideas of problem-based learning, place-based education, and scenario-based learning, where students have the ability to interact with authentic–and hopefully local–problems, designing solutions to problems they see on a daily basis.
• We should ensure the development of a “learner identity” should be a matter of choice and authentically-sourced, rather than universal and academically-derived
• We should give learners the space and emotional support to experiment with complex ideas and data sources without letting them flounder, or “play and experiment badly
• Our Students should “own” their learning experiences in connection with mentors outside the school “owned” their learning experiences in connection with mentors outside the school.
• We should incorporate all the social elements that ..drive people, including: mentorship, acceptance, social responses, companionship, as well as competition and envy. we should design learning so that students need to connect to clarify a need for knowledge, to create knowledge, or to share knowledge. we should creat a classroom where the social influence was both a cause and an effect for curiosity and an authentic need to know.
• We should ensure and enable our students to value was a matter of personalized learning. Our classrooms should be learning spaces that are charged with possibility, connections, creativity, and student-sourced emotion. It should be with some matter of design, access to content, feedback loops, learning models, and outward visibility to make this work.
• we should focus on the innovations and innovatiive elements such abstractions of understanding, including curiosity, creativity, innovation, design thinking, agency, self-direction, and other equally endearing components of 21st century learning. Universal catalysts for motivation include curiosity, choice, agency, and self-efficacy, whether in an academic environment, creating art, or performing athletically. A blended learning classroom, where students can access both instruction and content in the classroom and online, is no different in that respect; a student’s ability to follow their curiosity, recognize and evaluate possible learning pathways, collaborate freely, and interact directly with content and peer sets all impact the confidence, curiosity, and motivation of a learner.
• We should create the ability to self-monitor and adjust cognitive ambition, potential models, and the relative quality of their own thinking and performanc which are important factors in student motivation. Blended Learning isn’t simply about giving students access to resources online. Narrow learning pathways with tightly sequenced access to content, pre-written assessments, and externally-sourced quality criteria only serve to homogenize an already mediocre learning model. Student autonomy, self-direction, and flexibility, at worst, decenter the teacher and place the student at the center of their own learning experience.