Friday, February 20, 2009
Breaking Ranks is increasing the pace of reform in schools across the US.
A scheme developed by the National Association of Secondary School Principals in America using collaborative leadership alongside personalisation to transform "failing" schools has become part of the US National Reform Agenda.
Started in 1996 as a research project into effective school renewal and regeneration, Breaking Ranks has now become established as a proven approach with 21 states in the US using Breaking Ranks as the framework for their strategy for change in education.
The principles behind the Breaking Ranks framework and the training resources for schools are that children learn better in a personalised environment, teachers teach better in a professional community and leaders are more successful in a collaborative environment.
The Breaking Ranks program is designed to support schools creating a vision for education in the 21st century using tested strategies for change. Personalisation, Collaborative Leadership and an overhaul of assessment are the central themes and in the latest advice, these are supported by 30 recommendations for middle school leaders and 31 for high school leaders.
Many of these recommendations relate directly to the transformation programme in the UK particularly the need for learners to take an active role in both their own learning and in their school communities and one of the key foci for this year is the work of the Raising Student Voice and Participation (RSVP) programme, overlapping with similar programmes in the UK.
Examples of these recommendations include:
16. The high school will engage students' families as partners in the students' education
20. Each high school will present alternatives to tracking and to ability grouping.
24. The academic program will extend beyond the high school campus and take advantage of learning opportunities outside the four walls of the building.
28. Teachers will be adept at acting as coaches and facilitators to promote more active involvement of students in their own learning.
29. Teachers will integrate assessment into instruction so that assessment is accomplished using a variety of methods and does not merely measure students, but becomes part of the learning process.
30. Recognising that education is a continuum, high schools will reach out to elementary and middle level schools as well as institutions of higher education to better serve the articulation of student learning and to ensure that each stage of the continuum understands what will be required of students at the succeeding stage.
In the search for solutions to the challenges laid down by these recommendations a number of schools and the NAASP itself have investigated PbyP as a useful tool in the armory and as a result Dan Buckley will be presenting at the national conference in San Diego this month with the possibility of more American learners joining the pool of expert peer assessors in PbyP later in the year.