Extraordinary Schools
Posted by amandladev on July 6, 2011
Amandla was honoured to be invited to a recent meeting of the newly formed South African Extraordinary Schools Coalition. This group of mostly independent schools and partner organisations formed to bring the weight of a collective to answering questions around how to make schools centres of excellence.
As the group discussed goals and strategies, a few central questions emerged:
How can South African schools integrate lessons already learnt by school reform movements outside SA?
How can their schools model instructional leadership?
How might they form a third tier of schooling akin to American charter schools?
How can we measure what’s effective in the classroom?
And how can they construct a coalition that’s non-bureaucratic and deals very directly with real issues?
Some potential answers include teacher peer review and sharing of best practice to increase their knowledge and skills. Integrating ICT for the most modern classrooms and to develop students in ways that teachers sometimes can’t is on the list. Also, creating mechanisms for real-time knowledge sharing can help improve teacher effectiveness. But there’s also a larger question around determining how what works actually works so that it can be replicated.
As Amandla works to connect successful efforts, it eagerly participates in discussion to help answer these questions.
