From Shetland to South Africa – student voice goes global
June 2008
Kim Thomas
“The most innovative and radical experiment that I’m aware of” is how Professor John MacBeath, Chair of Educational Leadership at the University of Cambridge, describes The Learning School. This project, in which every year an internationally-mixed group of 18 and 19 year-old students visits and evaluates schools around the world, was launched in 1998 by Stewart Hay, a teacher at Anderson High School in Shetland. The remarkable success of the project, says John, is down to Stewart’s “determination and can-do attitude”.
It is certainly an extraordinary story. When Stewart conceived the idea, Anderson High had already built up a partnership with other schools around the globe. The school had started to consult its own students as part of its self-evaluation, so consulting other students from partner schools was a natural extension, says Stewart: “It would enrich that evaluation process, we thought, to have the eyes of young people who come from different cultures and lands be part of our school self-evaluation scheme.”
The partner schools agreed, and so the project was born: a group of students, which would include one student from each partner school, accompanied by two more senior coordinators, would, over the course of 10 months, spend four or five weeks at each school, investigating a specific aspect of the school’s development, and then report back.
Stewart then approached John for advice. John’s initial reaction was that it was an “off-the-wall” idea, but he agreed to help the students develop research techniques such as classroom observation, pupil interviews, and questionnaires. The first group of students carried out their research in 1999, and The Learning School has sent a group round the world every year since. After the first three years, the students’ experiences were collated into a book, ‘Self-evaluation in the Global Classroom’.
There are normally half a dozen or so students in each group, and they come from a wide range of places: this year’s cohort, which has just completed its stint, consists of one student from Anderson, two from Sweden, one from the Czech Republic, one from South Africa, and one from Australia, as well as two coordinators. Their focus has been on the theme ‘A curriculum for learning and living in the 21st century’, and they have recorded their observations by filming students in focus groups and in lessons such as science and art and design. Usually, the students produce a written report of their findings; this year, instead, the feedback will be in the form of a DVD.
The project hasn’t been without its challenges. At first, says Stewart, there was resistance from teachers in some of the schools who felt uneasy about being evaluated by students: “Sometimes it led to the need to discuss and debate some of the findings young people identified. People did feel that perhaps there could be a need to make clear that it wasn’t criticism, that the evaluation process was designed to be positive, and where there were critical comments, they were made in a light to reflect students’ desire to help promote change in school.”
There have been practical problems too, from the mundane (lost passports) to the downright alarming: in the first year, the students got arrested in Capetown for not having the correct visas – a problem Stewart had to deal with remotely by phoning the High Commissioner.
For the students involved, the experience has been hugely rewarding. Each student who wants to participate has to apply. In Anderson, students fill out an application form, and are then interviewed by Stewart and a colleague, who then make their choice. The trip is funded by the local authority.
Colin Bragg participated in the project in 2000-2001, in the year between finishing school and going to university. He travelled with seven other students: starting with Shetland, the group then went on to visit schools in Sweden, the Czech Republic, Germany, South Africa, Japan, Hong Kong and Korea, spending four to five weeks in each, shadowing students, handing out questionnaires and observing lessons. The differences between schools were “vast”, he says: “In the Czech Republic, people would be driven by getting good grades and bettering themselves for a job, whereas people in the UK were more likely to be motivated by something out of personal interest, and people in Japan would be motivated by some aspect of duty or what other people think of them.”
The schools he liked best were the ones in Sweden, where there was a very flexible approach to curriculum: students in history lessons, for example, could choose which period to study and set their own essay titles. He was less impressed by Japanese maths classes, which required students to sit in an orderly fashion and “cram the information in”.
Travelling with a group of students from all over the world was a valuable experience, he says, requiring patience and compromise: “Understanding cultural differences was something you had to come to terms with quite quickly.” The whole experience, says Colin, gave him an “understanding of other people’s perspectives, and of the richness and diversity of the world”.
John says the impact on students has been “incalculable”: “It is just such a mind-expanding experience to live in a township in South Africa one week, and next week to live with a Japanese family who speak no English. Travel broadens the mind, but this particular kind of travel is immersion in these different cultures, so the benefits to students has been huge.”
But the participating schools have benefited too, he says: “It’s almost like getting free consultancy: you’re getting an evaluation of aspects of learning and teaching and assessment fed back to teachers and to the school.” Because the students stay for a whole month, they are able to provide more detailed feedback than the schools could expect from a typical government inspection.
Finally, says John, the students’ observations can be fed back into national policy: each year the students give a seminar at the Scottish Executive attended by the Chief Inspector of Schools.
Stewart feels that Anderson in particular has benefited from gaining the perspective of students from a range of different cultures: Swedish students, for example, highlighted the importance of relating classroom teaching to students’ individual learning styles. “I think it brings a sharpness of eyes; it brings a cross-cultural perspective; but most of all it brings a student voice, not just the local one but the international one,” he says.