Educational communities join our network at a time when they are ready to experiment with new ways of improving teaching and learning for all of their students. Involvement requires significant commitments. In particular, participating organisations have to:
• Collect and engage with evidence regarding aspects of their policies and practices;
• Formulate and implement improvement strategies that are at the heart of their development plans;
• Allocate significant staff development time and resources in order to implement these improvement strategies; and
• Establish leadership practices that support implementation activities.
What is the rationale for the IQEA approach to educational improvement?
IQEA is based on strategic propositions derived from almost 20 years of research and development activities. These stress the importance of:
• Understanding context. Whilst there are general patterns regarding how educational improvement can be achieved, the exact form they need to take varies from place to face. It follows that the strategies used must relate to specific contexts and circumstances.
• Developing a common sense of purpose. Priorities within education are contested and there are different views of what quality means and implies. Logic suggests that progress will require agreements between stakeholders about the goals that need to be addressed.
• Using evidence to drive change. We have found that evidence about teaching and learning, collected though techniques such as mutual observation, lesson study and interviews with students, can stimulate efforts to explore new and overlooked possibilities for reaching out to all learners
• Strengthening interdependence. Our research points to how cooperation between education providers, and with other agencies and community groups, has the potential to reduce the gap between privileged and less privileged groups of learners
• Sharing responsibility. All of this demands new relationship between educational establishments, communities and local authorities, and new forms of leadership practice that can help to foster these changes
Innovative programmes designed to generate sustainable practice
