Ingroup Loyalty (peer pressure)
It is the Leadership Team of the school and essential others (governors) who need to ensure that their own understanding of VT and its management is at a sufficiently deep level of theory and practice. To implement VT with style and success requires different management approaches to those currently used in schools. This is critical for any cultural and organisational transformation to be successful. Otherwise schools will simply mix up the students and reinvent the past. The changes that are made clear through training will enable school leaders to understand how to implement and manage a vastly improved learning support culture based on vertical structures.
This begins with the three critical management areas needed to understand VT (highlighted below). These provide a firm base on which to develop a Vertical Tutoring culture and enable successful transformation. This knowledge is essential for any school serious about adopting a school improvement philosophy based upon sound values and management practices where values are built-in and not added on. Without this knowledge and best national practice, the chances of getting VT right are low.
In effect this training involves unlearning much of what schools currently believe and assume. in order to re-engineer the school using vertical structures and new managerial approaches the past must be left behind. This process can be daunting for weaker management teams and liberating for those able to embrace change more easily.
NB Please refer to the system mistakes page. Even schools that have been properly trained sometimes decide to make organisational adaptations based on their own deep-rooted and false assumptions about kids and learning especially when they wrongly advise parents that tutor groups can be friendship based. This is a misunderstanding of VT and how it works and diminishes the cultural efficacy of VT to improve outcomes. A second critical mistake concerns the size of groups and the nature of tutoring. The web is now littered with poor practice posing as good from well meaning schools where old cultural ideas make them prisoners of orthodoxy...
The science of systems thinking, untaught to school leaders, helps us understand the school as a learning support operation with values built in rather than added on. The key is to cast an external eye on the school as an organisation and ask some very simple questions of it. We then answer those questions using values and knowledge to reveal wrong assumptions and factory school management thinking and assumptions.
The session starts by understanding why with horizontal year or grade systems can never do what they are supposed to do: ie. work effectively as an effective operational learning system. this session uses the three key concepts above that are common to all service sector organisations. Without these, many schools will simply reinvent old problems. It requires a degree of unlearning to escape our cultural and moribund orthodoxies. This learning enables the LT to start building a values driven VT culture. This is then translated into a principled and effective management system that creates a Vertical Tutoring culture focused on school improvement. The critical link between VT and improved teaching and learning can then be properly understood and enhanced. The three areas above form the means of understanding and managing a VT culture. Without these, schools run a big risk of reinventing the past when they go VT.
(part 1) Bespoke LEADERSHIP TEAM TRAINING
Other individuals and groups / governors may also like to access this training and learn how to create a high performing values driven school. Feel free to make contact