Focus on Interactions

It is often useful to use a metaphor to help think about how a school might work. In the past we have thought about schools as organisations for example. This is no longer so valuable as organisations are increasingly thought about as producing a product or supplying a service. That’s not quite what we think schools do. Recently, there has been wide use of likening schools to communities but this analogy also seems to emphasise roles and relationships rather than the essential process of the school. If we were able to lift the roof of a school and watch the activity as it happened, it is likely that we would be struck with the predominance of interactive talk amongst the occupants. Teachers talk with students, with each other, students talk and from time to time visitors talk with various groups. Obviously there are times when students study independently and individually and teachers prepare and mark but the dominant activity is likely to be interactions amongst the people. A metaphor which enables us to further explore these kinds of relationships could be an incubator, perhaps a social incubator. For example, groups of people are exposed to a sympathetic environment where it is expected that they will develop at different rates and in different ways. They will interact with each other and the significant people (teachers) and demonstrate their growth and learning in unique ways. The pages linked below use a concept map approach to aid in further stimulating interactions with what are shown as four threads of this idea.

Leadership interactions;

Classroom teaching interactions;

Cultural interactions;

Interactions about goals and targets – which occur at the intersections of the four threads.

A printable version of the pages above is available here.