Mullingar teachers spend the mid-term at Harvard

A group of staff from Mullingar Community College will spend their mid-term break studying at Harvard University.

A mixed school with DEIS status, Mullingar Community College has an enrolment of 337 and a staff of approximately 50, 13 of whom are travelling to Boston for at Harvard University.

The group of assistant principals, co-ordinators, teachers and special needs assistants hope to use the unique opportunity to drive collaborative practices in schools and take school planning to the next level.

Self-evaluation and planning are important systems in every school and by their nature are collaborative processes. Groups of staff work in teams to reflect on what a school does well, identify areas for improvement and set goals for the coming weeks, terms and years.

In Mullingar Community College the core focus of the process has always been how to best support students, their families and the local community; and improve the outcomes of their learners.

The time constraints with working in any school, and especially one as busy as Mullingar Community College, represent an ongoing challenge to the efficiency and effectiveness of the DEIS planning process.

Joe Rayfus, an assistant principal and art teacher at Mullingar Community College, is directly involved in DEIS planning, and, by his own admission, he often questioned if there was a way to be really ambitious with targets and still meet or even surpass them.

Joe said: “While researching for my postgrad, I read about a school district in upstate New York that had made incredible improvements when tackling absenteeism. Working with ‘Proving Ground’, a Harvard University programme, the district had researched, developed and implemented a unique set of innovative strategies which resulted in the total number of missed schools days being reduced by eight per cent. To put that in context, our own DEIS attendance group had previously been working towards a one per cent reduction.”

Even though Proving Ground had not previously worked with any schools outside North American, Mr Rayfus made contact in the hope of gaining a deeper insight of how their approach was returning such impressive results.

Within weeks, both he and the school principal Seamus Mohan had met the director of the programme via Zoom and plans were put in place to trial one of the initiatives at Mullingar Community College.

Proving Ground’s system involves working with school based learning communities to rapidly identify their biggest challenges and to develop and test solutions.

The approach relies heavily on collaboration in larger networks, and as an ETB school Mullingar Community College intend to share their strategies and results across the Longford and Westmeath Education and Training Board in the coming months, and perhaps even on a national level through the ETBI network.

The outcome will mean that rather than relying on anecdotal advice or trends, each school will have access to real and relevant data from across their ETB network.

Data Wise

While initial trials of the programme have returned promising data, adapting the approach for an Irish context brought a fresh set of challenges. It was then that a connection was made with another Harvard based project – Data Wise.

Data Wise, in their own words, is a systematic approach around instructional improvement. While data-based decision making is fundamental to the Proving Ground approach, initially it was the ‘Meeting Wise’ element of the project that Mr Rayfus believed offered the final piece in the puzzle.

Meeting Wise identifies improving meeting agendas to change how people work together; it offers the Meeting Wise Checklist as a tool for developing a common language for discussing and improving the quality of meetings; and the Meeting Wise Agenda Template to help get started.

It provides tips for setting up, facilitating, and participating effectively in meetings, and supports the teachers and leaders in developing strategies for making a fundamental shift in how collaborative time is used.

“With limited time available to school leaders and their staff, implementing programmes of this scale on a whole school level was always going to prove to be challenging,” said Joe. “Meeting Wise helps establish clear structures for meetings, along with defined norms and methods for setting realistic expectations.

“When I first spoke with Kathryn Boudett, the director of the Data Wise Programme, she mentioned that she was often mindful of how her programme and Proving Ground naturally complemented each other but that they had never had the opportunity to see the two working in tandem – that was until we reached out to them.”

The group of teachers are travelling to Boston at their own expense, and have all engaged with and completed online training with Data Wise prior to their face-to-face session at Harvard.

While in the US, the group will spend a day visiting and working with Josiah Quincy Upper School, part of the Boston Public Schools system, and meeting with Mullingar native and one of the world’s leading experts in developmental psychology, and Harvard lecturer, Emeritus Professor Kevin Nugent.