Mauritius: What makes An Ineffective School?
 |
 |
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
L'Express (Port Louis)
COLUMN
17 June 2008
Posted to the web 17 June 2008
Port Louis
The perceived superiority of national colleges is no longer a certainty. It has been acknowledged after the latest HSC and laureate results that merit is found in less known schools that perform well. My reflection today lies in what makes an unsuccessful school.
Uninspiring teachers
Though many parents today would place discipline on the highest rung of the hierarchy of merits of a school, I would underplay this contingency, ad-hoc anxiety and insist that a poor school is one that does not constitute a learning organization. Poor, uninspiring teachers who always work to turn students into scapegoats and parents into fabricators of criminals are among the worst characteristics of a failing school - teaching is approximate, unchallenging.
Pupils' learning style is not taken into account - weak pupils and better ones are treated alike. Facts and figures are regurgitated by such teachers as though telling implied understanding. Little or no interaction exists.
Learning is note-taking - not the negotiation of ideas and the conversion of facts into received knowledge. Teachers would not even care whether pupils who are weak have understood the lesson or not and are summarily dismissed simply because they do not know the correct answer. Poor teachers hardly can operate from mistakes made by pupils.
Lack of essential parts
Because the failed school is no learning organization, essential components of a school like a library, the computer room as a multi-media resource centre, co-curricular activities are trivialized or have only a token, symbolic existence.
Cliques and clans
A school needs a transformational leadership and it is common to find in failed school poor leaders who are at loggerheads with their staff or who thrive on cliques. I have known a few private secondary schools where the staff is divided into clans, each seeking the least opportunity to carp at others. In such schools, there is no academic atmosphere. The staffroom will be dead silent or resonate with futile debates on prices of steel, oil, onions.
No pastoral care
A failing school is non-caring. How long has this pupil been absent? Is he in class? Why not? If his absence has exceeded three days, why is it so? Does anyone know why? Why don't so many pupils bring their textbooks in class? Why do a few children drop unconscious during morning assembly? Caring is the empathy one shows by taking into account details that might escape a cursory eye.
The nature of a caring school is to ensure that in infrastructure, amenities, motivation and academic requirements, the school can provide for children's needs. Resources are not galore, and no one should ever pretend to be able to give what it can't. A non-caring school takes students to be units carrying an income per capita. The educational upbringing of the learner is secondary.
Isolated classes
A school fails first and foremost in the class, where the essence of schooling takes place. Does the school leader care about the transactions in class? The school has a professional community. In a failing school, the teacher does whatever he wants and does it alone.
Lack of quality
A failing school is often characterised by the absence of quality in most areas:
Quality of environment;
- Quality of infrastructure;
- Quality of teaching;
- Quality of school leadership;
- Quality of discipline;
- Quality of language spoken both in class and outside.
In fact quality cannot be recognized by a failing school because of the absence of norms and standards as well as models.
Professional image
A failing school has teachers who lack motivation and self-esteem and whose professional image is always at risk with either pupils or with management. There is a general lack of consensus on issues of common interest. Confrontational relationships override the interest of the child.
Relevant Links
Indiscipline
|
Read comments. Write your own.
|
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Make allAfrica.com your home page
|
RSS Feed
Sign up for FREE daily 'top headlines' by email >> | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | My Account | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
