Manningham Catholic cluster (Victoria) – Students taking the lead
This story is from the Manningham cluster report in the VEGPSP Report – Stage 1 and 2. The full VEGPSP reports are available as PDFs on the Resources page.
Cluster coordinator: Sue Cahill, St Charles Borromeo Catholic Primary School
Participating schools:
- St Charles Borromeo Primary School
- Our Lady of the Pines Primary School
- St Clement of Rome Primary School
- St Gregory the Great Primary School
- St Kevin’s Primary School
- Sts Peter and Paul Primary School
UAN critical friends: Professor Judith Chapman, Dr Patricia Cartright and Dr Marian de Souza, Australian Catholic University, Victoria
Reflecting its belief that, to use the words of its coordinator, ‘to change “the culture” of any place the groundswell needs to come from all parties involved’, the Manningham Cluster of Catholic primary schools entrusted students with the task.
More specifically, Student Action Teams in each of the six participating schools led the investigation and then implementation of values education using, in each case, a whole school approach. The teams, which had been used with success in one of the schools in the past, were asked to investigate the nine values in the National Framework and determine the extent to which they ‘are seen/not seen, heard/not heard, felt/not felt, put into action or not in their personal/family lives, their school environment and in their community’. This then formed the basis for teams to determine ways and means to implement values in action in each of these three domains.
The Student Action Teams, it should be noted, are predicated on the principles that:
- students can make serious and important decisions about issues that are important to them;
- students can do important and valuable things;
- they have skills, expertise and knowledge of the needs of their community;
- important action can be undertaken as part of students’ learning in school.
In that sense, it is more than just a means of improving the overall ethos of the school, and also constitutes a pedagogical approach that is aimed at inducting students into ‘active citizenship’ by working together to tackle an issue of school and/or community concern.
The National Framework, as indicated, provided the starting point for work by the teams. Each school was allocated three of the nine values in the framework and students asked to investigate and then act around these. Team members met regularly in their schools to research, plan and take action around the values they were given. They also communicated electronically and face-to-face through three interschool forums held during the year where they could share their findings and initiatives, and attended a research and action planning workshop where they were trained in new skills.
Typical of how the teams worked is the experience of a Years 3 and 4 teacher in one of the cluster schools allocated the values of Respect, Doing Your Best, and Honesty and Trustworthiness. The students were required to formulate questionnaires to find out what people identified as ‘values’ in school, home and community. This took such forms (in this case from another cluster school using a different set of values) as the questionnaire in Figure 7.
Figure 7: Student Action Team questionnaire
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Integrity | Freedom | Honesty and trustworthiness |
These are our ideas … | ||
• Using manners • Owning up • Walking the talk • Respecting yourself and others • Honest • Friendliness • Kind to others • Mature outlook | • Allowing people to be themselves • Accepting differences • Encouraging others • Celebrating other cultures • No put downs • Confident to speak your mind • Making decisions to help each other | • Trust other people • Encouragement • Risk taking • Compassion • Telling the truth • Supporting each other • Friends • Owning up |
What are yours … | ||
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From this came the questionnaires for students to collect data, collate information and interpret results. These results were then used as the basis for student action to increase the level of a particular value, such as Respect, in the school. A regular time was set aside in the weekly timetable for this to occur, with the result that the students also ended up addressing staff meetings and school assemblies about their work, and planning a Manners Week where all students engage in activities to increase the degree of respect shown in the school. This activity was planned to be repeated three times a year for the changes to take root.
Little wonder, perhaps, that this teacher acknowledged:
I have seen how students can respond given the opportunity, how students can develop real leadership skills, how students are prepared to take full responsibility when they are engaged in the work, how effective working interactively with students from other schools can be, and how students engage when they feel strongly about something … They have had the opportunity to show what they are capable of, and through their work, to realise the true meaning of the values they have studied.
That the approach sprang from the experience of one of the cluster schools also meant for the other five it was new. The coordinator, in response, put great effort into the work of the cluster itself, to the point where it became a major source of support to teachers involved and professional learning for the group as a whole. Regular, supportive communication was a feature of its work, with fortnightly meetings and email exchanges every couple of days.
The work put into maintaining the cluster itself was critical to the success of the project as was, according to all schools involved, the energy and leadership of the cluster coordinator herself. Cluster meetings, it was explained, ‘always ran to an advertised agenda. Always had a minute taker (these minutes were distributed to everyone in our interest group), always provided time for all school coordinators to share the good, the bad and the ugly, always shared the financial update, always had a professional development component and always, and most importantly, had a lot of laughs’.
The UAN’s critical friends also played an important part being there for the schools, as the cluster coordinator put it, assisting them
to develop professionally and to grow personally as we travelled the values journey. They have participated in our Student Forums, visited each of the schools, set up email contact with the schools they are responsible for, facilitated a ‘Stop, Think, Listen’ workshop for the six school coordinators and myself, unpacking action research, case study and case writing, and facilitated the workshop where we collated and clarified our final configurative mapping tool.
Interestingly enough in this context, the positives of the whole cluster experience are, in the minds of those involved, arguably as important as the impact on each individual school and the students through their teams. As they cogently explained in their final report, ‘what started as a prescribed framework for the project delivery … has now become a preferred framework by the members. The professional development that has eventuated due to our project has gone so much further than values education to the sharing of good practice, ideas, resources and time to each and every member by each and every member’.
But the outcomes extend beyond that. The impact on the students has been profound. As the coordinator explained:
To allow the students to lead the project and let them take us on a journey that has opened our minds, eyes and hearts has been awesome. To see the students model true values in action has had the school community follow their lead. It has opened up conversation about values around staffroom tables at lunch, parents stopping to discuss the latest forum and how much their child enjoyed feeling so important, and the students beaming with pride when they speak at assembly or in a classroom or staff meeting.
Beyond this, having set out to develop an ethos where words match deeds and, to use the cluster’s terminology, they ‘walk the talk’, perhaps one of the major outcomes of the project is that all members of the cluster now feel more comfortable with Student Action Teams, and hence pedagogy in the schools involves a greater willingness to hand over responsibility to the students themselves. This in turn has changed the way cluster members look at classroom management and relationships and, as they put it themselves in their final report, ‘we have ended up with … a framework for truly embedding values education for students, by students’.
As one of the teachers involved typically explained:
I now realise that … often as teachers we spend a lot of time doing all of the talking … It is when we step back and begin to listen to the ideas and opinions of the students that we begin to understand and appreciate their views. I have now become more comfortable stepping back and allowing the students to lead the conversation during our sessions together … After engaging with the Student Action Teams about the values they have researched, I have learnt a lot about these students.
Certainly the students themselves have a clear appreciation of their role, as evident in the following sample student group definitions of a Student Action Team:
- with a Student Action Team we are not just helping us, we are helping the whole community, and with the actions of what we do and say. Thinking about everybody’s future and to make the schools better.
- the Student Action Team is to make a better community through students putting words into actions.
- SAT to us means to help and support each student in our school with courage and understanding towards each other’s ideas, backgrounds and religions. It also means to encourage everyone not just your friends.
This no doubt reflects the sheer range of values action in which students were involved, as is evident in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Values in action in student teams | |
School A• Extension of buddy system so all students now have a buddy; the Year 6 students are buddied with a staff member and the Years 4 and 5 students are buddied to residents at a local retirement village • Values column in newsletter each week written by SAT • SAT to speak at weekly assembly • Values the focus of all liturgies | School B• Implement a Certificate of Merit process to involve all members of school community • This would be carried out at weekly assemblies • Focus in current term on students who display the words and actions associated with Honesty and Trustworthiness • Recognition with Certificate of Merit at assembly and identified in newsletter |
School C• Focus in particular on the value of Respect • Manners Week – activities to increase the degree of respect shown at school • This will be carried out once per term | School D• Under the umbrella Care and Compassion the SAT is implementing a Peer Mediation programme to be run by the SAT members after appropriate training occurs |
School E• Students have written and illustrated picture storybooks about Respect • Made posters about Respect for each classroom • Made ‘Most Respectful Person of the Week’ badges for each class | School F• Students have identified the need for peer support • SAT members have had the first training workshop as Peer Support Mediators • Will implement a Peer Support programme for the whole school |
The whole experience has been made even richer through the forums and workshop in which students were engaged. More specifically, they experienced:
- the first forum where representatives of each of the Student Action Teams came together and looked at the nine values in the National Framework, compared them to the values they had identified as important, and negotiated three values for their school teams to research as outlined above.
- a research workshop attended by representatives of each Student Action Team where they received training on research methodology and, in particular, what to make of all the data they had collected so they then could take this back to share with other members of their teams.
- a second forum ‘hinging’ research and action. Having collated their research results they looked at the meaning of action and what could and should be done and the timeline that ought apply.
- an action planning workshop where they were challenged to look at some action they could take to solve a problem identified through their research. This involved a consideration of what actions are possible, prioritising of actions, strategies to adopt and setting out steps to make it all happen.
- a third and final forum focused on ‘acting on our values, valuing our action and telling others about it’. This in turn provided the basis for teams to develop their own action reports.
In this context, values inevitably also have become even more explicit in the curriculum than previously was the case. In fact, values are consciously built into curriculum planning processes as evident in the Integrated Unit Planner in Figure 9, which is used by staff in one of the cluster schools.
Figure 9: Integrated Unit Planner | ||
Unit title/Generative question: Host learning area: Level: Duration of unit: | ||
Skills focused upon in this unit | ||
Researching/investigating | Problem solving | Thinking |
Information technology | Communicating | Working collaboratively |
Multiple perspectives | ||
Indigenous | Environmental education | Global |
ICT | Civics and citizenship | Studies of Asia |
Gender | Vocational | Spiritual |
Cultural and linguistic diversity | ||
Values | ||
Care and Compassion | Freedom | Respect |
Doing Your Best | Honesty and Trustworthiness | Understanding, Tolerance and Inclusion |
Fair Go | Integrity | Responsibility |
Tuning in/immersion(activities to engage students in the topic) What do you know about …? What are you interested in …? What questions do you have about …? What would you like to learn more about? Why? What is your plan for finding this out? Tell me how you would find out about …? Where and how could you find information about …? Who could help you? What do you need to do first/next? Do you understand what you are required to do/find out? Do you have any questions about? | ||
Finding out(a shared experience from which students will gather new information about the topic) What would you like to learn more about? What are your plans now? What do you need help with? How can I/we help you? What are you asked to do here? Where and how could you find more information about …? What questions have been answered? Do you have any new questions? | ||
Sorting out/making connections(activities that help students process the information that they have gathered – students are able to put it all together and draw some conclusions about what they have learnt) What have you learnt? How will you organise this information? How will you record this information? How will you present/share/communicate this information? What will you do first/next? Do you have all the information you need? | ||
Going further/planning for individual inquiry(activities that challenge and extend students’ understandings) What would you like to learn more about? Why? How is this linked to the topic/understandings/concepts? How will you do this? What will you do first/next? Who/what can help you? Why do you want to investigate this aspect of the topic? What else would you be interested in exploring or finding out about? What issues or questions have been raised as a result of this inquiry? | ||
ReflectionWhat is the most significant/interesting thing you have learnt? Why? Why do you think we studied this topic? What helped/hindered your learning? What would you like to learn more about? Why? How could you do this? What would you do differently next time? Why? What are you still unsure about? What challenged you the most? | ||
Taking action(activities that give students the opportunity to act upon what they have learnt) What have you learnt that you can now use in your everyday life? What are your plans now? How can you apply this knowledge/skill in your everyday life? What do you want to do as a result of your learning? | ||
ResourcesWhat has already been produced in this area? What materials are available to us? (books, CD-ROMs, videos, charts etc) Do we need to do any reading about this topic? Do we know any experts in this area? What excursions are available? | ||
AssessmentHave students met the required outcomes? What assessment activities will give us this information? | ||
Unit evaluationHave students met the planned criteria? What thinking tool will be used to reflect on the new learning? How have you used reflection tools in each section of the unit? | ||
Certainly the view of the university partners working with this cluster of schools is that the project has made the schools much more focused on the values they are concerned to develop in their students, with regular references to ensuring they ‘walk the talk’. And responses to the Configurative Mapping tool reveal that most of the schools have directly incorporated values into their planning documents, and that values are showcased in students’ work.
The work of the Student Action Teams has, the critical friends confirm, ‘been a significant factor in the schools’, which has extended to the community as well, with action research teams calling on ‘the involvement of families and other community members’. The upshot is that ‘values education ideals have permeated the whole school culture, with a “ripple effect” being seen as a significant force for change across the whole school community, and with the language of values becoming part of the dialogue in schools and communities’. This, the university associates noted, ‘is something we clearly observed in our visits to individual schools, our discussions with teachers and the coordinators, and our talks to students who have been eager to share their work with us’.
Although all assert that ten months simply was not enough time to fully implement the sort of ideas that sit behind the whole Student Action Teams approach, it was long enough for these observers to note that ‘teachers are, overall, more passionate about the day-to-day approach to values education and to the practical ways of implementing the ideals of the nine values’.
Key messages
- When students lead values education projects they develop a language and understanding of values that is relevant to them.
- Good leadership at both the school and cluster level can empower people, including students, to make a difference to the culture and practices of the school. Committed, passionate leadership can, over time, build a shared belief in the potential all students have, while supporting teachers to relinquish some of their control.
- Regular, supportive communication is a feature of good cluster leadership, as is the conduct of effective cluster meetings characterised by: clear and focused agendas which are advertised in advance; the taking of minutes to ensure decisions are recorded and followed up; and opportunities to share successes and failures and jointly learn along the way.
- The power of positive relationships within and beyond each school community is demonstrated through the student forums as well as through the positive relationship that existed between the school coordinators, cluster coordinator and the three UAN critical friends working with the schools.