11.19.24Student Achievement Through Staff Culture: An Interview with Max Wakeman
School leadership gold in this interview with Max
Over the past year we’ve been learning from 40 schools in Walsall and Sandwell England. These schools, located outside of Birmingham in areas of unusually high economic deprivation, were chosen to participate in a Priority Education Improvement Areas (PEIA) grant to increase self-regulation and meta-cognition (and therefore academic and social outcomes) in students.
Windsor Academy Trust, the visionary and organizer of the program, reached out to us to provide a training and support, and we’re thrilled to have been a part of it and thrilled to share that the initial results have been really encouraging.
Together with local education leaders, we’ve had the opportunity to visit all 40 schools, train leadership teams on Engaging Academics and Check for Understanding techniques, and study video of teachers implementing the techniques in their classrooms. From the video study alone, we’ve been lucky enough to cut 17 videos that we’ve been using in training, several of which you’ve read about on this blog here here and here for example.
In June, we started our second round of visits, to assess growth in meta-cognition and self-regulation, and we were delighted that of the 16 schools we visited, 13 of them were implementing techniques to positive effect. Obviously the real evidence will be in the form of assessment outcomes, which we are very optimistic about (there are lots of very promising leading indicators, including Goldsmith Primary School, part of Windsor Academy Trust being named an Apple Distinguished School, one of 400 schools chosen internationally) but in the meantime we’ll be writing more about what we’ve learned, and we couldn’t wait to share this interview with Max Wakeman, the Head Teacher at Goldsmith, where we taped two of the outstanding lessons we shared above.
In this interview, Max reflects on his school’s success in our work together, he talks about the importance of creating a strong Culture of Error for his teachers – and about showing love for students by holding them to the highest of expectations.
TLAC team-member Hannah Solomon had so much fun talking to Max here – we know you’ll enjoy learning from him as much as we did!
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