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See also...
The choice
We have some choice about how we see the people and things in our lives. The choices we make directly shape our interactions people and things. As a consequence our choices also shape and the resulting activities and experiences, our success and well-being.
Many schools report significant shifts in how staff and students and their families) see wach other as they use the Planner to make sense of
- what is happening, and begin
- to plan and manage more constructive and productive solutions
For example, people move
- from confronting and containing problems (behaviour management)
- to implementing improvements (coaching for success and well-being).
This occurs as users begin to see the Planner as much more than a behaviour tracking device. How they see any tool determines what we do with it. What does this mean for the Support Module?
Planner/Support Module
At a simple level there are a few ways to understand the Planner/Support Module
- As a record keeping device (database of information about the student)
- As a planning device to manage the school/system's responses (actions) to the student
- As a communication system for stakeholders to share information and construct knowledge and responses
- …
To a certain extent these dot points frequently represent a sequence of developmental stages .
Student at the Centre
To be consistent with Student at the Centre, access to data should be on the basis of
- Users create records on the basis of the 'need to know'
- Each user's 'need to know', and this is determined by the context
- The user's working relationship with the student is the key contextual factor
The Support Module as a communication system
Communication involves more than creating records of what we know and accessing records of what others know (information).
Note: information is organised data related to context
Communication also involves shaping the flow of information (organised data related to context), And this includes making it clear
- who is to be the intended recipient of the data
- and when it should be brought to their attention
The challenge and its solution
Users can only record what they know. But what if you don't know who should be the recipient?
Interestingly, the Support Module can be built to meet this challenge very easily and rather well.
And the solution is in keeping with what is known about organisations from complexity theory. The approach is constructivist in essence: the system is used to construct knowledge about the student. The knowledge should focus on interactions involving the student and be strongly focused on success and well-being. The particular interactions are associated with the working relationship between the user and the student. Such an approach places the Student at the Centre of the entire Support Module. The following guidelines may apply:
- There are perhaps only five working relationships between students and
staff members of the DoE
- 5 levels of need-to-know
- 5 different but overlapping set of knowledge required by their working relationship with the student
- Records would be created by users of the Module as communications about the student and related factors
- Creators of records would identify the intended recipients in terms of their working relationship with the student (without actually knowing who they are as individuals)
- Since the Module is integrated with/into StIMS it can be programmed to identify the working relationship between any student and every other member of DoE staff
- The Module would present data about a student to users according to their working relationship with the student
- The Module could be programmed to provide information regularly as part of an alerts function
Additional benefits - greater effectiveness
There are many additional benefits that are likely to low from this approach. For example,
- It places the Student and the Centre and greatly enhances the ability of the Class Teacher to be the central player in the success and well-being of each student
- It supports the working relationship between the students and those who support them over time and place.
- It represents a quantum gain in the effectiveness in critical areas such
as the work of support professionals
- Guidance Officer recommendations can get through to the people who need
to enact them
- Currently, GO recommendations are frequently lost in files, blocked by lack of time to confer, or die quickly as they are overtaken by other demanding day-to-day matters
- Social Workers do not document contextual information that is critical to the success and well-being of the student because of school's inability to manage sensitive material safely and well. And the student pays the cost of this deficiency!!!
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- The Module would enable all support professionals to provide information according to the users need to know, that is according to their working relationship with the student
- Guidance Officer recommendations can get through to the people who need
to enact them
- And so on....
More soon!!!
