4 Monitoring the change
It is important that changes are monitored in order to see if they are being successful. The monitoring needs to start at an early stage so that the plan can be changed if necessary, and so that early successes are noticed and celebrated. The team that is responsible for managing the change needs to think about possible indicators and the performance level that is expected.
‘Indicators’ could include anything that provides evidence that change is taking place. This could be obvious things, such as work in exercise books or the number of students completing their homework. Alternatively, it could be things like overheard conversations between students, feedback from parents or a change in the attitude of certain students and teachers.
‘Performance level’ will be something more concrete such as:
- 90 per cent of students regularly completing their homework
- every teacher setting at least one homework exercise per week that gives students some choice about how they do it or what they do
- every teacher setting one open-ended task per week.
Activity 6: Monitoring change
Think about a change that you would like to bring about in your school. How will you know that change is taking place? List three indicators that you could use to monitor the change in your Learning Diary.
What performance level would you look for? List three measures that you could use to check the progress of change.
Discussion
It is important that performance measures are realistic. The change team needs to experience some early success in order to keep them motivated! You can increase the expectations as the work progresses, but early performance measures should be set at a realistic level, slightly above the current situation.
3 Establishing a change team