Bauerfeedback.docx

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You show me your feedback and Ill show you mine

Work in a School Quality Circle in Austria

The Quality Circle - a process of developing quality standards for teaching

Schulverbund Graz-West is a network of five reform schools for lower secondary, and one

upper secondary in Austria.

In our quality evaluation projectFQS - which was based on action research and ran from

1996 to 1998 teachers had to work together in quality circles.

In this paper I will give a brief outline of the project framework and then describe how we set

about the actual work in our quality circle. I will also explain the instrument quality

standard.

Our quality group was comprised of three upper secondary teachers. They were involved in an

innovation focussing on the personality development of students through new subjects and

creative teaching approachesthe creative route. We shared our thoughts about the concept

of personality development and finally developed a quality standard for one of the dynamic

qualifications we thought were at the core of the concept.

This is how we did it. We

organized work structures; found a topic equally relevant to all three group members: Presentation Techniques; agreed on and worked out a quality standard; found instruments to assess the quality of our work; collected data; interpreted data and drew conclusionsBackground

Ten years ago I started my work at "Schulverbund Graz-West", a network of five reform

schools carrying out a model project for comprehensive education of 1014 year-olds

embedded in an overall Austrian school system which is in favour of a variety of schools for

children in this age group.

In Schulverbund there is no streaming, but co-teaching in some subjects and the co-operationof teachers in yearteams. There is also a focus on social interaction and playful and

independent learning methods to cope with heterogeneous classes. Action Research was one

of the pillars of school improvement and so I got acquainted with the method.

From the very beginning, besides teaching, I took over several tasks supporting the school

management in school development. I also did some of my own action research training

reflecting a development project on student assessment in a course with Peter Posch/Herbert

Altrichter1. This is how I got hooked onto this technique.

The Pilot Project FQS

In recent years we were asked by the Austrian Government to do self-evaluation and so we

were faced with the question how to link the individual action research efforts of teachers to

1Posch/Altrichter: Steirisches Innovationsprojekt, 1991-93


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systematic quality improvement work. Consequently the Schulverbund decided to go for a

project developed by Altrichter/Messner/ Posch/ Strittmater called "Furthering Quality

Evaluation for Schools ", FQS for short. In this project teachers were asked to work together

in so-called "quality circles" consisting of 4 - 6 teachers, each working on a topic relevant to

the school model. The different quality circles each had a representative in the school steering

group who was in charge of the project. The steering groups were aided by the three externalconsultants (Posch, Altrichter and Strittmater), receiving training, feedback and other kinds of

necessary support.

A picture of a house is an effective way of describing the project.

Frderliche Qualittssicherung im Verbund FQSBauer/Tschinkel 99

Action Research is the foundation, in this case not done by individuals alone, but in quality

circles. The pillars are feedback and school research. The house is held together by the roof

which is formed by school management including the steering group.

In the following pages I will describe my experience with this project which included work in

the quality circle and also work in the steering group of the largest school.

The Quality Circles

The Quality circles were of different sizes and formed differently in the five schools. In some

schools the year team structure was used and the team was asked to name a topic relevant to

their daily work. In our school the management was asked to select the fields of school

development that needed closer inspection. So the quality circles were formed according to

topics and people assigned themselves to the topic in which they were most interested.

Finding a research topic:It is the same thrill as when you are looking for a new research question, only here you have

to go through the process in a group, discussing different ideas and evaluating them, both

according to your personal needs, but also on how interesting they will be for the group.


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At that time my main focus at work was on the development of a special branch in upper

secondary2, and so it was an easy choice to join this group. However, conditions in upper

secondary were different from lower secondary. There were no year groups, but small

development teams, and so our quality circle consisted of only three people. We were all

teaching different subjects and developing curricula in different areas, which were the special

features of the model branch we were developing.

At first our main difficulty was to decide what we had in common and which aspect of our

work we could improve by looking at it from different angles. After a long debate we found

out that one of our main aims for our work in upper secondary was the reinforcement of the

so-called "dynamic qualifications" in ordinary teaching which we considered an important

factor in the development of young people's personalities.

Having found the topic did not automatically mean it was all downhill from there! "Dynamic

qualifications" is a very inclusive term and we had to make sure we had a common

understanding. It turned out to be the beginning of the next problem: we found that in fact we

had such a comprehensive understanding of the term that it was very difficult to decide on afocus for our work. We finally settled on developing a so-called "quality standard", an

instrument we had obtained from our external consultants. This would enable us to do three

important things:

clarify aims (norms); define criteria (what you actually measure) and indicators (how can you see success); establish evaluation instruments.

The Quality Standard

Graph 2

Quality standard, an instrument developed by Strittmater/Altrichter/Posch, FQS, 1996-98

NORM : What is our aim/goal?

Criteria Indicators Evaluation instruments

What do we do to achieve our

aim?

How can we tell success? How do we assess our

achievement?

In order to use this new instrument we agreed to narrow our focus considerably and to

concentrate on something which was equally important to all of us - it turned out to be

"presentation techniques". It was easy to formulate the norm, but quite difficult to agree on

the criteria. Should we just jot down what we were all individually doing in our different

subjects or was it necessary to agree on some criteria which were carried out by everyone inthe group? Were we supposed to compile all our efforts to produce an "impressive" standard,

or were we supposed to decide on which of these things should be done by everyone

(standard) in order to produce "quality"?

I still have my doubts here. It seems tempting to write down everything that is done to show

how creative and diligent teachers are in pursuit of their duties and perhaps to influence the

ideas of a possible reader. On the other hand this cannot be applied evenly to every teacher. It

is very difficult to standardize teaching methods and certainly not ideal if you use it for

norming quality more widely, say for a whole school district. But it can contribute to school

development to develop a common understanding of what seems "good" quality in this

2Creative branch aiming at developing young people`s personality by subjects like body consciousness,

creative techniques, (drama) workshop, media and communicationnone of these subjects exist in any other

Austrian school


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respect for a group of teachers, for a school or for our network of five schools. Therefore we

were willing to use this standard as the basis of evaluation by the others in our group.

EvaluationWe decided on "classroom observation" as the instrument. It would be done by the critical

friends in our quality circle.

I had chosen the presentation of a three week history project for the end of April, which was

to be critically observed by my two colleagues. On the set date, however, one of my

colleagues was taken ill and the other had to cover for her and so I was left without my critical

friends. The presentation, however, was so excellent, that I decided to have another go and, as

a reward for the students, invite the headmistress as well as both colleagues. As we could not

find a date when they were not supposed to be teaching other classes, we decided to invite

these classes as well, thereby giving the students an additional chance of getting feedback

from peers. We prepared the observing students on how to give feedback, for which we

selected written responses because of the large number of people involved.

The presentationAs a proud teacher I want to outline quickly what the students did. For three weeks they had

been working on the topic "witches". They had only been told to present the topic in a

creative and thorough way, but also to ensure that their audience did not lose interest. Since

this topic is still quite loaded with emotions they started their presentation in a pitch dark

classroom lit only by candlelight with drums and low singing. They had prepared an

"exhibition" of informative posters which were then visited with the help of a tour guide

illuminating just one poster at a time. Other items of information were provided on recorded

cassettes as well as in an exhibition of three-dimensional objects (like Barbie dolls

representing different female idols, C.G. Jungk's archetypes...). The whole session was led by

one girl announcing the contributions and guiding the spectators. To sum up the information,

a handout was provided.

ConsequencesThe class were very proud of their presentation and very eager to have feedback. It was easy

to focus on the strong points first and then talk about the weaknesses. These were mostly

related to individual contributions e.g.voice too low, language not really adequate, some

excited laughter etc.

One of the findings was, of course, that even though everyone in the class had been exposed

to the same teaching input, the individuals reacted very differently. Some students are just

more talented, more outgoing and more extrovert, while others are very shy and find itdifficult to speak up in front of an audience. So the latter will need to be given more attention

in future.

The teachers had given feedback on questions based on the criteria and indicators of our

quality standard. But we found it was also helpful that the students gave feedback without this

aid. Indeed new criteria emerged and as a result we decided to amend our quality standard.

Some of the observing students were carried away by the creative presentation of such an

emotional topic and gave inadequate feedback. So that was provided a further field of action

improving the skills of giving feedback.

Conclusion

The work in our quality circle was not easy, but turned out to be very rewarding. Sometimes I

felt that I could have achieved so much more on my own without these long discussions, but

the shared feeling of achievement at the end made up for all that.


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In Action Research the main aim is to improve the quality of your own work. If you do

that in a quality circle you still focus on the work of the group members, but for the school

there is the added value that the groups share certain ideas which broadens the basis for a

common understanding for school policy development.

It is difficult to evaluate teaching, because in Austria, or at least not to my knowledge,

we do not have a common understanding, or norms or standards telling us what good teachingis. If you assess students it is certainly standard to give them criteria on what you expect them

to be able to do and how they should do it. There are no criteria for teaching. Thats why we

thought it would be a good idea to spend time on reaching this common understanding of

standard quality on at least one topic important to us.

Quality standards are not an overall solution to the problem of self-evaluation. One

of their main qualities lies in the process of developing them. The more people there are

involved, the higher the understanding of the difficult process of teaching. It is very

interesting and rewarding to discuss what you are doing and why you do it with your

colleagues Often people do the same thing for different reasons and it is enriching to see other

points of view.

As mentioned above, I do not believe in norming or standardizing teachingso that some develop a standard for others. One of the main qualities is in developing and,

voluntarily, subjecting yourself to the norm. Doing something ambitious like this just for one

quality circle actually does seem a waste of energy, and so the steering groups decided to

collect all the quality standards and make sure they were available in each school.

However, some teachers expected other teachers to accept their norm and to subject

themselves to it. I have often experienced teachers to ask other people to subject themselves

to their norms, yet only rarely to ask others if they could employ their norm.

Looking back at the process I can only stress again what I have been saying about

other Action Research studies. I can see that I learned a lot and that it has enriched my

understanding of teaching and also research or self-evaluation. In this way it has contributed

to my professional knowledge and I do not regret the additional working hours I had to put in.

Written by Christa Bauer

Coordinator of school-development, Schulverbund Graz-West, Teacher Trainer, Consultant

Schulverbund Graz-West , Schulentwicklungskoordination

A-8053 Graz, Klusemannstrasse 25

[email protected]

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