How exactly does this ‘step aside’ link to my story? Epistemology links to my story as a something that has guided my development as a leader. For me it has been about an accumulation of knowledge about the system, myself and my beliefs. It has been how I have made sense of things, how I sorted out what was ‘right’ and how I made decisions to move the school forward in a learning trajectory rather than a factory process. Through this knowledge I considered that I needed to judge more explicitly how what I knew (truths) and what I believed in (beliefs) could direct a way to improve the true attainment of the child, whilst at the same time supporting the school to raise achievement overall. League tables were high on the agenda in schools …show more content…
I considered that this focus would support my values, the child and the school. Instead of looking for ‘quick fixes’ I thought ‘let’s just teach the subject well’. I began to look for solutions and as a result became to believe strongly in the part the teacher played in the raising the attainment of the individual child. I decided this was something I could wholeheartedly support and was within my area of influence. I believed that improving teaching and therefore learning could impact on the league tables in a way more in line with my ontological values rather than a didactic step-by-step guidance to attain examination success, as accepted within some vocational courses. In connection to this I became interested in the findings of Hattie (2009). In his investigation of the question ‘what has the greatest influence on student learning’? He showed instructional quality to have the potential of effecting outcomes by a whole …show more content…
The theory was, that we expect airplanes to be highly reliable in particular procedures such as taking off and landing. Other things such as the food we are served may not need to score quite so highly. Transferring the principles into education would mean that school improvement plans must focus on a few key things that need to be done very well and therefore become highly reliable. At the time the HRS initiative was due to begin as a pilot in North East England, the head teacher of School A, the school I was working in, began his thesis for a Doctorate in Education. Supported by Professor David Reynolds he chose to research and interrogate the HRS initiative. This allowed him the opportunity to apply the principles of HRS to his own action research as a whole school intervention. To do this he needed to distance himself from the implementation in practice and therefore I asked if I would become the school representative for the