Teacher Support with Google Apps - 1

Supporting Teacher Development with Google Apps

The revision history feature in Google Docs is not only useful for going back through drafts, it can also be used to provide active, real-time support for staff, assisting them to make better, more effective interventions.



I've just had some great feedback from a school that I have been working with for some time.

The Head decided that she wanted to shake things up after a less than outstanding OFSTED inspection - not bad but not where she wanted to be - and so we worked together to introduce Google Apps for Education across the school. That was several years ago and things went really well, with more lots of exciting learning activities that seemed to breathe new life into the teaching staff and, importantly,  engage the students.

Last year she asked how we could take things further and I suggested that we could use some of the features in Google Apps to support staff in THEIR learning journey more effectively. We discussed it with staff who were a little wary but one department, English, put their heads above the trench and volunteered to pilot some activities.

We discussed the issues that they felt may be important to focus on and, in the end, everyone agreed that supporting staff in developing their understanding of the types of interventions that they were making to support individual learners and resultant learning outcomes would be a good place to start.

Again, we narrowed down the focus a little more and decided to look at creative writing. They were already using Google Docs to develop creative writing activities and using this to support staff seemed a sensible next step.

So how did they do it?

Well, staff told their pupils what they would like to do and got agreement from them to allow the Head of Department and the Head to have access to the shared Google Docs that they would be developing over the year. Then, when a member of staff made an active intervention with an individual, one that they regarded as significant, they commented on it in the Google doc. The HoD and the Head could then log in and review the revision history within that doc to see if the intervention had produced some form of outcome, positive or negative.

Importantly, the teacher, the HoD and the Head could all discuss what was happening pretty quickly so that if there needed to be some other intervention made or if it was unclear that anything positive had resulted from the initial intervention something could be done about it.

In many cases the pupil themselves would be included in the discussions, at some level, to find out their experiences. The whole activity was focused on HELPING the teacher improve the learning outcomes for the pupils and not associated with any form of performance management process.

How did it go?

Well after a year of piloting this the majority of the English department have found it useful. Some did not want the pupils involved, and that was fine, but still felt that they gained value from the HoD being able to review and discuss their work.

One member of staff decided that it was too intrusive and withdrew from the pilot, preferring to seek other methods of support from the HoD. But the majority of the staff actively encouraged pupils to get involved in discussing how their interventions had helped, seeing improvement in behaviour and outcomes from most of the pupils that they taught. In some cases staff reported that previously un-cooperative or 'quiet' pupils had become more engaged after working with the teacher to give them feedback about their interventions on different tasks.

All the staff who stuck with the project thought that their teaching had improved due to the timeliness of the interventions from the HoD and especially the ability for them to 'discuss' progress and developments in the evening through chat. The majority of the staff felt that the Head's comments were less useful as they were more generic and less focused on the 'here and now' activities that were their focus (to which the Head breathed a sigh of relief since the prospect of rolling it out to other departments and the subsequent workload was causing her concern).

What's next

At the main staff meeting this term the English staff presented their experiences and declared their intention to extend the pilot to ways of supporting students with exam preparations. Subsequently Geography, History and, interestingly, Science have also asked to develop their own activities using this methodology.