School Leadership, Management, Administration and Governance

The primary aim of this module is to empower teaching practice supervisors and school-based mentors to develop and implement appropriate mentoring programmes to support teaching practice placements in schools. However, as will be seen, the competences associated with mentoring can also be applied more widely.
The learning guide of this module addresses four key questions as follows:

• What has changed/is changing in the schooling system and what are the roles of supervisors and school-based mentors?
• What is mentoring?
• What are the personal and professional qualities of effective mentors?
• How can we manage the establishment, monitoring and evaluation of a school mentoring programme to support teaching practice placements?

In this umthamo, we will look at how education changes as society changes, and as different groups of people gain power. The education provided by communities and governments is different at different times and in different places all over the world.

Lo mthamo asks you to take whole school development out into the broader context of the community of schools in your district. We have spoken, in the Schools as Learning Communities strand, of 'Schools as Learning Organisations', of 'Learning Schools', of School Improvement', Whole School Development' and 'Healing the System'. All these have been approaches to developing our schools into 'Self-managing schools' - schools which are independent and can take initiative in solving their own difficulties within their own context.

This umthamo continues the discussion started in the previous umthamo on cluster development.

The way schools are organized and managed affects the quality of learning which takes place in them. Ideally schools should be communities. They should be places where different people all have a part to play, and work together in a supportive way, like the members of a family. The first umthamo looks at the way schools are organized.

This umthamo will help teachers develop their own pictures of a quality school in the Eastern Cape.  This will be done through surveying the school stakeholders and examining an effectiveness, relevance and efficiency approach in studying quality.

In lo mthamo teachers are encouraged to work with their school management and other school stakeholders to develop their school. They will first look at their own personal development, then at organisational development in order to develop an improvement strategy.

Lo mthamo continues the series that aims to support personal and organizational development of teachers and schools. In the previous umthamo teachers were asked to to implement as many steps of their school development plan as possible In lo mthamo teachers are asked to reflect on the process of implementation and adjust their plans.

In this umthamo, we will try to understand policy, and the role of policy in the process of developing 'quality schools'. The umthamo will guide you in evaluating and re-creating policy in your own school.

Lo mthamo explores alternatives to corporal punishment and looks for strategies that suit teachers, their learners as well as their parents.

This optional reading on the sociology of school timetables includes a small research activity.

 Time and space in teaching: Teaching as a practice that shapes, and is shaped by, time and space. By the end of the section you should be able to use concepts to help you think about school teaching and how it is related to arrangements of time and space.

Section Two builds a conceptual foundation for the module as a whole. By the end of the section you should be able to use the following concepts to help you think about school teaching and how it is related to arrangements of time and space:

• internal time and space;

• external time and space;

• activities, agents and intentions;

• formal purposes;

• elements of teaching;

• practices;

• institutions;

• regulative and constitutive rules.

• see how crowded space hinders teaching and learning;
• use your judgement in developing an appropriate approach to arranging learning time and space, especially in large, overcrowded classes;
• appreciate how such an approach depends on a notion of teaching as an intentional practice, which is both flexible and learning-centred;
• understand the scope of teachers' responsibility for helping learners to shape learning time and space beyond the classroom and outside of school time;
• use your judgement in thinking about how to enable learners to enter and work within the conceptual space of different subjects or learning areas.

BRIDGE’s Guides to Social Investment Interventions aim to support the work and spend of social investors who promote educational improvement. The purpose of the School Profile Guide is to help you establish a preliminary overview of the level of functionality of a school which is the target of a funded intervention in order to assist with project planning. It has been developed as a generic tool, with the understanding that users will adapt it to suit their own needs.