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 project FQS - 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 approaches the 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 conclusions Background 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 10 14 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-operation of teachers in year teams. 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
1

Posch/Altrichter: Steirisches Innovationsprojekt, 1991-93

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 external consultants (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

Bauer/Tschinkel 99

FQS

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.

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 a focus 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 What do we do to achieve our How can we tell success? aim?

Evaluation instruments 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 in the 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
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Creative branch aiming at developing young people`s personality by subjects like body consciousness, creative techniques, (drama) workshop, media and communication none of these subjects exist in any other Austrian school

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. Evaluation We 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 presentation As 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. Consequences The 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 it difficult 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.

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 teaching is. 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 teaching so 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 chbauer@kluse.asn-graz.ac.at