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The School Committee and School Principal
We are doing a number of studies, including:
What is the Role of the School Committee?
According to the decree of the Minister of National Education, the School Committee’s role includes advising, supporting, supervising and mediating. So far the role of the school committee in most schools is limited to raising funds. Generally the committee members are chosen by the principal and follow his directions, they do not take their own initiatives.
Now a different spirit is appearing in some schools. The school committee members are chosen democratically by the parents and community, and the school committee works in partnership with the school principal and teachers to develop the school. The school committee is involved in decision making and is able to contribute its ideas for developing the school. We are currently making a study in a number of schools where school committees are playing a wider role. We would like to discover:
- What is the membership of the school committee?
- How were the members selected?
- What is its program of work?
- What are the relationships between the committee, school principal and teachers?
What is a Good Headteacher?
According to research in many countries, the factor which most determined the quality of the education in a school is the school principal. Education officials here often say that a good principal is one who frequently monitors classes, identifies the teachers’ mistakes, and tells the teachers how to improve their performance. But from our observations good, effective principals do not work at all like that!
Good principals need to have a commitment to develop their schools. Besides this these principals generally work in a democratic way. They give the opportunity to the teachers and school committee to contribute and develop their ideas.
They involve all stakeholders in decision making so that everyone feels ownership. One of the indicators of a good school is that, there are visitors, it is not only the principal who does the talking, but the teachers, committee and parents all feel free to speak.
We are currently making a study to record and analyse in a number of what we consider to be good schools: what does a good principal do?
The results of our research will be used as training material for MBE target schools.
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TIPS FOR TEACHERS 1
What makes a Good Display?
A good display will motivate the students whose work is displayed. Besides this a good display will give inspiration to other students to do better work.
At the initial stages of implementing PAKEM the displays are often of worksheets which the children have filled in. As a result all the children’s writing is almost the same. Many displays are just of pages of exercises torn out of the children’s writing books. If all displays are full of the same work the display will not fulfil the function and objectives outlined above.
A good display consists of children’s work which is purely their own, such as: reports of visits (to a sauce factory, a village cooperative), reports of students’ research or experiments, pictures and so on. Displays can include models, apparatus used for experiments, reports of the process and results of experiments, books made by the children and works of art.
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Some examples of neat, interesting displays of children’s work
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Displays can be the results of children’s individual work, for example, poetry, short stories, or book reviews. Besides this they can also be the result of group work, for example reports, how things were made, drawings, examples of materials used, maps and statistics etc.
Displays should be changed when they are no longer of interest to the children. What is the display in your classroom like?
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Local Exhibition in Batang
The MBE coordinator
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for Batang district contributed to the Dinas Pendidikan stand with information about the MBE activities in the district.
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