Joining SUPER
Joining the Partnership
The SUPER partnership is seeking to expand. If you think that your school may be interested, please contact Lyndsay Upex at the Faculty of Education - lju20@cam.ac.uk
Colleen McLaughlin and a headteacher from the partnership will respond with further information and details of possible next steps. Recent new partners took part in an induction process that you may be interested to read about.
The Induction Process
The aim of the induction process is to inform new partners, assess their needs and plan the partnership's responses to those needs, as well as learn from new partners. We consider this to be a process of mutual learning and understanding. We have detailed the process for the first term but consider the process to be a year long.
Allocating partners
New schools will be allocated partners from the current member schools. Then it is proposed that the following process of needs assessment and induction would take place in the first term:
- Schools visits which would focus on the questions attached and draw on the processes attached - It is considered essential that it should include head teacher to head teacher contact
- Two way visits to each of the partnered schools - It has been found effective to have more than one person from each school involved in the visit and for the visits to consist of a range of contacts throughout the day.
Possible areas for enquiry on visits to partner schools
The aim of the visits is for all partners to share understandings about purposes, processes and structures to support the development and use of research and enquiry in schools, within the context of a schools-university partnership for educational research. We have some areas or questions for this process, which you may wish to draw upon. They will not all be relevant so please choose from them.
- What are your overall hopes and intentions for research and enquiry in your school?
- What is the history of teachers engaging in and with research in your school?
- Outline the main research undertaken recently.
- If your school has engaged in teacher research and enquiry
- How did you organise it?
- What were the main findings?
- How were they shared? With whom?
- What mechanisms do you/could you use for dissemination?
- What have you learned about developing and sustaining research and enquiry in your school? What have been your particular successes? What have been the major challenges?
- What support would you want to receive from the SUPER partnership in the next year?
- How does the SUPER partnership work?
- How is research supported and developed? How could research be developed?
- In particular what is the role of the Head teacher, the TRC, the Student Voice co-ordinator and the University Critical Friend.
- How does the SUPER MEd work and what do you feel about it? What support does it require to work?
- SUPER has core commitments. How do you/ will you meet these? What are the relevant issues here?
Possible processes to be used
It is important that this process is jointly planned by the two partnered schools.We will send a pack on Study Walks that colleagues might draw on.
We also thought that interviewing people might be a way of addressing the questions e.g. interviewing the TRC, a teacher researcher, an MEd participant, the HT, The Student voice coordinator.
The idea is that these visits will lead to the establishment of the needs of new partners. The SUPER partnership management group will then meet to plan the response to these needs over the next two terms. The university will offer research training for all schools during the following two terms and this is part of the fee for induction that schools are asked to pay. The timing and substance of this training would be negotiated with the partnership schools.
Finance
The costs of the entire induction process are £1000 per new partner and these are paid to the Faculty of Education. These funds are paid into the SUPER partnership account, which funds the activities of the whole partnership.