Collaborative Criteria Carried Out in My School.

¶ … collaborative criteria carried out in my school.

Quality of education delivered to students is one of the top priorities of our school, and over the years, our school uses collaborative criteria to deliver high quality education for students. The strategy employed to deliver effective quality education is to use collaborative criteria in using evaluation strategy to identify areas that needs improvement in the school teaching practice. A school evaluation program is one of the criteria that occur in my school. The school principal, vice principal, teachers and school boards work together to implement a school evaluation in my school. In a climate of respect and trust, my school makes a consultation with parents and students to improve the school learning environment. The major reason for the collaborative criteria is to prepare for the external evaluation from the school board. In the United States, the Europe and countries taking education very important, external evaluators come to each school once or twice in a year to evaluate the program and access whether a school's curriculum program conforms to the laid down school board's requirements. (Goodwin, & Burke, 2008). Thus, our school implements a collaborative effort to carry out a self-evaluation before the arrival of the external evaluator.

Implementation of the Collaborative Criteria

Our school evaluation collaborative strategy involves planning process that involves six steps:

Collecting the evidence on the learning and teaching outcomes,

Analyzing the evidence that involves evaluation of knowledge, skills, and attainment students acquired during learning process.

Judging the quality of the learning outcomes to arrive at significant strengths and weakness of the learning outcomes.

Identification of strengths and weakness in the school learning process and proposed improvement process.

The fifth stage focuses on the improvement plan

The last stage is to make implementation action at class and school levels depending on the areas where there is a need for improvement.

There are different types of collaboration criteria taking place in my school. First, some teachers may engage in a self-evaluation to evaluate his or her teaching performance. For example, a teacher may invite his or her colleague to review his or her lesson plan in an objective manner to identify the strengths and weakness of his or her lesson plan. On the other hand, two or three teachers in our schools may collaborate to evaluate one another teaching performance. A professional collaborative agreement among teachers is to review one another teaching and learning method and suggests areas that need improvement. Using this collaborative strategy, teachers in our schools have been able to improve their teaching performances.

Typically, the collaborative effort assists our school to arrive at quality instructional practice and common standard to enhance quality of the school practice. For example, the collaborative evaluation practice assists our school to arrive at realistic and sound judgment of the quality of education delivered to students. The evaluation results will assist our school to draw an objective conclusion about the quality of teaching and learner outcomes and identify where improvement is necessary. (Barr, Koppel, Reeves, et al. 2005).

My school also collaborates to draw the SMART goals to achieve high quality of education for my school. (Bogue, 2013). At the beginning of the academic years, the school principal, vice-principals and three other senior teachers work together to draw up the SMART goals that my school should achieve at the end of the academic year. Moreover, the school principal, vice-principals and three other senior teachers collaborate to ensure that my school achieves our SMART goals at the end of the academic year. Our SMART goal is presented below:

Our SMART Goals

SMART is one of the collaborative efforts that my school uses in achieving a quality of education. A SMART refers to Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time. At the beginning of each academic year, my school set SMART goals to be achieved for each academic year in order to improve the school quality of education. Our school academic year for 2013/2014 starts by August 16, 2013 and end by August 1, 2014. Our school SMART goals for the 2013/2014 academic year are as follow:

Specific: By August 1, 2014, our school aims to achieve new and quality performances using performances management system in order to enhance the educational performances of our students. The implementation is to use collaborative effort to evaluate teaching performances of teachers and provides areas where there is a need for improvement. The standard set for all teachers is that more than 90% of the students should perform excellently at the end of the academic year. External evaluators will also evaluate the performances.

Measurable: Our school's goals will be measured using tangible evidence such as student's performances for each term. The school will use short- and long-term student's performances. The average performances of students at the end of each term will be used for short-term evaluation. However, the average performances of students at the end of the school calendar year will also be used to measure our goals. The school grades will be used for the quantification of student's performances and students who score 75% and above will be rated as top performing students. We will compare our goal with the previous five years to evaluate the extent we have achieved our goals.