Developing reflective practice through team work

My work at New Rush Hall evolved out of the four-year project I led for Antidote with staff and students at one primary and one secondary school in the London Borough of Newham. An important element in this work was an exploration of the value of reflective groupwork for staff. This proved immensely rewarding for those who took part, but hard to sustain over time. I wrote in my report of the project:

Staff also need to feel respected, valued and listened to if they are to work and learn effectively. Talking and thinking together about what is going on can make an enormous difference to people’s experience at work. But it can be difficult to carve out time and space for open reflection, and to encourage people to participate without feeling forced into something uncomfortable.

I was approached by a member of staff at New Rush Hall, a special school for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, to see if we could apply some of the thinking to come out of the project in this very different setting.

Starting point
We started the project with a half-day Inset to start the process of thinking about how people’s emotional experience enabled them to engage students in learning.  Then, to help orientate the project, we used Antidote’s School Emotional Environment for Learning Survey (SEELS) to help us understand the quality of the emotional environment for staff and for students. As described in a previous article, SEELS is a confidential online survey that explores the extent to which people feel:

• Capable and supported to achieve their potential.
• Listened to, and therefore encouraged to listen to others.
• Accepted for who they really are.
• Safe enough to acknowledge what they are feeling.
• Included, with an important role to play in the school.

Staff at New Rush Hall recognised that they needed to feel CLASI if they were to:

• successfully de-escalate difficult situations
• enable students to find different ways of managing themselves
• encourage students to talk about the things that concern them.

Survey findings
The survey was carried out in the spring of 2005 and showed that:

• staff’s emotional experience was as good as that at any of the other schools we had surveyed at that stage
• over half the staff generally felt listened to, accepted and safe enough to acknowledge their feelings; they were less likely to feel capable and included
• people were more positive about support for teaching and learning and about the overall atmosphere than they were about space and place around the school
• while staff relationships seemed to be generally experienced as respectful and trusting, one in four people seemed to feel isolated and one in six were feeling undervalued
• most people seemed to experience good relationships in their own teams and classrooms, but non-teaching staff in particular seemed to feel less connected to adults in other areas of the school.

Exploration
Staff used the feedback from the survey to begin talking about why they were more likely to feel listened to and accepted than capable and included. Thoughts that came up were around:

• how children with social and emotional and behavioural difficulties can create feelings of powerlessness
• the difficulties, particularly for part-time and outreach staff in knowing what is going on and feeling fully part of the school
• the difference between organisational provision (for being listened to and accepted) and the feelings that are inside ourselves, more internal.

These thoughts led into discussion about how to strengthen relationships across the staff team in ways that would enhance understanding of children’s needs. Suggestions included requests for more team-building opportunities and for more opportunities to share and feed back on each other’s work. There was agreement that it would be helpful to make time to reflect together on what was going on.

Reflection time
In September 2006 we began a regular reflective meeting, devoting one twilight meeting each half term to thinking together about links between the emotional life of the school as a whole and the experience or behaviours of particular children. The full-day Inset in January 2007 focused on how to create opportunities for students as well as staff to think together about their experience at and beyond school.

This work was further informed by a SEELS survey with students. The results showed the high volatility of the student population, and the extent to which staff were relied on to provide a stable ‘base’. In 2007-08 the reflective team meetings were supplemented by opportunities for staff to request a one-to-one ‘thinking space’.

Feedback
In the summer term of 2007, after two years of group and individual reflection, staff reported finding the sessions useful because they provided:

• time to reflect about what you could do to improve your performance
• an opportunity to look inside yourself
• reflection on what is going on in our working relationships with pupils and connecting that to how any such feelings and behaviour impact on pupils’ overall school experience
• opportunities to share knowledge and understanding of our work so that we feel less isolated and can find enduring solutions to issues raised.

Generally, staff say that the experience of these sessions has made them more aware of the value of reflective meetings in small groups, one-to-one and large groups.