Session 4

Reflections
What defines a school learning environment?
Basically there are eight areas:
- Leadership: School leaders must share their vision to staff, school culture
- Physical environment: School culture
- Teachers: Teaching methodology, support staff, teacher-student interaction
- Students: Learning styles, emotional learning, attitude
- Working with parents: Parents must be supportive of school activities
- Collaboration with external agencies: greater exposure for our students
- Security: School must be a safe place for our students and teachers
- Budget: Money is important to implement certain programmes

Find this instrument SLCEQ very interesting to use and it can be tied in with Moo's theory. The following are the links:
SLCEQ Instrumentation - Moo's Schema
Student Support - Relationship dimension
Affiliation - Relationship dimension
Professional Interest - Personal growth
Achievement Orientation - Personal growth
Staff Freedom - System maintenance
Participatory Decision Making- System maintenance
Innovation - System maintenance
Resource Adequacy - System maintenance
Work Pressure - System maintenance

Some comments on SLCEQ Instrumentation:
- Better to put SA (Strongly agree) first followed by SD (Strongly disagree)
- Items should be spread over the scales and not put in category. This is to ensure that students or teachers don't get tired of answering the questions and see a pattern.
- Have a gauge of 4 to 5 items per scale
- As a first cut, do not have more than 25 items
- Try out the questionaire with a group first, before implementing with the actual group

I liked the hands-on session on the case study. We had the opportunity to assess a school learning environment and see the positive and negative aspects of the environment and make recommendations to improvement the environment. I could use this questions to assess my own school environment.

I also found a lot of resources that I can use on the eduweb. onlinelearning. I will use some of them when planning my Food and Nutrition lessons.

I also had a taste of answering a questionaire and how to collect data and then to transport it to SPSS. It has been a fruitful session today.