EFFICACY OF ENGAGEMENT

SUMMARY

In the past years we have been working on enhancing engagement of all stakeholders in our community life. The first step was to involve teachers in the diagnostic process of our institution some years ago. We also carried out our first survey to parents, obtaining for the first time, tangible information on how they were perceiving different aspects of our school (2016). Since 2017 we have been working on the transmission and reflection on our institution values, expressed in our Ideario, inviting all staff members to participate in an Ideario Workshop. We deliberately included the administrative team who, we had detected, was being perceived as outsiders by the pedagogical teams. We also shared the results of the parents’ survey with leadership teams and worked together in defining improvement actions for the upcoming years (2017). 2018 was the year in which our improvement journey began to gain strength. Assisted by AdvancED, we were able to find ways to involve and engage more stakeholders. Groups of teachers, instructional and non-instructional teams and students got together monthly to engage in professional conversations around sets of standards and quality factors. This information was completed with the analysis of results of AdvancED surveys and inventories and shared with staff and students to reflect upon our first insights and agree on future steps of improvement. We detected that older students feel that we are a school open to their opinions but that these aren´t taken into account because change "doesn´t happen". Although the school has a strong culture of "giving voice to the students" we realized that we needed formal structure to canalize their opinions and suggestions. This year we created the Student Council, we named representatives from each secondary form and defined a specific process to help them present and carry out their initiatives. Also, the school provides numerous opportunities for students to engage actively in academic and non-academic activities (sport tournaments, spiritual retreats, field trips, social projects, Drama Club, preparation for the sacrament of Confirmation, collaboration in the implementation of activities for younger students, etc.). Additionally, in a classroom instructional level, we have been working for the past three years in the implementation of active instructional strategies. Special emphasis in promoting collaborative learning, project based learning, learning centers, has been made and supported with specific training sessions. Eleot observations show that we need to improve in engaging all instructional staff in these practices and improving its quality.