Sonia Santos is the Year 6 Team Leader and Appraisal Coordinator at Newton International School, a British International School in Doha, Qatar with more than 100 teachers and support staff and more than 1,000 pupils from Foundation One to Year 8.
Introduced to Newton International School in 2020, BlueSky has enabled the school to streamline many of its previously paper-based processes, including those for teacher evaluation. It has helped the school “see the bigger picture,” says Sonia, and helped her as a team leader to take a strategic view of the needs of teachers to pinpoint where staff might need support to meet the priorities set out in the school action plan more consistently.
Mapping professional learning to school priorities
“Mapping the priorities of the school and where the gaps were in what was happening in classrooms has been really useful, especially after the pandemic. The majority of our new teachers had had little or no time in class in the past two years due to Covid, and now they were in a new school and having to teach 20-plus children with little professional practice under their belt. After studying the reports produced on BlueSky, one of the priorities I realised immediately was planning and including more enquiry-based lessons so that lessons came to life more for students, and the differentiated learning needs of teachers could be identified and addressed. That sort of issue is easily picked up with the BlueSky reports.”
Because professional development objectives are also on BlueSky, it is easy to link training and development to school priorities, she adds. The school started using BlueSky learning, the easy-to-access, flexible learning library of research-based and practitioner-led CPD modules.
“This year staff had three objectives, one chosen by them and two set by the school. We make sure that when people are choosing CPD – whether it’s from the BlueSky Learning provision or our own school provision – they link the activity with the objectives, so when we look at a report of the school priorities, we can see what is being covered or not, and where we might need to create an action if there is not enough evidence that a particular priority is being addressed.”
“This year staff had three objectives, one chosen by them and two set by the school. We make sure that when people are choosing CPD – whether it’s from the BlueSky Learning provision or our own school provision – they link the activity with the objectives, so when we look at a report of the school priorities, we can see what is being covered or not, and where we might need to create an action if there is not enough evidence that a particular priority is being addressed.”
Streamlined reporting and teacher evaluation
BlueSky reports have also made the preparation of information for external inspections much more efficient and time-saving for staff.
“In Qatar, we have both Qatari and British inspections and the reports capture any aspect that they want to scrutinise. At a recent Qatari inspection, the team were very keen to look at how many teachers were satisfactory, how many were good and the evidence for those assessments. I printed off all of the BlueSky reports with details of staff CPD, the evaluation of that CPD, and all the comments that each teacher had added. This meant that the inspectors could easily see how much work was going into appraisal and professional development and what the impact was. They also wanted to know what teachers’ objectives were in some detail and I was able to print off a visual report so they could take the information away to study.”
BlueSky has improved both efficiency and effectiveness, Sonia believes, easing her workload as a manager and helping the school in its drive to raise standards, and helping to motivate staff.
“Recently I was asked by the CEO for some teachers’ appraisals over the last few years and in five minutes I could send over a list, because all I had to do was print them off from BlueSky Education where everything is held: objectives, observations, learning walks, reports, everything a teacher does. Imagine if that was all still on paper – how could I figure out one what teachers had done for the past two or three years!
“It has helped us to address under-performance, too, as it enables us to monitor progress and put support in place so easily when required.
“There’s the efficiency and the increased efficacy in quality assurance from BlueSky Education but also the added value of BlueSky Learning in encouraging people to do more than they need to, which makes it a very worthwhile investment.”
Developing teaching practice and knowledge
“For CPD, the BlueSky Learning modules have proved so popular that we are finding some people doing much more than we expect. They can complete modules when they have time and when they want, they set up targets to take some of techniques and strategies into their class and you can see in the reports that they improve – and it shows they are up to date with new thinking in education.”
“As a teacher I find the BlueSky Learning modules really useful to improve my knowledge in different teaching areas. The learning modules about metacognition in the BlueSky Learning library helped me and the staff immensely to develop our understanding of Rosenshine’s principles.”
These things combined make it great value for money, she adds.
“There’s the efficiency and the increased efficacy in quality assurance from BlueSky Education but also the added value of BlueSky Learning in encouraging people to do more than they need to, which makes it a very worthwhile investment.
“Given the scale of our school, the support it affords us for the cost is well worth it. Most importantly, teaching is definitely better since we started with BlueSky.”
