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Hello, welcome back.

I'm Tony Townsend.

This is course eight, Developing relationships, and we're in week five,

it takes a village to raise a child.

Lecture 3 of this particular week is looking at

what can we do to invite the community in to our school.

And what sorts of things do we need to consider to turn our school

into a community school.

I'd like to start with this fairly long quotation from Linking Schools With Life.

I will give you time to read it, but

essentially what's it's saying is that many schools are like new islands,

set apart from the mainland of life by a deep moat of convention and tradition.

Certain times of the day the drawbridge is lowered and the part-time inhabitants

cross over to the island in the morning and back to the mainland at night.

Why do these young people go out to the island

to learn how to live on the mainland?

It goes on looking at some of the things that happen on the island.

Where they are given excellent books on the island telling them about life on

the mainland.

Where for a special treat they take a few of the young people off the island during

the day to see what happens on the mainland.

And then at night, nobody goes there except for

the people who claim the schools clean the island, it's lifeless.

And then we see at the end, occasionally one of the graduates

from that particular island, can be heard to say to one another,

I remember reading something about that when we were on the island.

The interesting bit about this quotation is that it's now 70 years old.

We have to ask ourselves the question, how much closer

to our communities have schools come in that 70 years?

Or are schools still islands that had part time inhabitants from the mainland?

That they don't really do anything on the island that is associated with

lot from the mainland.

And of course the argument there was that we need to develop schools

as community schools.

So what is a community school?

Well, we could argue that communities, families,

schools are all equal partners in education.

It goes to the next level if you like of it takes a village to raise a child.

Teachers, parents, residents of the community,

all see each other as positive partners to develop

not only the school and the students within it, but the community as well.

So what does a community school demonstrate an interest in?

Firstly, it's trying to look at a quality education for everybody.

For young people.

But it's also looking at the development of young adults, and

the development of families and communities.

So what we're looking at here is,

community school being a school that is interested in the whole community.

The argument being that if the whole school and the whole community are focused

on education, then the students will do better than if either is not.

So what are some of the ingredients of a community school?

Well, the critical one of course is a strong focus on education and learning.

But it's not just education and learning for young people.

It's education and learning for everybody.

So the teachers become learners, the school leaders become learners,

the families become learners as well.

And what we're looking at here is a partnership in a lifelong learning

approach.

We're not just using the school for a short period of time.

It is part of my life for the whole of my life.

And so I can use the school.

And the school can use me and my skills in a mutual partnership.

So it's a long-term commitment to my community.

If I see that my community is developed through education and

its schools can provide that level of support that enable it to happen,

then that is what a community school should do.

So in looking at various principles if you like that include lifelong learning.

One never stops learning.

Now this is something that is perfectly acceptable these days because

we know how quickly the world is changing.

If we don't continue to learn, we get left behind.

But you can see from the list that there are number of

principles of community education.

Including leadership, self-determination,

self-help, and integrated delivery of services.

These are the sorts of things that adopt a holistic approach

to what we're doing in education.

It is the whole community that works together.

We try to develop leadership, not only within the school, but

within the community as well.

We try to help the community to be self-determining, as well as the school.

The best way of doing this is to make sure

that there is a common approach to the delivery of service.

And the people know how to get to the services they need.

And one way of doing this, of course,

is to have to school as the focus of where these services are delivered.

So if we want to compare the difference between, say, a traditional school,

as many of us will know it and at community school, the first difference

we might look at is the amount of time the school is available to its community.

And what we can see there is that the school is not only available

on a daily basis, seven days a week but it's also available for

a longer period of the year, for a longer period of the day, and

have a variety of different types of lessons that occurs

within a community school as compared to a traditional school.

So if we looked at previously that students would spend

a small amount of time, only about 2% of their lifetime,

in school, in a traditional school.

We can see that in a community school, that might be doubled or tripled.

If we do the mathematics and we look at the traditional school, we can see that

the traditional school is going to be open for about 13% of the total year.

The total time in a year is over 1,800 hours, but

the time that the traditional school is open is only about 1,100,

about 13% of the possible time.

The Community School, on the other hand, by moving from five days to seven days,

from moving from 6 hours to 12 hours, and from moving from 180 days to 220 days,

can bring this closer to 50% of the time that the school is being used.

Let's look at the sorts of spaces when we compare the difference.

In a traditional school,

all of the education usually takes place inside the four walls of a classroom.

There is very little opportunity for

students to go outside of their classroom into the community itself.

But if we look at the community school, education can take place anywhere,

and we use as many of the community resources and

facilities as we can to enable the students to learn.

If we compare the difference in terms of involvement,

in a traditional school there's very limited involvement by parents.

And hardly any at all by communities.

And what we find is the parent involvement drops off.

As the child gets older the parent involvement gets low.

In the community school, however, because it's not only the children that are using

the school, but also the family and the community, as well,

there is a comprehensive process of engaging both family and

community in a wide range of activities within the school.

So in fact whereas we might argue that the traditional school sees teachers and

parents as separate, in a community school their seen as partners.

So if we go to look at developing a partnership approach

to improving education for students, what do we need to do?

What are the things that we can consider as being appropriate strategies for

developing those?

And in our next lecture we will look at some of these issues.

Until then, thank you for watching.

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Inviting the community into our school

Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Developing Relationships

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