Adhyayan began working with St. Stanislaus High School in Bandra, Mumbai in January 2012. This followed a request from its alumni who are supporting Father Jude, the School’s principal in preparing for the school’s 150th anniversary. St Stanislaus High School is a well-known, all-age Jesuit Boy’s school of over 2000 students whose reputation is citywide.
Dream 2013, the title of their anniversary project is designed to assist the St. Stanislaus leadership team in creating and resourcing a realistic development plan, which will support the school’s continued development over the coming decade.
Adhyayan’s partnership with St. Stanislaus High School was initiated to help the school identify key areas for celebration and development through a realistic School Improvement Plan. As a first step, the school committed to the Adhyayan Quality Standard, underpinned by our School Self-Review and Evaluation (SSRE) diagnostic.
Once the school made a decision to be assessed against the Adhyayan National Quality Standard, we undertook a quality workshop with the school’s ‘Dream team’ comprising the Principal, alumni, management, and senior teaching and support staff. The purpose was to prepare the school for undertaking its own school self-review. The school decided to split the Dream team into three separate teams with each undertaking separate reviews so that they could get as balanced a perspective of the school’s current effectiveness as possible. Their findings were subsequently amalgamated into a series of judgements against Adhyayan’s six Key Performance Areas of Leadership and Management, Teaching and Learning, The Child, The Curriculum, Community and Partnerships and Infrastructure and Resources. Following an external review undertaken by Kavita Anand and Spokey Wheeler of Adhyayan on January 18, the school was awarded the Adhyayan Gold National Quality Standard.
The dialogue about the school’s and Adhyayan’s reviews illuminated their School Improvement Plan. The plan they subsequently developed has been truthful to the St. Stanislaus mission of educating students for both life and livelihood in the 21st Century.
With a planning agenda including – creating and sustaining high quality classroom displays of children’s work for learning and assessment, raising teachers’ expectations of their students’ learning capacity by identifying minimum levels for all students, and training teachers in assessing student performance in accordance with continuous comprehensive evaluation and multiple intelligences — these conversations could have been taking place anywhere in the world.
At the heart of the plan is the development of the potentially ground breaking initiative to embed the Jesuit Certificate Programme (JCP) within the school curriculum. This will involve teachers in applying a wider range of teaching styles and techniques including independent thinking and problem solving in a much richer offering. Adhyayan is continuing to work alongside St. Stanislaus High School in developing the JCP strategy.