Guidelines for the School Self Review Tool process

The SSRT has two components: a School Self Review Tool (SSRT) one copy of which is completed by a review team, and a Teacher Survey for all teaching staff. The Teacher Survey is a subset of the SSRT questions and needs to be completed prior to the SSRT. 

The SSRT and the Teacher Survey both include a range of parallel questions about different aspects of school life:

• school-wide leadership, climate, policies, and practices
• how teachers teach, and what happens in classrooms
• student culture and behaviour, and
• how connections are made with the school community.

The SSRT has fourteen extra questions (Questions 44, 45, 50, 51, 64-67 and 137-142) that staff may highlight for further discussion when completing the SSRT.

The Teacher Survey is completed anonymously. The Survey Administrator will send an email to all teachers. This includes a link to the online survey site. Teachers are asked to register, decide on a password and then complete the survey. Please ensure teachers have the right to opt out.

Teachers responses will be summarised in a Teacher: Items at a Glance report (as long as a minimum number of 5 teachers completed the survey to ensure anonymity). This can be used to assist the review team to complete the SSRT.

• Arrange a professional learning meeting to introduce the self review process and the Teacher Survey.
• At the meeting, discuss the purpose of the self review, the School Self Review Tool (SSRT), and the Teacher Survey. Provide staff with a hardcopy of the Teacher Survey and SSRT: Teacher information sheet (ideally all staff, including support and administration staff, as well as community stakeholders, could be involved at this first meeting, although only teaching staff will complete the Teacher Survey).
• Send the Teacher Survey link to all teachers and give them a timeframe to complete the survey. NOTE: The survey site will only produce reports if 5 or more teachers complete the survey. This cut off point has been selected to ensure anonymity. Schools with less than 5 teachers can use the hardcopy of the Teacher Survey to hold a discussion that contributes to the SSRT process.
• Organise a smaller review team of school leaders [link], teachers, other school staff, and other stakeholders who are interested in further discussing and completing the SSRT at a review session (it is important that all staff and stakeholders are volunteers and feel comfortable about their involvement).
• As a group, decide on a facilitator for the review session.
• Encourage teachers to complete their surveys prior to the review session – this means that you will be able to use the teacher data to assist in completing the SSRT.
• Send the Teacher: Items at a Glance report to the review team.
• Hold a review session with the review team to discuss the SSRT items and develop a combined set of SSRT results for your school. Use the Teacher: Items at a Glance report to assist you.
• Login in to the site (www.wellbeingatschool.org.nz) with your school username and password, make sure you are in your Survey administration area, select the Survey admin icon for the SSRT, click on the Survey link, and complete one copy of the SSRT. Please note you could enter this information at the time of the school review session.

• Establishing ground rules (e.g., the right to pass, differences in opinions are to be expected and respected, it’s ok to agree to disagree, the process that will be used to make a group judgement about each item)
• Deciding on roles for the group (e.g., recorder of decisions and items which led to debates)
• Organising small group tasks (e.g., see below for continuum lines or think-pair-share tasks)
• Managing the process for making judgements [link]
• Time keeping and suggesting breaks
• Wrap-up discussion, next steps, and ensure the SSRT is completed.

• Prior to the review session, the school review team members could look at the Teacher: Items at a glance report and highlight the 5-10 items they most want to discuss.
• The whole team decides which of the selected items they will debate in more depth.
• Teachers, school leaders, and pastoral care staff work in separate groups to discuss these items.
• Following this, the team regroups to feedback to each other.
• The team records a group judgement on the selected items.
• The team then works through the other items using the Teacher Survey data as one source of information to record a group judgement. The team can hold discussions when necessary on other items were there are differing viewpoints.

• If there are large differences of opinion, the mid-point from the equivalent Teacher Survey data could be used to complete the SSRT.
• Think-pair-share discussions could be used for items for which there are large differences in opinion so that staff can hear each others’ views. A mid-point between these could be recorded if agreement is not reached.
• For each item, staff could stand in a continuum line, or use stickies that are placed on a continuum on the wall. The median position could be selected (that is, the position with the most people or stickies).
• The facilitator or another team member could be designated responsibility for summarising the general position stemming from the team discussions.
• When developing the ground rules, the team could decide on a process to follow for items for which a shared view is not reached (e.g., the team could agree to always select the middle point from the teacher data, a middle response (if views span all options), or a position at the end-points of the scale (if views are leaning towards responses such as “strongly agree” or “strongly disagree”.)