Education Endowment Foundation:Defining what success will look like

Defining what success will look like

Considering what success will look like for you and your colleagues.

Estimated time 1 minute and 36 seconds

Introduction

Section 1 of 1

Course Progress

It is worth considering what success will look like for you and your colleagues. Here are a few questions to think about before we move into examining the specific recommendations from the guidance report:

  • What do you hope TA classroom practice will look like in six months’ time? What about in twelve months’ time?
  • How might your journey of change affect the way in which TAs in your school see themselves professionally? What positive changes might it bring about?
  • Why does changing how TAs work matter to you? Why does it matter in the wider context of your school?
  • How will you know if the changes you implement have worked?
  • What will success look like for you and your colleagues?
The last question sums up our focus here. If we want to make significant changes to TA deployment, training and use then we need to have a clear sense of what we are working towards. We need a set of criteria against which we can judge our efforts. We need to know what success will look like.

The document below is a Visioning exercise that can help you to focus on the aims of your school. One way of starting this process is to think about where you want to be in the future. Use the Visioning exercise resource to support discussions throughout your school about what differences you and your staff want to see as a result of improving your use of TAs.

You might like to use the following questions to structure your discussion and the key points which result:

  • What will great TA classroom practice look like in our school?
  • How will deployment be better than it is now?
  • What changes will really stand out and make a difference?
  • How will TA-teacher communication be different?
  • What will intervention best practice look like in our school?

Knowing what success entails for you and your colleagues means knowing what you are working towards. It also gives you a way to judge your progress – and a way of saying ​‘Yes, we’ve got there!’ further down the line. Involving everybody in the process of defining what success will look like is another opportunity to generate that sense of inclusivity and openness we mentioned earlier. This creates a great starting point from which to work.