Governor monitoring reports – it's ethnographic research!

 

I'm now in the second year of my doctoral research journey and I am knee deep in reading of all kinds but currently looking at ways of keeping a research journal and recording notes from research.  You might wonder what that has to do with governor monitoring reports – well bear with me!

It occurred to me that what we do when we visit our schools, in our link governor roles or with a specific remit from the board, is a piece of research – ethnographic research perhaps? Ethnographic research can be described as “a descriptive, analytical and explanatory study of the culture … values, beliefs and practices of one or more groups” (1). It is about observing people in their every- day settings – so we listen, we observe (to learn not to make judgements and this is an essential distinction) and we talk to the participants about their interpretations of the events.  

We might be sitting in on a pupil progress meeting as I did recently to understand the rigour of the process. I was able to listen to and observe the professional discussions between leaders and staff, I was able to ask staff at the end about how they felt about the process, and I was able to make notes about my interpretations of what I had seen in light of our values, vision and strategy.

It might be a curriculum visit to see how phonics and reading is delivered – visiting a class discretely with permission, talking to the staff concerned about their views on the teaching of phonics and reading – how is it going? Challenges? Successes?  Then importantly talking to the children to find their views with some simple questions – what do they like to read? Do they have plenty of books to choose from? What do they find hard – who can they go to for help? With a bit of planning you can craft some questions and then quietly jot down you thoughts and the answers afterwards. The NGA is just one place you can find some prompts to help you with this. (2)

How you make those notes takes me back to the reason I started this blog post in the first place because these are our research notes, and they have a serious part to play in informing the board.  Nigel Gann suggests that "school visits are opportunities for governors to learn" and "to see the impact of their plans and policies on the day to day operation of the school" (3)  They need careful recording, collating as a record and sharing with the board. They need to be reflected upon and discussed not just filed away and forgotten. (4)  The best way of doing this for speed and ease of managing and consistency is, in my opinion, to have a template.  This is advocated as a technique for ethnographic research too! There are other ways as well, depending on what you are doing, – word clouds can be great for finding what matters in a staff, parent of pupil voice exercise once the responses have been recorded (5), photos might me appropriate in certain circumstances (with permissions).

All of this adds up to data! – it is valuable – it is evidence – it is a tool for discussion and learning.  Keeping these reports together, means certain things can be tracked across time.  For example we have a section on ours to record where we see our values in action during our visit,  Flicking back through the reports, across this section alone, gives a picture of our school’s culture and ethos in action over time.

Finally, you might want to add hyperlinks to reading and resources to help colleagues understand the subject of your report – I think this is a great idea! This is particularly important if you want to generate engagement,  discussion and learning for the board and I link across to the blog of a governance colleague here who has written recently about speaking up in meetings.  We don’t want these reports to be greeted with tumbleweed – remember, they are valuable data from our research, and we need them to have been read and engaged with! (6)

   

1.       Cohen, l., Manion, L. and Morrison, K. (2018). Research Methods in Education (8th Ed.).  Routledge.

2.       National Governance Association. https://www.nga.org.uk/Knowledge-Centre

3.    Gann, N., (2016) Improving School Governance (2nd Ed.). Routledge       

4.    Brown, N., (2021) Making the most of your research journal. Policy Press

5.      Brown, N.

6.      Blog post by The Clerk’s Elbow https://clerkselbowsite.wordpress.com/2021/11/12/pump-up-the-volume/

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