P1 Audits
PHASE 1 - PLANNINGKnowing where the school is and where it wants to be - Audits
The next step is to understand where your school is now and identify what you want to see change as a result of this work. The Evaluation Framework gives you the central target programme outcomes.
Two preliminary audits will help you reflect on this:
Active listening is a key skill required for developing an empathic school, so we suggest doing a listening audit. This breaks active listening down into a set of key observable skills. This could be something you could focus on during a learning walk. This audit can also be given to teachers to complete, and can be adapted for use in peer observations. It is important that everyone is very honest.
This is based on EmpathyLab’s list of desired outcomes and will help you identify some of the key changes you want to see. We realise that evaluating some of these statements is not an exact science but it acts as a good starting point.
TOP TIPS
- How do you know whether these skills are present in your school, and to what extent? Engage with the programme’s evaluation framework which has tools to help you collect this data. Think about existing data you could draw on.
- It’s hard work to ensure that all members of the school community have strong active listening skills. Addressing this needs a lot of honest reflection, and can also move mountains.
- To get deep and useful responses to the listening audit you could identify a leading cohort to do it first, presenting back honestly and reflectively to the rest of the staff.