The Intelligent School Book

In writing The Intelligent School, the authors offer a practical resource to schools to help them maximise their improvement efforts. The aim is to help schools to be intelligent organizations; to be the type of school that can synthesise different kinds of knowledge, experience and ideas in order to be confident about current achievements, and be able to decide what to do next. Between them, the authors have more than 80 years, experience of working in and with primary, secondary and special schools, local education authorities and academic institutions. This book has grown from a number of concerns which the authors share: · to recognise that there is no blueprint for improving schools, but that schools can be enabled to make intelligent, informed decisions about what is likely to work best for them; · to focus school improvement efforts on the classroom;· to make research findings accessible and usable for teachers; · to support practitioners in making better sense and use of what they are doing; · to celebrate and disseminate good practice. The Intelligent School addresses these shared concerns, and aims to inform practitioners of some of the key messages from these four inter-related areas of research: school effectiveness, school improvement, teaching and learning. How these findings can be pieced together in a practical way to improve teaching and learning is illustrated through the use of practical examples from schools and LEAs.The authors argue that putting the pieces together of schools effectiveness and school improvement with teaching and learning is not as simple as it sounds: all-important is the capacity a school has to use this knowledge. They draw on Howard Gardner's notion of multiple intelligence and on recent thinking about the nature of organizations to take a fresh look at schools. The Intelligent School is described as greater than the sum of its parts. Nine intelligences are identified that when used in combination enable a school to have the capacity to achieve its goals successfully.Read More