Engaged teachers, engaged students: Developing the 'insider school'

This presentation reports on a university-school partnership with a focus on student engagement. The partnership took up ideas about student engagement developed in the Fair Go Project, and used these in the development of a model for whole school professional development. The Fair Go Project's student engagement framework has the 'insider classroom' as a key component. 'Insider classroom' processes help learners become part of the classroom learning community, to become recognised as valuable members of the community and play meaningful roles for the benefit of all learners. It was reasoned that these same kinds of processes could be applied to teachers to encourage stronger levels of professional engagement that would work for the benefit of student engagement. A whole school model of the 'insider school' was then developed and evaluated as an innovative process towards shared decision making and collaboration. Concepts and processes of engaged teachers and engaged students within the emerging model are shared and elaborated in the presentation.