Professional learning resources for school leaders brought to you by Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, in partnership with the Global Partnership for Education - Knowledge and Information Exchange (GPE KIX) project: School Leaders Towards Equity and Inclusion project.

Table of Contents

1. Welcome
2. Why focus on inclusion?
3. What can I expect from this course?
4. Learning goals
5. The course platform
6. Accessibility
7. Your learning journal
8. Working through the course
9. Working together
10. Assessment, Responsibilities and Expectations
11. Facilitation

1. Welcome

Welcome to this open course on improving equity and inclusion in schools. This course contains eight sections. It provides resources and an action guide to support Afghan school leaders in improving inclusive education practices. Each section should take about 4 to 5 hours to complete, spread over no more than two weeks. This course is a resource to support you and peer school leaders in networked improvement communities to work together to explore inclusion issues in schools.

The course is delivered in a “blended learning” format, meaning it will take place online and during facilitated meetings with other school leaders. The course will connect you with other Afghan school leaders tackling similar and different inclusion issues in their own schools. Together you will investigate inclusion challenges, come up with solutions and take actions for inclusion at your school.

The course guides you through a series of steps. This is based on a continuous improvement methodology of work called a Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle, which involves planning, doing, studying and acting on small changes in practice in your schools. The emphasis is on small changes to improve inclusion for your school. While taking the course you will become very familiar with PDSA cycles and finding inclusion challenges at your school.

• Headteachers
• Deputy headteachers
• School Leaders
• School Principals
• School Shura Chairs or School Management Committee Chairs
• A stakeholder partner such as an NGO working with school leaders

This course has been created by Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan in collaboration with other partners, as part of the GPE-KIX project: School Leaders toward Equity and Inclusion. The project is working with partners in Afghanistan, Nepal and Pakistan together with international educators. Learn more about the project here.

2. Why focus on inclusion?

We all know that there are large numbers of learners who do not participate fully in quality learning around the world. These learners include girls, children with disabilities, displaced children, children from specific ethnic groups, children in remote rural areas and children living in extreme poverty.

Addressing this issue is an urgent priority for all of us involved in education. Many governments have comprehensive policies on school inclusion. But policies alone are not sufficient to achieve equity in learning. Local action is also needed. School leaders such as you can play a vital role here. You can be even more effective if you work together as a community.

• What this course is about
• The course learning outcomes
• How to use the online course platform
• The purpose of keeping a learning journal
• How this course will work
• How this course is accessible for all participants

3. What can I expect from this course?

This course is a resource for school leaders. It takes an innovative approach to improving school practices to promote inclusion. It does not give you explicit instructions about what you must improve and how. Rather the course helps you to develop your skills and confidence in developing your own plans and leading behaviour change for students, teachers and management. This behaviour change is focussed on making schools more inclusive for all your learners.

• introduce school leaders to a range of ideas about inclusion and inclusive practices in schools
• provide guidance to school leaders on how to analyse inclusion issues in their context
• foster networked improvement communities (NICs) of school leaders
• support school leaders to work together to undertake experiments to test small-scale changes which improve inclusive practices in their schools
• change perspectives and mindsets about how school leaders can work to make schools more inclusive.

4. Learning Goals

• Identify a range of inclusion issues in your schools and explain to colleagues and your wider school community how these issues are impacting student learning.
• Describe the relevant policies for inclusion in your context.
• Collect, analyze and use data related to inclusion in your school.
• Identify sources of guidance and support (local and national) for inclusion and equity.
• Introduce new actions and strategies to promote inclusion in your school.
• Evaluate the usefulness of these actions and assess whether to continue with the action or change the action.
• Use digital technology to communicate with peers, find resources, and share practices and strategies with peers.

5. The course platform

Take 10 minutes to browse through the course platform, including the Resources sections.
Try out an audio-visual resource, to make sure you can see and hear it.
Open a PDF from the Resources section.
Open a few of the links, to make sure you can access these.

Each section of the course has various online or offline activities.

With each subsection and activity you will see various icons. These tell you what to expect to be doing.

6. Accessibility

• You can download and print the course pages
• All audio-visuals will have a transcript, subtitles or captions to go along with it
• Diagrams and photos that are important to the learning outcomes will have descriptive text explanations
• Please tell your facilitator if you have any other accessibility needs (challenges with seeing, understanding or reading printed text, help with using technology, keyboarding, typing, etc.).
• Accommodations exist and your facilitator will help find solutions for your accessibility needs, whatever they are.

7. Your learning journal

Your learning journal is a personal resource that you will build up as you study this course. You will use it to record your thoughts for specific activities and your learning or observations. You can add to the journal at any time with further notes and observations.

The learning journal might be a notebook, a document on your phone or tablet, or an audio file on your phone or tablet . You should choose what you will use as your learning journal and use this throughout the course.

At the end of the course you will be asked to look back through your learning journal to review what you have learned from this course and how your ideas, attitudes, skills and behaviours might have changed.

You can choose which language to use in your learning journal. Include pictures or photos if you want. Your learning journal is just for you. No one will see what you write, draw or say, unless you decide to share it with others.

Decide what format you will use for your learning journal. If you complete it electronically, don’t forget to save it every time you use it.

Now take 10 minutes to write your first learning journal entry. Include the date and the title of the entry, My personal aims. Now try to answer these questions.

• In your role, what do you expect to gain from this course?
• What are you looking forward to in your study and collaboration with other school leaders?

8. Working through the course

This course is designed to be undertaken with a small group of fellow school leaders or head teachers. It is a highly practical course. Each of the eight course sections includes reading, activities, and reflection. There are also opportunities for discussion with other school leaders in your course community.

In each section there are a number of activities. Some of these activities you will undertake on your own, perhaps in your school. These can be completed at a time and place which works for you. Some of these activities ask you to make observations or reflections in your learning journal.

Other activities are designed to be undertaken with your peers in the course community (NIC). This might be an in-person meeting at a local centre or online using a collaboration platform. Your facilitator will consult with you and set up what works best for you and your fellow school leaders.

You should attempt all the activities in the course. If you are stuck you can ask other school leaders in your community or your facilitator.

Each section also offers a resources area and notes for facilitators.

9. Working together

In each section you will be asked to share your ideas or experiences with other school leaders and to comment on what they have shared. You will help each other to solve small problems related to inclusion in your school. This collaboration will be through the online platform.

Go now to this online platform. Check that you can access it.

• Your first name
• Your role and the type of school that you work in
• How long you have been in your school
• What are the main inclusion challenges in your school?

Also comment on the post from one other school leader. Tell them what you like about their post or ask them a question.

It is very important to appreciate confidentiality among your peers. You will be talking about sensitive matters, including your challenges as a school leader, and the challenges you face to solve small but complex problems, with other school leaders. It is essential that you do not share information you learn about other school leaders and their schools outside of the course/project forum. You may also refer to specific students and cases in activities. It is very important that you avoid including information about students that compromises their anonymity.

10. Assessment, Responsibilities, Expectations

This course is not graded so you will not receive a grade or any marks on activities you complete. All of the course readings and activities are important for your learning throughout the course. It is recommended that you do the activities in the order they are presented in order to best learn from doing the improvement process.

Some activities are marked with a star:

When you finish these activities your course facilitator will confirm that you have completed them, based on what you share in meetings or in the course forum.

11. Facilitation

The course is written so that it does not need a ‘teacher’, but there may be a facilitator to help guide your learning. Each section has short notes for facilitators.

• guide and support the group to work through the course and complete the assignments;
• encourage everyone to contribute and participate in discussions;
• keep the group focused and moving forward.

The definition of ‘facilitation’ is to ‘make things easy’. It is moving a group of people through a process.

The course has a help feature that you can use to request help from your facilitator at any time. They will answer your questions as soon as they are available.

In your learning journal note down your initial answers to these questions. for study. You will discuss your ideas with other school leaders in your group (NIC).

• How would you like to collaborate with your peer school leaders in a small group - when and where, and how often? (Think about where and when you will have internet access)
• Who is your facilitator?
• How do you contact them if you have a problem?

Welcome to the first section, where we deepen our understanding of inclusion and inclusion challenges in our own schools and beyond. Connect with the stories and discussions as you think about your role in including all pupils in learning activities.

Time: 4.5 hours
Number of activities: Four

• Understand what is meant by “inclusive education” in the context of your schools.
• Understand that the school environment can be adapted through small changes.
• Identify specific types of inclusion challenges in your context, based on the resources that are available.

Inclusion Audit

This section is about why collecting data is an important tool to help us understand education inclusion challenges in more depth. It is a very active session where you will be looking for information relevant to you and your school. It may be the first time you have done work like this or you may regularly collect such data. We hope this in-depth exploration of your data will provide new facts and insights for your leadership.

Time: 4.5 hours
Number of activities: Three

• describe how different types of data can be used to help you plan inclusion changes in your school
• find sources of information to find out more about the profile and learning of students in your school and community

When considering inclusion in your school, in addition to examining the data and information on who is attending or dropping out of school, it is important to look at what happens in classrooms. In this section you will look at teaching and learning practices in your school. This may involve you observing teachers in their classrooms. When you are doing this it will be very important to be sensitive about your presence in the classroom. You are not judging your teachers. You are there as a curious observer, trying to find out about the experiences of the diverse students in your school.

Time: 4.5 hours
Number of activities: Five

• Describe what to expect in a school which has an inclusive environment
• Undertake observations in your school on student inclusion
• Analyze data on inclusion collected from your school and present it in a meaningful way

An introduction to the Plan - Do - Study - Act Cycle

Time: 4 hours
Number of activities: Five

• Identify at least one micro-problem related to inclusion in your school or the wider community.
• Use a Problem Tree analysis to find the underlying causes and effects of a micro-problem.
• Start to use the PDSA cycle to plan improvements relating to inclusion at your school.

In Section 4 you will explore an inclusion micro-problem. A micro-problem is a small process or practice. You will practice using tools to help you decide on a manageable goal in relation to an inclusion micro-problem, and to carry out short-term plans to improve inclusion at your school. These plans can be framed using a Plan - Do - Study - Act Cycle, or an Improvement Cycle.

The Plan - Do - Study - Act Cycle is a useful tool for planning small actions to improve inclusion at your school.

The Problem Tree will help you analyze the underlying causes and effects of a micro-problem. You will then work on tackling this micro-problem with a Plan-Do-Study Act Cycle.

• be able to implement a PDSA cycle using the small change you planned in Section 4
• collect data on the impact of the change you made
• have reflected on any challenges you are experiencing in implementing the change and share them with your peers in the improvement community.

At this point in the course you will be doing what you said you would do based on your audit data and observations, and based on making a plan for a micro-change. You have a time frame of two weeks.

This section is short because you will be spending time making sure your plan is carried out. Before you start, it is important to communicate with your school about why you are undertaking the PDSA cycle. Consider who needs to know: is it a teacher, the school management committee, parents? Before you begin you will also want to plan how you will know if the change is working and how to support the teacher or group. Review the “Study” part of your plan. This part will have some clues about what information you need to collect while you are “Doing” the plan. Make sure you know when and how you will collect the information.

The first activity (5.1) is to communicate and include your staff and or communities in the small change you are trying. The second activity (5.2) is to do the Plan. Lastly you will analyze the results and decide whether to repeat the cycle or change it (Act) (5.3).

In Section 6 we will focus on the ‘Study’ phase of the PDSA cycle. The Study phase is about what we learn from implementing the changes.

• You will understand how to analyze the data you have collected on the intervention or “action”.
• You will apply analysis skills to make a decision about whether to continue the action or stop and try something else.
• You will understand your peers’ micro-problem solutions and how they studied the impact of their changes.

Well done on implementing a change – this is difficult. Here we look at what your data is telling you.

For this section you might want to look back at this resources from Section 2: 2.4 Understanding and Evaluating your Attendance Data

Introduction:

In this section you will undertake another PDSA cycle in response to another inclusion challenge, or you will try something different to address your original challenge.

The process should become easier and easier every time you use the PDSA cycle. Try to keep your challenges small so you can learn from the specific approaches you are using to solve them.

The case study here shows an example of what it can look like to repeat the PDSA cycle based on what is learned in the first attempt. Notice how they adjusted the plan to go deeper into the causes.

Learning outcomes:

• You will have gained increased confidence and skills in undertaking PDSA cycles in response to small inclusion challenges.
• You will understand more about how to solve the specific inclusion challenges that exist in your school and community.

Great job on getting this far in the course and contributing to your Networked Improvement Community of school leaders! We hope that the activities you have done so far have helped you to develop in a new way as a leader with new skills as well as improving inclusion in your school.

In this section, you will be revisiting the school inclusion audit and reflecting on changes to your understanding of inclusion. You will do a self-evaluation of your skills and knowledge development throughout the course and share your thoughts and reflections with your school community and your fellow school leaders in the course.

When you started the course, we suggested that learning and working in a networked improvement community is an important way to improve inclusion for students at your school. In this section you have the chance to celebrate your work with others, reflect on what you have learned, and consider what you plan to do next as a champion for inclusion.

• You will be able to identify and describe activities that your school took on to promote inclusion.
• You will feel equipped to promote further changes and actions related to inclusion issues in your school.
• You will be able to compare your initial ideas of inclusion with your knowledge after completion of the PDSA cycles.
• You will be able to reflect on changes in your skills, attitude and confidence that took place while you implemented the PDSA cycles