Participatory Practice

Ways for staff, teachers and students to see their school clearly and improve it together, starting from evidence of what is actually happening.

These projects share one aim: education reform that starts in classrooms, rather than arriving from above.

It starts from evidence: what is actually happening, as each group in the school sees it, organised so that effort goes into problems that exist, not ones that are assumed.

Reform written top-down tends to be adopted on paper and lost in practice. Reform grown from the ground up fits the school it grows in, is owned by the people who made it, and keeps going after the project ends. Many local versions are also more resilient than one central template.

The difficulty has always been cost. Participatory methods work, but they need a skilled facilitator present to hold everything together between sessions. AI changes that: tools that propose, but never decide, can carry the continuity, while the people inside the school keep every judgement.

The methods come from participatory rural appraisal and community education in Zambia, and have been used since 2000 in public services, community projects and schools in the UK and New Zealand. There is one project for each group in a school:

• Staff AI Inquiry for staff: how the school uses AI, and where it helps or bypasses learning.
• CCC for teachers: a commons where teaching knowledge is shared, tailored and improved in use.
• LFTI for students: research into their own experience of school.