North-East teachers are supported by North-East leaders in North-East schools. North-East schools are those where all students are successful. To do so, North-East schools support and focus on those students who have been traditionally marginalised by ineffective pedagogies from their successfully participating and achieving in modern education systems. In North-East schools, these students are included in indicators of success rather than failure.
North-East schools are those where relationships matter. In fact, creating a strong caring and relational context for learning is fundamental to everybody being able to do their jobs effectively, be they the principal, a middle leader or a teacher. In a North-East school, you will see a strong relationship between the creation of caring and learning relationships at all levels of the school and the effective use of teaching and learning interactions that we know make a difference for the learning of all students. You will see these two variables, relationships and interactions, occurring at the upper end of the two measurement scales of a common scatter plot (a horizontal one for measures of relationships, the other vertical for measures of interactions). For example, you will see that when the occurrence of caring and learning ‘relationships’ is improving, the measurement will be heading ‘East’ along the horizontal continuum. Similarly, when the use of effective dialogic ‘interactions’ is improving, the measurement will be heading ‘North’ up the vertical continuum. The combination of these two variables, the ‘North’ and the ‘East,’ locates the most effective schools in the upper right quadrant, the ‘North-East’. It is when teaching and schooling are both located in the North-East that we see marginalised student performance improving and disparities reducing.
The third variable is that of ‘monitoring’ because this is the means of evaluating how well the relationships and interactions are supporting learners’ learning and then modifying relationships and interactions accordingly. Monitoring, using the GPILSEO model, allows leaders of learning to continually modify relationships and interactions so as to sustain teaching practices in the North-East, because we know that it is this location that best promotes students’ learning in a sustainable manner. The interactions between these three variables, relationships, interactions and monitoring, is shown in the diagram below
