Diagnosis: How democratic is your school?
How?
In this section, you find hands-on materials. These open educational resources (OER) can support your way towards establishing your own self-assessment about the level of democracy within your school – and how to improve it!
Class assemblies, project-based learning, collaborative evaluation, Service-Learning, tutorials… Once again, there are as many images of democracy as ways of living within a community. “Democracy is the personal way in which an individual lives life and only becomes a reality when practiced in our day-to-day existence” (Bernstein 2010, 251).
It is important to clarify what democracy means to your school, as the definition is usually too diffuse, not clear. The questionnaire that you can download for free will help you to analyse how democratic your school is by assessing your strengths and weak points. The result should help you to make choices and develop strategies to increase democracy at your school. It can of course be modified and adapted to your own school context.
We encourage you to organise an activity for doing this diagnosis engaging the different members of the community: school team, family, students.