We’re a large primary school and we have students from kindergarten through to year
six.
We’re in a regional town of Western Australia called Mandurah.
In 2011 we were analysing our data and we became quite concerned with our NAPLAN results.
We identified that 30 percent of our students were falling below national minimum standard
in both reading and maths.
We became aware of an expert in explicit teaching who was conducting programs in Melbourne so
we sent our deputy and three influential teaching staff over to view him in action and also
to attend his professional learning.
They then came back to the school and fed that information back to our whole staff and
that’s where the process started.
Once we’d actually got the explicit teaching model in place then we decided to look at
more explicit parts of explicit teaching and so feedback was one of the things that we
really wanted to look closely at because it was so important.
Since the explicit teaching was brought in and became a firm school direction our performance
management has been based on it.
Our focus has become feedback and we were given a professional development on it which
had lots of data relating to the most efficient and effective feedback.
So we had a look at John Hattie’s research giving feedback and what impact that has on
students and then we had a look at Dylan Wiliam’s work and what he had to say about formative
assessment and we did quite a long session with our staff on what sort of feedback actually
makes improvement.
Success criteria are really important because micro skills results in big learning goals
and so it’s very important to have very specific criteria because when you add those
together students end up with a result that is far greater than if you try and work on
everything at once.
Most of the questions that I ask of students throughout a lesson are really focused on
the aims of the session.
Those specific learning goals and success criteria.
Why is it we’ve got that comma after the adverb at the start of the sentence, Ashton?
Because it’s extra information.
If we take that out will our sentence still make sense?
Yes.
Yes it will.
Questioning is definitely allowing the teacher to see whether the students know and are able
to move forward and that’s that formative assessment, constantly making sure that the
students are understanding, checking for understanding all the time.
Over the shoulder marking is really important in allowing students to focus on the success
criteria, however, if a student’s work already meets those success criteria then it’s looking
for what they can do to improve even further.
DMB I like how you’ve used a capital letter.
Your adverb is a good one and you’ve put a comma there.
The courageous, but dumb knight went into the dragon’s mouth.
Oh my goodness that is foolish.
The most important part of planning lessons is ensuring that you incorporate opportunities
for feedback into your lessons.
You need to make sure that you can check for understanding with the students at all points
of the learning.
Can I see hands up, please, all of those people whose partner effectively began their sentence
with an adverb?
Excellent.
With your blue I’m going to get you to underline a simple sentence that you’ve used.
With the green you’re going to underline a compound sentence and in red you’re going
to find a complex sentence.
During the lesson I’ll get the students to actually highlight particular things in
coloured pencil.
In the lesson I’ve just done I got them to highlight the three different sentence
types.
It gives me an opportunity to actually see if the kids can apply the knowledge that we’ve
learnt in an explicit teaching lesson back into a task and this allows the students,
once again, to reflect on their piece of writing, highlight what they’ve actually done so
they’ve got evidence of their learning.
And you’re going to have to edit your own work, but then you’re going to have an option
to actually give some peer feedback.
What sorts of things would you offer in peer feedback?
If they’ve got some words that could be improved you give them an option of a higher
modality word.
Peer feedback is valuable to both students, the reader and the writer, and the rubric
guides what is desired to be obtained.
The students try to come up with a positive statement which is a star and a wish which
is a critical feedback.
What it does is it allows the kids to set a path of improvement for each other.
I really liked your use of your paragraph and it was really evident how you did every
single step and sentence.
And my wish would be that you listed more solutions in your solution paragraph because
it was about litter so there’s a lot of different things you could do instead of just
making laws about it.
I would like to see your numbers written neatly inside the head and the belly of the seahorse.
I need to see you using up that whole area.
Can you have another go next to mine please to do the letter ‘s’.
At the end of each lesson once I have marked their work I have a little rubric that I staple
into their lesson.
It gives me a chance to see which areas I have probably got some gaps in so I can then
go back and, for example, if their numbers are not tall or meeting the areas where they
need to be I can go back and do a handwriting lesson specifically on numbers.
So the rubrics is more for me to see where there are some gaps that I can improve on
and plan for my next lesson.
We’ve got a very I guess stringent data collection cycle.
As a whole school we analyse our data at a whole school level and we feedback at a whole
school level and then discuss it at phase level as a follow up as to this is what we’ve
found now what are we going to do about it and we are able to do that I think because
we’ve got scope and sequence documents also.
So the scope and sequence for literacy and numeracy tells teachers what they need to
teach every week and therefore we can collect data from all students which tells whether
they have achieved that for that week or not.
Today the purpose of our phase meeting is to look at some results from the progressive
achievement tests that our students completed in October this year.
More specifically, we’re going to have a look at the strengths and weaknesses that
we’ve identified and what changes we can make to our maths scope and sequence documents.
We look at data that we have collected across the year.
We look specifically at the weaknesses and strengths that the students may have had during
our formative and summative assessments that we’ve done.
We then created an outcome for the staff and these are then followed up at future meetings
that then makes everybody accountable to making the changes and having success.
And just looking back at the data there seems to be a bit of a weakness with the problem-solving
part of things.
Looking at the scope and sequence I’ve just found we do have problem solving in there,
but it’s just if you go through it really only just pops up a couple of times a term.
We wanted every child to reach at least a certain level so we put together a benchmark
level which was the minimum standard and then a standard level which was that we expected
at least 50 percent of the students to reach that standard level.
As our students have improved our benchmarks have got increasingly more difficult and our
standards have got increasingly more difficult.
I think too we’ve gone from teachers sitting at their desk to teachers moving around the
classroom all the time and giving continuous feedback to students on an individual basis.
So it’s not at the end that they get that feedback it’s as they’re moving forward
they get that feedback.