(gentle music)
- Every Queensland state primary school
receives Advancing STEM funding
to lift student outcomes
in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Schools are developing strategic plans
to prioritise their STEM improvement initiatives.
These plans respond to the local context,
are informed by evidence,
and meet the needs of their learners.
We're visiting Heatley State School
in North Queensland region
to understand and learn from their STEM improvement journey.
(upbeat music)
- So back in the day,
Heatley was one of the largest schools in Queensland,
but now our enrollment is sitting just under 500 students.
We have 21 classes from prep to year six,
and about 45% of our students come
from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds.
And as well, we have a considerable number of students
born overseas from New Zealand and Pacific nations,
Malaysia, the Philippines, and some African countries.
So we've been working in STEM
for about seven years now
in different shapes and forms.
So I'm really committed to the work that we have started,
because I can really see the difference it makes
to students' engagement and learning.
STEM has and will remain a significant piece
of our work in this school,
and it will retain a budget line
in all of our strategic planning
that I can see into the future.
- North Queensland region uses
the school improvement model's inquiry cycle,
and aligns these to the eight steps
of collaborative inquiry by Lyn Sharratt.
Regional officers support schools to collaboratively plan
how to wrap an inquiry process around an improvement focus.
Heatley State School has undertaken a number of cycles
of inquiry in science, technologies, and mathematics
to build the critical and creative thinking skills
of their students.
This story will show their journey using collaboration,
evidence, and an iterative approach
to refine their improvement initiative.
Now, they're ready to hand over to an emerging leader
to scale up what's working.
Let's look at some of the evidence
they used in their initiative.
- Our STEM improvement journey has really been
about future-proofing our teachers and our students.
So we realised that the world
as learners is going to be changing.
So we want to provide opportunities
to make sure we're all ready for that.
And that just coincided
with the department STEM initiatives.
And we were part of the STEM Cluster Tool Trial.
And then we were able to use the advancing STEM funds
to help support those opportunities.
We also consider the fact that our teachers were used
to starting their math lessons with modelling
but looking at the gradual release of responsibility
and wanting to perhaps start
at the independent level
to engage the students more in their learning.
And some of the teachers were quite honest
that they were used to being in control of the learning
in the classroom, but knew that that might not be
where they wanted to always be.
So that led to wanting to find out more
about inquiry-based learning
and the teachers wanting to know
what does this look like at our school?
- Yeah and there were flags
in the school's NAPLAN Numeracy data as well.
So in measurement and geometry, only 14% of the year five
cohort got the question correct on analysing angles
in complex shapes.
And in actual fact, the whole year-five cohort
across the nation found this very challenging
with only 20% of students getting this one correct.
- So prioritising the mathematics curriculum,
we identified two problems of practise.
The first one was how are we going to develop
teacher confidence in using inquiries, pedagogies in that?
And the other problem of practise was
how are we going to change teachers' mindset
about how to implement assessment and move away
from always modelling their thinking to their students.
We sought the advice of our regional STEM champ Marie,
to help us move the work forward.
- Yeah, so my role was to gather the research
that would help to identify our next steps
or inform what approach we were going to take
that would address our problem of practise.
So we were already familiar
with "Visible Learning For Literacy."
So I looked at "Visible Learning For Mathematics"
by Fisher, Frey, and Hattie,
which looks at the different phases of learning,
going from surface to deep
and into that transfer phase of learning.
Hattie also lists Piagetian programmes
as an effect size of 1.28.
So knowing that Piagetian programmes focus on thinking skills
this was really reaffirming for what we were considering.
We also referred to the National STEM
School Education Strategy,
which states that STEM is the collection of learning areas
or disciplines connected by common thinking skills.
These are critical and creative thinking,
design and innovation, collaboration and communication
and problem solving.
And of course, we referred to the department STEM
in Queensland state schools key messages advice
that reminded us that if we were
using a cross-disciplinary approach
napping to the curriculum is essential.
We also recognised that applying
a cross-disciplinary approach and bringing in the thinking
and digital technologies into their mathematics lessons
would enable this transference of learning.
The STEM Connections Project, which is detailed
on the Australian Curriculum website
also had some very useful resources to help plan
for applying a cross-disciplinary approach.
So exploring this research,
we were able to then collaboratively plan
what our next steps would be
in order to improve student engagement,
problem solving and critical and creative thinking skills
in mathematics and digital technologies.
So we recognise that the best way to build
teacher confidence in planning and inquiry approach
in measurement and geometry
was going to be for us to model this.
So teachers were invited to create a maze
using a range of angles and lines.
They had to programme a robot through the maze.
They started working independently
and then they went to shared and guided.
This encouraged teachers to identify
what they needed to know in order to solve this problem.
So I became the facilitator
of the learning empowering teachers as learners
to collaborate and use critical and creative thinking
to solve the problem as well as engaging with new ICT tools.
So QR codes were progressively put up
around the room to differentiate the learning
and provide multiple ways to access the required support.
So we collected evidence of impact along the way
by referring to the guiding questions
on the state schools improvement strategy.
We also ended up looking at the five questions for teachers
and five questions for students by Lyn Sharratt.
But we also added in the five questions for system leaders
as well as five questions for middle leaders
because in our region we've contextualised it
to include all parties involved
in the improvement focus
just to enable that precision in our piece of work.
- The students were really passionate about the learning
that they undertook in this unit.
They wrote persuasive letters in their English unit
to the principal to ask for a school set of Spiros
because we'd been borrowing the regional ones.
- So our improvement focus has been
refined over multiple iterations.
When we sat down to review the work, it became really
apparent of the evidence of impact.
Teachers' confidence had improved greatly with applying
and using an inquiry approach in the classrooms
in their mathematics lessons.
And also our students' learning outcomes had improved
and they felt much more confident in using problem solving
and critical and creative thinking skills
when they were analysing angles in complex shapes.
- We have collected the evidence we need to be confident
in upscaling this approach across our school.
So now I'll be handing over the leadership
of the project to Nicole,
who's been integral in the project's success so far.
- In the future, it looks like expanding
across years, four, five, and six,
starting with year five, looking at upscaling
the new teachers to that year level this year.
We're also looking at introducing microbits in science
in year six later on this year.
The next thing we will do is to identify and then develop
further cross-curricular STEM learning opportunities
in both years four and six.
To ensure the sustainability of this work,
flexibility and consistent collaborative professionalism
is absolutely vital.
- In this approach to STEM school improvement,
we see why Heatley State School is confident
they're scaling up the right work.
The right work has strong connections to student needs
and is aligned to the Australian curriculum,
high leverage practises and system priorities.
We identify the right work when we use evidence
to plan, implement, and monitor,
and we do the right work through intentional collaboration.
How do you know what's working to lift student outcomes
for your students?
And what does scaling up look like in your school?
(upbeat music)