OPS Education Space

How do the teachers write reports?

It’s that time of year when every teacher in your family or friendship group replies ‘I’d love to, but I have to write reports!’ to any invitation. Trust me when I say we don’t like having to say no. Weekends are weekends, but officially reporting to parents at the end of semesters is an essential albeit time consuming process. 

You may look at the report your child receives and think how can a few sentences, dots and ticks take that long? The simple reason is that those ticks and dots require some serious data analysis, moderation and triangulation to ensure they are reflective of what your child is able to do independently. We don’t just use one assessment piece to produce the final mark, we use at least three (hence triangulation) with each of these requiring close analysis. This information is collected throughout the semester using a number of recording strategies, such as numerical results from tests such as Essential Assessment, observation notes during focus groups, annotated work samples and rubrics. All of this ‘evidence’ is used to formulate which box gets  ticked and what stage gets the dot.

The ‘dot’ is your child’s overall standing against the Victorian Curriculum for each of the learning areas and shows the growth your child has made since their previous report. Most subjects are reported on every 6 months (each semester) but there are some, like each area within Humanities such as History, where they are reported on every 12 months due to the need for us to teach a different area of Humanities each term.

Growth is a term teachers use very often and that’s for a very good reason. Our ultimate goal is to develop each child’s learning and that starting point, wherever it may be, is the baseline we work from at the start of each year. The Department of Education requires us to measure this growth in 6 month increments and their expectation is that each child makes 6 months growth every Semester. HOWEVER, like all areas of development, learning growth is not linear and it doesn’t follow the months of the year. Your child doesn’t grow at a constantly steady rate which is why the term ‘growth spurt’ is used. Learning is the same. Each child will make growth during the semester, they just may not make the statistically average 6 months so the ‘dot’ doesn’t move. There have been many occasions where I’ve wanted to draw in my own dot to show that growth has been made as this is an achievement that must be celebrated, but alas, the computer says ‘no’.

Sometimes there is a burst of connections within a particular skill or concept and there is HUGE learning growth as everything is now making sense. A ‘Learning Spurt’ you may say. Other times, the connections take longer to come together and this could be for a number of reasons, such as cognitive development, personal or social development or a child missing a significant time away from the classroom (holidays, illness etc). They may also have had significant background knowledge or experience in what has been taught during that semester, resulting in higher than average growth, but this may not be the case in the next semester so their rate of learning is not as fast. THAT IS OKAY!!

OPS uses tick boxes to provide information to parents on specific skills within each learning area. As the curriculum is a continuum of learning in each area, we are able to identify where your child is performing in relation to their year level and only the main foci for the semester are included in the report. 

In Year 4, one of the tick boxes for writing is ‘Using their increasing knowledge of phonics, prefixes and suffixes to spell unfamiliar words’ which is the basis of our spelling program. As spelling is something we do every day, this part of the Level 4 curriculum has been included. You will see similar tick boxes for the other year levels. 

To continue with the Writing example, tick boxes have been chosen to represent achievement at the word level (spelling), sentence level (grammar and punctuation), structural level (title, paragraphs, handwriting etc) and the text creation level (storyline, character development, using description etc). The multiple skills and understandings of the Writing curriculum relate to one or more of these areas and are considered by the teacher when completing the tick boxes, even though they may not appear with a box of their own.

Report comments and how these are created have been a focus of discussion in education circles lately, mostly around the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). One of the biggest arguments for using AI is the amount of time it saves. The reality of report writing is that a personal comment takes a lot of time to write. Some primary school teachers average 20 mins per student, some spend longer, and when you multiply this by the number of students, it’s around 8 hours. This time is for the comments alone, not the data collection, analysis and entry. 

The other argument is that it will improve the quality of report comments as programs could, with the correct input, use parent appropriate and succinct language, and could personalise the report more effectively eliminating the ‘cut and paste’ feeling you occasionally get from school reports. At OPS, we have spent time working on how to create a comprehensive and personalised comment for each child in our class. Most of what you read will have been written specifically for your child as we know all of the children in our class extremely well by Term 4. It’s also an opportunity for us to share and celebrate all of the wonderful things they have achieved and how the skills they have mastered to do so. However, there will also be sentences that are used from a comment bank that report on a specific event or project all of the children have completed, like for the Soiree and camp. In these cases, the individual achievements will be altered to reflect the learning of each child. 

So when your child’s report comes your way at the end of the term, please take the time to consider how much work actually goes into their creation and that this all happened in addition to the regular teaching and planning we did each day. The teachers do not guess and close enough isn’t good enough. Your child deserves to have an accurate report as they have worked extremely hard all year to overcome the challenges learning throws their way. Celebrate their success, focus on their growth and be proud of the achievements your child has made this year. 

We most definitely are.     

Delia Robey

Year 3 and 4 PLC Leader, Education Sub Committee Convenor