Teaching and Learning

Curriculum, Assessment and Teaching and Learning

Assistant Principal: Curriculum, Assessment and Teaching and Learning

Welcome to the start of the 2023 school year. It’s an exciting time, spurred on by the fact that we are a continuingly growing school, and achieved such high performing results in 2022. 

Teaching Staff focus in 2023

In 2023, our staff will be spending significant collaboration time focused on our assessment practices, in particular the ways in which we provide feedback. We know feedback in a major contributor to learning growth and achievement, as students need to know, in relation to their learning:

• Where am I going?
• How am I going?
• How will I get there

At Woodmans Hill, our staff are continuing the building of expertise and practice in our use of developmental rubrics. Our developmental rubrics allow for students and teachers to assess continually; as they describe how students demonstrate their understanding through an increased complexity of skill application.

This has many benefits, such as:

• Students understanding where they are at with their current progress where they need to go to next.
• Students building belief that learning is a continuous journey.
• Assessment feedback being linked extremely specifically to the Victorian Curriculum, ensuring accurate assessment.
• Increased opportunity for goal setting.

Developmental rubrics focus on what students can do, not what they cannot, as they continually look at the next stage in level of criteria to improve.

Learning Walks

One of the actions that our staff will be continuing using this year is Learning Walks. Learning Walks involve teams of staff visiting a range of classes to understand the learning trends and patterns within a school. This process offers a collection of benefits, mainly on staff gaining understanding of the learning practices across the school. Observing the range of learning needs in different classes, sharing best teaching practices and asking students to reflect on their learning allows us to review the impact of our work established within our 2023 school focus.

Students will notice teams of staff continuing to visiting classes and asking individual students these 5 questions:

These five questions, allow us to gain a clear understanding of students awareness of their learning. It also encourages reflection of current learning among our student cohort.

Providing Feedback

An area of focus this year is how we provide feedback to students and parents about their learning behaviours that impact their academic achievement. For this we will be implementing a new system later in the year, where students are graded against our determined contributors for success. These areas for focus are:

Over the term we will develop clear criteria for each area of focus and share these with students and parents. In Term 2, students and parents will begin getting further feedback on these contributors for success in addition to Learning Task feedback.

Continuous Reporting (learning Task Feedback)

The Year level assessment feedback Schedules will be provided on Compass at the beginning of week 3 (13/3 – 17/3). These schedules inform each family when a student’s results t will be published on Compass throughout the Semester for each Learning Task (assessment).

We have invested significant time and focus to ensure that feedback is published to our families in a timely and ongoing manner in 2022 and again in 2023, ensuring there is greater opportunity for parents, staff and students to communicate about learning throughout the Semester, instead of the traditional end of Semester report only.