Teaching and Learning

This semester has certainly been a memorable one. We have experienced a great deal of change and I commend our entire school community for dealing with these extraordinary circumstances in such a resilient way.

Developmental Assessment

Over the past six months, we have been visiting other schools, looking at our own practices and spending time researching what Developmental Assessment is and how we can better assess learning growth. We have asked parents and students through various forums what they think of moving away from giving grades and assessing learning growth instead. Overwhelming the response has been that quality feedback throughout the learning process is the key to improvement. We are looking forward to spending time as a teaching staff next term, digging deeply into how we can assess students better by focussing on learning growth and progression.

Assessment Example:

Take the analogy of assessing students kicking a footy.

If you were going to assess someone to kick a footy, you would first of all work out whether they could kick a footy or not. You would then adjust your teaching to each of your learners. For some, you might need to teach them how to hold the ball. You would give explicit instructions by showing them how to hold it, get them to practice holding it, check in again with them and re-teach how to hold it if needed.

One student might kick the ball brilliantly already and you might suggest kicking it on the run, or trying a banana kick. Or they might pick up a different ball and explore why kicking a rugby ball is different to an AFL ball. As a teacher, you would want to see them mastering the skill of kicking the ball before you were confident in them teaching others or before you encouraged them to explore other ways of applying their kicking skills. You would be constantly checking in, adjusting your teaching based on what they were learning, how quickly they were learning it and giving feedback to help them know what the next step in their learning was.

What you wouldn’t do is teach all of them how to kick a ball in the same way. You wouldn’t wait until the end of the teaching sessions to get them to show you whether they could kick the ball and then give them a ‘very good’ or a ‘C’. You wouldn’t wait until after the teaching finished, to tell them that they tried hard but needed to work on holding the ball better next time. Whenever next time was. The grade and the feedback wouldn’t help them in their learning.

As a school, we want to focus on the assessing student learning and growth. We want to develop a way of communicating to parents and students where each student starts in their journey and where each student gets to in their learning. And we want to give staff and students the tools to scaffold this learning journey that parents can also access.

It’s going to be an exciting 6 months!

End of Semester Reports

Due to our Remote Learning context, we decided early in term 2 to focus our assessment on shorter, smaller tasks that would help us to guide students in their remote learning. Early on, we decided not to include summative assessments (CAIs and SACs) in our end of semester one reports as we wanted to give Learning Areas the flexibility to adjust their curriculum to best suit the needs of their students and to ensure the key skills and knowledge of their subjects were being taught. We wanted to ensure that our communication with parents and students regarding formative and summative assessment was progressive an on-going via Compass and that feedback was given regularly. This adjustment to our teaching and learning practices have meant that our reporting process is different this semester and essentially, it is more simplified.

VCE Reports

Please be advised that due to The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority’s decision to extend Unit 3 by two weeks, some assessments will be taking place early next term. Some students may receive an NA for VCE Outcomes if they haven’t had the opportunity to demonstrate their learning yet.

We wish everyone a safe and healthy holiday.

Carrie Wallis

Assistant Principal