Curriculum, Assessment and Teaching and Learning

Curriculum, Assessment and Teaching and Learning

It has been a great start to the school year with a lot of exciting learning opportunities taking place.

Electives

This year we have Year 9 electives and Year 10 Electives separately. We are really excited by this as it allows us greater scope to be able to cater for our students learning needs, with Year 10 electives backwards mapped and primarily designed as preparing students for their direct pathways into Year 11 and 12 senior programs. 

Requests for elective changes have now been processed for Semester 1, with elective rolls now locked for the remainder of the Semester.

Year 9 Electives (2 elective blocks)

Year 10 Electives (3 elective blocks)

Learning Walks

In the last Newsletter, I mentioned how we will be implementing Learning Walks. This process involves a range of staff visiting classes to seek an understanding of the learning trends across the school. Our first step of implementation was quite successful. When analysing our reflections, one trend that we noted was that the students as a cohort were all able to state very clearly ‘what’ they were learning and the rationale for that learning, and that classrooms were safe and orderly, with engaged students. 

For us, further scheduled Learning Walks are necessary to identify trends. We are further interested in the question: 

‘How are you going with this learning?’

Students having a strong awareness of their progress and being able to articulate the next steps in their learning is significant. It leads to students having greater agency over their learning and becoming self-directed learners. This question forms a strong aspect of both Hattie and Timperley (2007) and Black and Williams (2009) feedback models.

We have also modified the 5 Learning Walk questions to ensure students are able to clearly understand the feedback that we want to learn more about.

Continuous Reporting - Assessment Feedback Timelines 

These timelines inform students and parents of the week when feedback will be released on Compass for each Learning Task (LT) for each year level. For example, Year 8 Science students might complete an assignment in week 7 and their feedback will be released on Compass in week 8. In this example, the Feedback Calendar will read ‘Science LT 1’ in week 8. 

What does this mean as a parent? 

This means that parents can access feedback regarding their child’s performance and improvement at regular intervals throughout the semester, instead of only the traditional end of semester report. This report will still be published, as it collates all the Learning Task (LT) feedback. 

Having feedback that is more immediate, it offers the opportunities to have conversations with your child that are timely and relevant to their current learning. We encourage everyone to take this opportunity to view and discuss the more regularly published feedback.

Where is the timelines and Learning Task feedback located?

Timelines are located on each student and parent compass page. There is also an attachment explaining how to access Learning Task feedback.

School Captains

Our school captains briefly presented to staff at a staff meeting last week. They introduced themselves (to new staff) and described their focuses for 2022. We are excited to see how they encourage student input, to inform their decision making and work with the whole school to continue school improvement in their focus areas for our students. 

Steve Sirrals